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Recently, at the home of a good friend, I recognized the music coming out of the speakers as the Count Basie CD I had lent him. The sounds whetted my appetite, and when I got the disc back I soon gave it a listen. And I found that I was finally able to get over the mental block I’d had with Basie’s big-band sound.

Many years ago I got serious about jazz this way: I listened to recordings of small groups — trios, quartets, quintets, sextets — while checking out the personnel listings in the liner notes. Since there was usually only one person playing a given instrument, I could get a feel for each musician’s sound. Eventually, the sounds of Miles Davis or Roy Eldridge on trumpet, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Sonny Rollins, or John Coltrane on tenor sax, Charlie Parker or Johnny Hodges on alto became as familiar and recognizable to me as the voices of my family members.

Confronted with the personnel lists on a Basie record, though, I ran into a problem. When there are four trumpeters listed, and all are so closely associated with Basie that you can’t find any albums they recorded as leaders (or they never made any), how do you get to know their individual sounds? How can you tell who is playing the wonderful solo you’re listening to, and if you can’t tell, how can you enjoy it fully (if, that is, you’re a nerd like me)?

The answer was, I let go of my little head game and let the music carry me along. I still don’t know who plays that opening muted-trumpet solo on “Topsy” — but it sure is nice. “Blue and Sentimental,” “Softly, with Feeling” . . . beautiful stuff. And in the soloists’ relative anonymity, there is a good analogy about life. Each of us has days of feeling in tune, so to speak, with the world — backed up by its workings the way the full thumping force of Basie’s band backs up a soloist. And then there are days when, again like one of the Count’s horn players, we scream, wail, and are all but drowned out by the world around us. (Somehow it’s beautiful when it happens in the context of a Basie tune.)

Besides: there are recognizable sounds. Aside from the Count himself on piano, there is the inimitable — though much-imitated — sound of the great Lester (Pres) Young on tenor sax. Check it out. There is The Complete Decca Recordings, or, for the more economy-minded, Ken Burns Jazz: The Definitive Count Basie. If you can get past the words “Ken Burns,” you will find treasure.