By Michael Walsh

William ("Count") Basie: 1904-1984

The rotund man with the barrel chest and impeccable mustache would sit down at the piano, pop his fingers a couple of times to get the rhythm just right and, boom, his band would take off. Reeds and brasses would blast out in an ensemble sharp enough to shave with, trombones explosively punctuating the seductive murmurs of the saxophones. As the smoke cleared, there would be the piano, light and airy in the right hand, gentle in the left, keeping the whole thing together. "I'm only part of the rhythm section," William (''Count") Basie would say. "I'm a pacesetter." When he died last week of pancreatic cancer at 79, the man from Red Bank, N.J., Kansas City, Mo., and the swing clubs of New York had indeed set the pace for one of the century's most accomplished jazz bands.

Basie was not the compositional innovator that another of jazz's crowned heads, Duke Ellington, was, nor an instrumental virtuoso on the order of the Earl, "Fatha" Hines. Rather, the Count's talent lay in his knack for organizing the tightest, swingingest bands in the land; populating them with some of the best sidemen ever to grace a dance floor or a recording studio, including Tenor Sax Player Lester Young, Trumpeter Buck Clayton, Drummer Jo Jones and Blues Singer Jimmy Rushing; and later backing the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra. Although his elliptically eloquent, spare style of playing, influenced by Fats Waller, gave his band its characteristic texture, Basie slyly soft-pedaled his technique. "I just play my one or two notes and don't worry about keeping up," he said a couple of years ago.

The first of the great Basie bands was formed in 1935 in Kansas City, a wide-open town where the beat went on 24 hours a day. Basie, who had been stranded there seven years earlier after the breakup of a vaudeville show he had been traveling with, put together a nine-piece combo. Discovered by Jazz Critic and Record Producer John Hammond shortly thereafter, the Basie band went to New York in 1936. The next year the release of the bouncy One O'clock Jump made the Count a celebrity.

Although Basie employed talented arrangers in later years, many of his early hits, including One O'clock Jump and Jumpin 'at the Woodside, began as improvised "head arrangements." "We were fooling around at the Reno Club, and Basie was playing along in F," recalled one of his men. "He hollered at me that he was going to switch to D-flat and for me to 'set something.' I started playing that opening reed riff on alto. Hot Lips Page jumped in with the trumpet part without any trouble, and Dan Minor thought up the trombone part. That was it." That was One O'Clock Jump.

Throughout his career, Basie was constantly being compared to Ellington. Typically, his modesty precluded such notions. Once, when the Basie and Ellington orchestras combined for a recording, the Duke asked Basie to solo in Take the "A" Train. "You know what I did? I ran for the door," said Basie. But he could always look back with pride at one night in Kansas City in 1936, when the two bands battled for the first time. As Rushing recalled, the Count outswung the Duke.

Most of the big jazz bands died out during or after World War II. Basic's simply regrouped and kept on swinging. Personnel came and went, but the Count was able to keep his sound fundamentally unchanged. There was always that crisp, unforced style, as dapper as the yachting cap he habitually wore. Weakened by illnesses near the end, Basie had to come onstage on a motor scooter. But as soon as he took his seat at the keyboard, he was home again. "Man," he said, "all we're trying to do is make the music swing." And that is exactly what he did. --By Michael Walsh

MARRIED. Jerry Lee Lewis, 48, hard-living rockabilly singer; and Kerrie Lynn McCarver, 21, sometime country and gospel singer; he for the sixth time, she for the second; in Memphis. Lewis' last two wives died under mysterious circumstances, one by drowning, the other of a methadone overdose.

TRIAL ORDERED. For John Landis, 33, director of 1983's Twilight Zone: The Movie; Paul Stewart, the film's special-effects coordinator; and Dorcey Wingo, helicopter pilot; on involuntary-manslaughter charges arising from the 1982 deaths of Actor Vic Morrow and two children when a helicopter crashed onto them during the shooting of a Viet Nam battle scene for Twilight Zone; in Los Angeles. They face up to six years in prison if convicted on all charges.

HOSPITALIZED. Elizabeth Bolivia, 26, quadriplegic cerebral-palsy victim who was denied the legal right to starve herself to death in a California hospital last winter; after deciding to abandon her 7 1/2-month attempt to die; in Tijuana, Mexico. After doctors refused her the right to starve in a Tijuana hospital last month, because Mexico's laws are as stringent as California's, she moved into a Tijuana motel, still intending to die. On Easter Sunday morning, a California psychiatric technician, who had befriended her, and a Mexican intern persuaded her that there was still hope for a meaningful life. Bouvia, who had wasted away to 76 lbs., thereupon took her first solid food since September and returned to the Tijuana hospital for medical help and to regain some weight.

DIED. He Zizhen, 75, third wife of China's late Chairman, Mao Tse-tung, who married him in 1931, accompanied him on the epic 6,000-mile Long March in 1934-35, and was divorced by Mao in 1937 so he could marry onetime Film Starlet Jiang Qing; in Shanghai. He Zizhen lived out her post-Mao years mostly in obscurity in the U.S.S.R. and in China, often in hospitals and asylums, and her official obituary made no mention of the marriage to Mao.

DIED. Juan Tizol, 84, Puerto Rican-born valve trombonist who played in the Duke Ellington and Harry James bands during the '30s, '40s and '50s, and who wrote Caravan, one of the most popular tunes in the Ellington repertoire; of a heart attack; in Inglewood, Calif.

DIED. Celeste Albaret, 92, housekeeper, secretary and confidante to Marcel Proust during the last nine years of his life, when the eccentric, reclusive French novelist was struggling to finish his monumental Remembrance of Things Past (in which she is mentioned); of emphysema; in Paris. Albaret recorded her recollections of the strange, exploitative relationship in a 1976 memoir, Monsieur Proust, from which a moving film, Celeste, was adapted two years ago.