Red Bank icon Count Basie celebrated with new all-star tribute album

How’s this for some classic Jersey cool?

William “Count” Basie, the iconic, Red Bank-born bandleader and composer is celebrated in grand fashion with “Late Night Basie,” a new tribute album arriving Friday, April 7, via Primary Wave Music.

“This tribute record manages to have an eye on the past, acknowledging the past, looking at the inside lining of this garment, but being clear that it is of today,” said Wayne Winborne, executive director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University in Newark.

Nowhere is that more apparent than on “Didn’t You,” a lush and deeply funky rendition of Basie’s 1956 “April in Paris” classic delivered by boundary-pushing Boston native ensemble Lettuce and acclaimed Brooklyn emcee Talib Kweli.

Lettuce’s Grammy-winning trumpet player Eric “Benny” Bloom — a Rhode Island native who attended William Paterson University in Wayne and has been a Basie fan since his teens — explained the band’s approach to the song.

“I was like, ' ... We could still use the same (instrument) voicing but make it funkier and spread the rhythm out,’ " Bloom said. “ … What would Count Basie say if he heard it? That’s kind of what I was keeping in mind.”

Lettuce plays Manhattan's Blue Note Jazz Club June 8 to 11 and Sound Waves at Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City on June 24. The band's inclusion of Kweli, with his verse name-checking Red Bank, is a natural extension of the direct line between the work of Basie and others to the modern hip-hop world.

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“So many of these great hip-hop artists know so much about that early swing era, and listen to it or played the instruments at one point,” said Bloom. “That’s where a lot of people got their flow from, from John Coltrane and Miles (Davis) and Herbie (Hancock) and so much stuff. So to have (Kweli) on it, what a dream come true. You could have gotten so many other people, but Talib knows so much about the tradition. It was just the perfect fit.”

“It sounds vintage and new at the same time, if that makes sense,” Winborne said of Lettuce and Kweli’s track. “It sounds hip. It’s so hip — and yet, wait, this is like a standard. This was something that you would have heard in the middle of the last century, but it sounds hip and new? Huh. But (it does it) without trying too hard. I like it when things like that work organically.”

Basie, who died in 1984 at the age of 79, certainly left his mark on Red Bank, now home to the Count Basie Center for the Arts entertainment and education campus. His fingerprints can also be felt in nearly every corner of the musical world.

“Late Night Basie” features an appropriately stellar roster of musicians, from the Count Basie Orchestra under the director of Scotty Barnhart to late night television backing band fixtures Will Lee and Jimmy Vivino, and indie rockers Larkin Poe, whose take on “Blue and Sentimental” is a smoky, intimate delight.

“(Basie) is one of these figures who managed to be relevant throughout their career,” said Winborne. “His career spanned almost the entirety of the 20th century ... so he influenced and was influenced by styles, but managed to maintain a very distinct identity.”

Key to that identity was a certain blue-collar cool that’s not too far off from the work of later Monmouth County stars such as Bruce Springsteen or “Southside” Johnny Lyon.

When the Boss sings “all day you've been working that hard line, now tonight you're gonna have a good time” on “Out in the Street,” or Southside gets a Jersey Shore crowd singing along to Sam Cooke’s “Havin’ a Party,” they’re doing so in the spirit of Basie.

“There’s this grit (to Basie), there’s this connection to people," Winborne said. "There’s this on the ground aspect, there’s a sense of community. There’s a sense of hard-working (life), like ‘You can put on your fancy clothes but we know you’ve got to go to work on Monday so come on and have a good time.’ ”

Listen: “Late Night Basie” will be released on vinyl, CD and digital by Primary Wave Music on Friday, April 7; https://lnk.to/LateNiteBasie.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Count Basie celebrated with new all-star tribute album