Red Bank, NJ

Red Bank gave its name to jazz aristocracy: William "Count" Basie was born here in 1904, the son of a coachman and a laundress, and took the swing of the Jersey Shore to Kansas City and the world — "the Kid from Red Bank", as his band's tune forever fixed him. His hometown answered in kind: the grand 1926 movie palace on Monmouth Street became the Count Basie Theatre, and after a sweeping expansion now operates as the Count Basie Center for the Arts (a canonical-name note for the registry) — the Shore's premier stage, where symphony seasons, opera tours and rock royalty share the year, and where Basie himself returned in his last decades to play for his own.

The town around it is the borough at the navigable head of the Navesink, a Victorian river port turned one of New Jersey's liveliest small downtowns — antique rows, restaurants, the river full of sails, and in cold winters the old iceboat fleet flying across the frozen Navesink, a nineteenth-century sport the town never gave up. Bruce Springsteen's Shore-scene geography surrounds it, and the local music tradition runs unbroken from Basie's stride piano to the clubs of today. Small borough, large tempo.