The importance of the Count Basie Orchestra in the development of jazz cannot be overstated. His big band played with the freewheeling, loose swing of a much smaller jazz combo at an informal jam session. And Basie gave plenty of solo space to outstanding improvisers including Lester Young, Herschel Evans, "Hot Lips" Page, and "Sweets" Edison.

Ted Gioia in The History of Jazz writes about the innovative and widely influential sound of the Basie rhythm section. "No one filled [the] new role—that of the "comping" pianist—better than Count Basie. As such, he remains the best remembered of the Kansas City pioneers. In this symbiotic process, Basie, Page, and Jones collectively reengineered the nature of time and space in the context of jazz…”

Although he was born and raised in Red Bank, New Jersey, Count Basie played a key role in the emergence of the Kansas City style of jazz. Its roots were in the blues and the informal jam session tradition. Basie was stranded in Kansas City in 1927 after a show in which he was touring disbanded there, and he soon fell in with local musicians, eventually joining Walter Page’s Blue Devils.

In his autobiography Good Morning Blues, Basie described the first time he heard the Blue Devils performing on the back of a truck. "I just stood there listening and looking, because I had never heard anything like that band in my life. It was such a team spirit among those guys, and it came out in the music… Everything about them really got to me, and as things worked out, hearing them that day was probably the most important turning point in my musical career."

Later, Basie and a nucleus of Blue Devils players joined the Bennie Moten Orchestra. Moten died unexpectedly, and Basie took over leadership of the band, which by then called themselves the Barons of Rhythm.

Radio broadcasts of the Basie-led band from the Reno Club in Kansas City in 1935 attracted the attention of Eastern promoters. Tuning in to a late night broadcast on his much used and now legendary car radio, John Hammond ‘discovered’ the Basie band and secured a Decca recording contract and appearances in New York City.

In January 1938 the Count Basie Orchestra hit it big in New York with a long-running gig at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, the "Home of Happy Feet." Benny Goodman’s rival for the King of Swing title had arrived and was staking out his territory.