An extraordinary 1937 promotional photograph of Count Basie, signed at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom by Basie and fourteen members of the band including Billie Holiday and Lester Young, and dedicated to famed teenage jazz fan and collector Bob Inman.

The photo shows Basie with his conductor’s baton and is dated by Inman ‘June 23, 1937, Savoy Ballroom, New York.’ Basie has written “To Bob” at the top of the photograph, and Lester Young has written “To Bob” beneath his signature at the bottom.

Each of the following musicians has signed the front of the photograph: Count Basie, Ronald Washington, George Hunt, Ed Lewis (signed as “Edmond”), James Rushing, Dan Minor, Walter Page, Freddie Greene, Joe Jones, Bobby Moore (second trumpeter), Herschel Evans, Earl Shaver, Lester Young, Buck Clayton, and Billie Holiday.

The back of the photograph features a remarkable handwritten narrative by Inman, who has written his name and address in Bronxville, New York. He notes that he received the photograph from Basie’s agency MCA on January 9, 1937, and describes a visit to the Savoy Ballroom with friends Jim, Poe, Dan, Morten, and Dan Mortimer to see Count Basie and his band, who had been playing the Savoy for about two weeks and were set to leave in about three weeks to play the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Boston.

He writes that “Billy Hicks and his Sizzling Six” played while “Count Basie’s band took a rest” and were “fair”. He notes that he and his friends were at the Savoy from 9:30 to 12:30 and paid fifty cents admission. Inman also wrote about Billie Holiday on the back of the photograph, declaring that she was “the greatest girl Negro blues singer of today” — a striking contemporary assessment of Holiday at just twenty-one years of age, written in real time as she was on the verge of becoming one of the most important vocalists in American music.

Bob Inman was fourteen years old when he received a radio for Christmas in 1935 and became captivated by the swing music pouring out of New York’s ballrooms and hotels. From then until he graduated high school in 1938, Inman kept meticulous logs of every radio broadcast he listened to and chronicled the hundreds of jazz shows he attended in person, collecting autographs and photographs from the musicians along the way. His diaries and radio logs eventually filled seven large scrapbooks that today constitute one of the finest firsthand records of the New York swing scene of the late 1930s.

Inman’s famed collection was chronicled in the book Swing Era Scrapbook: The Teenage Diaries and Radio Logs of Bob Inman, 1936-1938, by Ken Vail.  This signed photograph is reproduced on a full page in the book.

Inman saw virtually every major act of the era in person — Benny Goodman at the Paramount Theater, Louis Armstrong at Loew’s State, Duke Ellington at the Apollo Theatre, and Chick Webb at the Savoy Ballroom among them. Pages from Inman’s original journals were part of the collection of Rolling Stones drummer and jazz aficionado Charlie Watts.

This photograph is an astonishing document of early swing era jazz. By June of 1937, Basie’s band had only recently arrived in New York from Kansas City and was still establishing itself on the national stage. The roster of signers reads like a roll call of jazz history: Lester Young, whose innovative tenor saxophone style would reshape jazz; Billie Holiday, who had been singing with the band and was already being recognized, as Inman’s inscription confirms, as a singular vocal talent; Herschel Evans, Young’s great tenor saxophone rival in the Basie reed section; Buck Clayton, whose elegant trumpet work became a hallmark of the Basie sound; Walter Page, the pioneering bassist; James Rushing, the great blues shouter; and Freddie Greene, whose rhythm guitar would anchor the Basie band for decades to come. That all of these signatures exist together on a single photograph, dedicated to a teenage fan at the Savoy Ballroom, makes this a museum quality piece of the highest order.

The 8″ x 10″ photograph has pin holes in each corner, a small bit of paper missing from the border in the upper right corner, a small tape stain in the lower right corner, and small tape stains at the bottom of the two bottom corners on the back. These condition issues are typical of a photograph that was clearly cherished and displayed by its original owner for many years and does not diminish the extraordinary significance of this piece.

With Recordmecca’s written lifetime guarantee of authenticity.