Warner Bros / Wea
1998
Live At The Sands (Live)
About This Album
Frank Sinatra's collaborations with Count Basie were among the singer's better ventures back into jazz in the early 1960s, and led not only to a couple of great studio albums, and one superb live Sinatra album, but also to Basie's being signed to the Sinatra-founded Reprise label in the mid-'60s. The 53 minutes of music captured on Live at the Sands was recorded during the opening sets from three different shows in late January and early February of 1966, by Basie and his band during the engagement with Sinatra at the Sands Hotel that yielded that live Sinatra album. Maybe that raises the expectations, because this release is a slight disappointment -- the band sounds OK, but except for Basie himself and drummer Sonny Payne, it seems like they're walking their way through some of this repertoire. There are a number of good moments here: "I Needs to Be Bee'd With," "Flight of the Foo Birds," "Satin Doll," "Blues for Home," and "This Could Be the Start of Something Big" (which is worth hearing for the ensemble work and Eric Dixon and Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis' solos); the band finally takes flight, but compared with some of the recordings of complete shows by Basie that are nothing less than great, a lot of this is secondary.
Track List (try tracks 2,4,5,8,9 and 13)

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