Tenor saxophonist Buddy Tate was born George Holmes Tate on February 22, 1915. He grew up in Texas and later came to be known as one of the great "Texas Tenors" with Illinois Jacquet and Arnett Cobb. In 1939 he was invited by Count Basie to replace Evans, who had died suddenly. "I dreamed he had died", Tate told writer Stanley Dance later, "and that Basie was going to call me. It happened within a week or two: I still have the telegram". Buddy stayed with Basie for nine happy years. After Basie, a gig at the Celebrity Room on 125th Street in Harlem led to a stay of 21 straight years "until the clientele began to change: They wanted rock and didn't appreciate what we were doing so we quit". He can be heard on records with Basie, Jimmy Rushing, Jay McShann and with numerous groups under his own name. Count Basie was certainly thinking of Buddy when he said "the band has always been built from the rhythm, to the tenors and then to the rest of the band." All through the 1950's he had recorded regularly, an occasional tour with Buck Clayton so as to keep himself in the public eye, which helped when he chose to freelance again, as there were immediate keen offers for his services. On the European circuit he teamed up with Jim Galloway and Jay McShann and after the death of Jimmy Forrest he teamed up with trombonist Al Grey. In the U.S. he worked the festival circuit and co-led a band with Bobby Rosengarden at the Rainbow Room. Buddy grew up in the era where jazz was moving from the traditional "two beat" feel into the more swing four. The former sounds corny to us today but it had its function for a certain style of dancing and was also fitting for the jazz band instrumentation of the day, especially the tuba. "The Buddy System" attempts to capture these two feels and also includes a section, after Bill's solo, where the horns play a transcribed version of a Buddy Tate solo from a 1940 Basie recording, "The World is Mad Part II." The jazz community was saddened to learn of Buddy's passing on February 10, 2001 in Chandler, Arizona. He was the last link to the stellar Count Basie Band of the late 1940's, where he shared the stage with Lester Young and Sweets Edison. Featuring Buddy Tate (ts, fl, voc), Hendrik Meurkens (vib, voc) Otto Weiss (p), Dieter Gützkow (b), Torsten Zwingenberger (dr). 6 Tracks. Recorded live in Berlin on April 15, 1986.