Giddins and DeVeaux on Count Basie

"For dance bands, head arrangements offered special flexibility. Some became fixed arrangements, written down to preserve the order of riffs. But in the heat of performance, musicians could extend the tune to extraordinary lengths. New rifs could be created to match the dancers' ingenuity. Basie was particularly skilled at creating head arrangements from the piano, by cuing the saxophones with one keyboard riff and the brasses with another. 'When you play a battle of music, it's the head arrangements that you could play for about ten minutes and get the dancers going,' remembered Teddy Wilson, whose music-reading band could not keep up with Kansas City–style spontaneity. Once the Basie band began playing 'One O'Clock Jump,' the contest was over: 'That was the end of the dance!' 'One O'Clock Jump' [available on this recording] was a fluid, twelve-bar blues arrangement that had evolved gradually for more than a decade before finding its final form; only after it was recorded was it notated. … Many of its riffs were collected over time by Basie long-timers like saxophonist Buster Smith, trumpeter Hot Lips Page, and trombonist Eddie Durham" (Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux, Jazz, p. 216).