We used to do like 300 one-nighters a year because we had no place to sit down and play regularly. There was so little written music that I wasn't accomplishing what I wanted to. Johnson and all the people I had read about and admired without ever thinking I'd be shaking hands with them.Early on I put in my notice. I used to listen to him because I had no fatherly advice when I left home. He took me every place in New York and introduced me to Duke, Don Redman, Benny Carter and Chick Webb - to the whole scene It was a thrill to meet James P. Buck had already built up a name with Basie, but people hadn't heard of me.The two trumpeters, outstanding and original improvisers, shared the work, and Edison took solos on more than 50 of Basie's records from this period He said:I always looked on Basie as a father When I joined the band he just took a liking to me.

But Gillespie soon left to join Teddy Hill, and Millinder hired Edison again. Then, he said:Bobby Moore, who was with Count Basie, took sick So I joined the Basie band at the end of 1937 Basie's was not an ensemble band Everybody in it was a soloist. I'd been playing in shows and had played with the tone and quality that had been wanted. I still played like that, often in the lower register, when I joined Basie and that's what made Lester Young start calling me "Sweets".

At first I tried to play pretty all the time, and I took a lot of solos on record that Buck Clayton got the credit for. Millinder was an erratic leader who fired musicians on the slightest whim. "One time he got so excited that he even fired himself," said Edison. Edison was sacked when Millinder decided he wanted Dizzy Gillespie in the band. Edison joined Millinder and apart from Smith the band included the new trumpet giant Charlie Shavers, the pianist Billy Kyle and the tenor player Don Byas. "You're playing for experience," said Hood and didn't pay him anything. After his mother intervened, Edison was given 35 cents a night.

In 1933 he joined the newly formed Jeter-Pillars Orchestra and moved with the band to St Louis where he worked for two years.A visiting alto player, Tab Smith, heard him, and recommended Edison to Lucky Millinder, who led a top-rank band in New York. Louis Armstrong has been my idol ever since.When he was 11 Edison almost died from typhoid fever A year later his mother took him back to Columbus, Ohio "My mother bought me a new horn. I think it took her about five years to pay for it." She bought a tuxedo for him, too, and he joined a local band led by Earl Hood. I used to listen to records by the old blues singers, and I happened to hear Louis Armstrong backing up Bessie Smith That was for me! That was where it all started That was the direction I wanted to go. I found an old cornet in the house, and he taught me to play scales on it. I went to live with him in Louisville, Kentucky, and he taught me to play a pump organ that he had.

Nobody ever heard of him again.His mother was similarly careless about recording the year of Edison's birth and nobody knows it for sure. Edison's only comment was that the year most often given in the reference books, 1915, was wrong It was most likely to have been 1919 Edison recalled:My uncle was a coalminer and a farmer. My dad came into Columbus one day, moved in with my mother, stayed a couple of months and was off. The only time I ever saw him was once or twice when I was about seven.