Entry · catalog no. 2408
head arrangement
/ /ˈhɛd əˈreɪndʒmənt/ /HED uh-RAYNJ-ment
noun · Kansas City, Missouri, and the Southwest territory band circuit · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
An arrangement a band builds by ear and keeps in its collective memory rather than on paper. One player starts a riff, a section answers it, another line gets stacked on top, and the parts are fitted together in rehearsal or right on the bandstand until the routine holds. Because nothing is fixed on the page, a head can be stretched, cut, re-voiced or handed to a different soloist in performance, and the same tune can run three minutes one night and ten the next.
“There was no music on the stands — the whole thing was a head arrangement they had put together at the Reno two years before.”
Origin & Attribution
The head arrangement is the signature working method of the Black territory bands of Kansas City and the Southwest in the 1920s and 1930s — Bennie Moten's band, Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy, Jay McShann's, and above all the Count Basie band that came up out of the Reno Club in Kansas City. These were bands with deep blues instincts, strong soloists and no budget for staff arrangers, and the method suited them: riffs traded between the reed and brass sections, layered antiphonally, held in memory, and left loose enough that the soloists had room. Basie said in his own account that a great many of the band's early charts were heads with no paper involved, and that the men rehearsed enough to hold everything. One O'Clock Jump is the plainest evidence: a twelve-bar blues routine assembled from band members' riffs at the Reno Club, with Eddie Durham and Buster Smith helping crystallize Basie's ideas, and only committed to a record, for Decca, on 7 July 1937. Two corrections. This was not an absence of arranging or a failure to read music; it was a different technology of arranging, one that stored the chart in the players rather than on the stand, and it produced music that stayed elastic in performance in a way written swing charts could not. And the innovation is regularly credited to the swing era's celebrity bandleaders and their arrangers, when the practice is older and belongs to the Black Southwest territory circuit that fed the swing era rather than followed it.
1936
The Basie band, working the Reno Club in Kansas City, builds its book largely out of heads; a late-night radio broadcast from the club gives One O'Clock Jump its name
1937
One O'Clock Jump is recorded for Decca on 7 July, fixing a head arrangement on disc
1985
Basie's autobiography, told to Albert Murray, documents the method from the inside
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Midwest
Kansas City, Missouri, and the Southwest territory band circuit · 1930s
Spoken by
Working Black bandsmen in Kansas City and the Southwest territories; later general jazz vocabulary
$HEADARThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady96 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
34/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1930
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Citations & Sources
■
Count Basie and His Orchestra, One O'Clock Jump, Decca, recorded 7 July 1937
record
■
One O'Clock Jump — Count Basie and His Orchestra (1937), National Recording Registry essay, Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Board
book
■
Count Basie, as told to Albert Murray, Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie (Random House, 1985)
oral history
■
+ Cite a sourceRoss Russell, Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest (University of California Press, 1971)
book
See also