A Louisville native, drummer
Bill Beason played with many classic jazz artists, including a long stint holding down the drum chair in the orchestra of singer
Ella Fitzgerald.
Beason started out in the Booker T. Washington Centre Band in his hometown, joining up with Horace Henderson's Collegians in 1924 after that bandleader pulled off a raid on musically talented students at Wilberforce University in Ohio. The drummer spent the remaining part of that decade with
Henderson, then relocated to New York City in the '30s, where he began working in the band of
Bingie Madison. In the mid-'30s he was drumming for
Teddy Hill, a job that led to
Beason's first European tour.
Beason also performed and recorded with
Jelly Roll Morton during this period. In 1938 and 1939 he played with
Don Redman, briefly with trumpet dynamo
Roy Eldridge, then was brought in to the
Fitzgerald band to replace the terminally ill
Chick Webb.
Beason was associated with
Fitzgerald until late 1941; he also rejoined
Henderson's new outfit in the fall of that year. Through the '40s, the drummer freelanced in groups led by
John Kirby,
Eddie Heywood,
Ben Webster,
James Moody,
Sy Oliver,
Earl Bostic, and many others, displaying a sure and steady sense of time and a potentially polite palette of percussive prompts, especially by modern standards. By the early '50s, however,
Beason seems to have lost his interest in drumming. He stayed in the New York area, living in the Bronx, but stayed off drum stools. The drummer left behind a clear record of his accomplishments -- or, more accurately, some five dozen of them -- appearing on at least 60 different recording sessions between 1930-1947.
–
Eugene Chadbourne, Rovi