Walter Page

Walter Sylvester Page (born February 9, 1900 in Gallatin , Missouri, † December 20, 1957 in New York City , New York) was an American jazz musician (double bass player, band leader) of swing .

life and work

Walter Page received thorough musical training in Kansas City , first learning the baritone horn and double bass, then saxophone, violin, piano, singing and voice training, composition and arranging. At the beginning of his career he worked in the band of Willie Lewis, whom he described as a fine musician. He also worked with Bennie Moten and Dave Lewis in the early 1920s.

The Blue Devils

Occupation Blue Devils, circa 1927
Trumpet:	James Simpson, Jimmy Lugrand (or Legrand), Hot Lips Page
Trombone:	Eddie Durham (replaced shortly after by Dan Minor )
Woodwind:	Buster Smith, Reuben Roddy , Ted Manning
Piano:	Turk Thomas (Count Basie from July 1928)
Guitar:	Reuben Lynch
Bass (bass horn, double bass, baritone saxophone):	Walter Page
Drums	Alvin Burroughs

In 1927 Willie Lewis' band broke up and after some engagements in small bands, Page founded the Blue Devils , which became the undisputed Territory Band around Oklahoma. Page and Bennie Moten , who at that time had the leading big band in Kansas City, avoided a cutting contest (battle) of both bands knowing their strengths and weaknesses.

He is best known as a leader and as a founder of Walter Page's Blue Devils became known, a swing band of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the first in the group of Bennie Moten , and ultimately in the big band of Count Basie rose. Page went down in jazz history primarily as the double bass player , on whose pioneering work the now classic accompanying style of the walking bass goes back. In the early years of his career, however, as was common in the jazz bands of the Midwest , he was a multi-instrumentalist. Until the first half of the 1930s, Page, like many of his colleagues, played the bass parts of many arrangements on the tuba , occasionally also on the deep saxophones ( baritone and bass ). He also appeared as a soloist sporadically on all of these instruments .

The band was sometimes so successful that they were able to afford a big touring car from their first major earnings for the extended tours. They worked as a ten-piece band within fifty miles of El Reno, Shawnee, Chickashay and the small towns. She defended her territory (hence the name territory bands ) against other bands in cutting contests and occasionally beat the bands of Jesse Stone and George E. Lee .

In 1928 Bill "Count" Basie was a member of the band for a few months and blues singer Jimmy Rushing also joined the band . In 1929, Basie and Eddie Durham and then Jimmy Rushing left the band and went to Bennie Moten, who could offer them better salaries.

In 1929 the band made their only two recordings with Page: Squabblin and Blue Devils Blues . Squabblin , composed by Basie, confirms the impressive solos and ensemble passages , and Jimmy Rushing sings with a finer voice than you will later know with Basie. The Blue Devil Blues is kept in a very relaxed half beat and is half as fast as the comparable stomps of the time at Moten. The whole piece is built up with brass riffs , except for an ensemble passage at the end. The piece is also Jimmy Rushing's first recording. It starts as C minor blues and ends as E flat major blues.

Occupation Blue Devils October 1929
ladder	Walter Page
Trumpet;	Hot Lips Page, James Simpson
trombone	Druie "Chap" Bess
Saxophones:	Henry "Buster" Smith, Reuben Roddy
piano	Charles Washington
Guitar:	Reuben Lynch
Double bass:	Walter Page
Drums:	Alvin Burroughs
Singing:	Jimmy Rushing

Around 1930, Oran "Hot Lips" Page , star soloist and half-brother of Walter, left the band and was replaced by Harry Smith. Lester Young was also part of the band for a short time (and was also later in the follow-up band, the 13 Original Blue Devils ).

Page had to leave the band in 1931. At that time, Page was planning to work its way towards the important center of New York and the band had just got good engagements. He had promised a pianist a job, but could not keep it because a musician in his band did not get along with the pianist and their collaboration in the band would only have resulted in dissent. He was then fined $ 250 by the musicians' union. With this penalty and his own family obligations, he could no longer pay the band members' salaries and left the band to James Simpson so that the concert dates that had already been booked could be attended. After that, Page played again with small groups, eventually joining Bennie Moten and playing with the Jeter Pillars in 1934 .

The Blue Devils without Walter Page

After Page left, saxophonist Buster Smith and singer Ernest Williams decided to keep the band going. They brought Leroy "Snake" White into the band to lead the band and called themselves The 13 Original Blue Devils . Lester Young played again. They played at the Ritz Ballroom in Oklahoma City. Buster Smith said confidently, “We had a strong band. We were pretty strong and they (Bennie Moten) weren't going to get us either. Almost everyone was hanging around here trying to have a battle of music with us. We didn't care about any of these bands until we met Andy Kirk. He had a good brass section; it was difficult and bothered us. "

The band was a so-called co-operative band (also Commonwealth Band), that is, they voted on band matters and divided the income more or less evenly according to an agreement (the band leader got a little more). She missed the chance to achieve national recognition when, after a close vote, she turned down an engagement with Fats Waller in Cincinnati for a one and a half hour show because the pay was too low. Instead, the band toured the Kentucky and West Virginia areas where they were still unknown, which ended in fiasco. When they played dejected at a club in 1933, it turned out that the booking agent only let them play for the entrance fees, which at around $ 30 an evening was too low. The police then seized the instruments that they were only given for the night jobs because they could no longer pay their debts to a taxi company. They were kicked out of their hotel and some returned to Kansas City in the manner of hobos on a freight train, others hitchhiked. That was the end of the Blue Devils. Jap Jones (tb), Ted Ross, Buster Smith (as) and Lester Young joined Bennie Moten.

If the band had had success in New York with their “snappier” sound (Basie) and the great influence they had on many musicians, the nationwide development of big band “swing” might have started earlier.

With basie and rhythm work

Walter Page's musical interest, both as a leader and as a sideman , was primarily in the development and refinement of a style for the four main instruments of the rhythm section ( piano , guitar , bass and drums ), as it was finally in the so-called All American Rhythm Section from around 1936 of the then Count Basie Orchestra was realized in a style-defining way. The other three associated musicians (Basie as pianist, guitarist Freddie Green and Jo Jones on drums) all emphasized the critical importance of Page's rhythmic ideas in the creation of this ensemble sound. Jo Jones, who named the Blue Devils under Page the greatest band I have ever heard in my life , and Page as the musical father of Basie, Rushing and Buster Smith, describes himself as a student of Page, who spent two years on the subtleties of playing the drums ( how to phrase, how to turn on what the kids now call 'dropping bombs' ... and also a few moral responsibilities ). The swing of this variety was different for the former handset so clearly from the rest of the Jazz cities (New York, Music Chicago ) that you style with the toponym Kansas City Swing occupied - all four musicians had in so-called territory bands worked by toured the Midwest and Southwest of this city.

Page himself resisted being called the "inventor" of the walking bass technique, which he himself traced back to Duke Ellington's bassist Wellman Braud . There is no doubt, however, that in the jazz world - among musicians and listeners alike - the implementation of this style of playing is inseparably linked to Page's name. Accordingly, in addition to his work in the Basie orchestra, the bassist not only played with many important black musicians of the swing era, his prominent musical position also earned him engagements in white bands, for example Benny Goodman and Eddie Condon , which was due to the racial segregation in that era American society was not without its problems. In contrast to his younger half-brother, the trumpeter Hot Lips Page , Walter always remained connected to the swing style and showed no particular interest in modern jazz, which was emerging after 1940 .

Mary Lou Williams: "I saw the basie band when there was only Page and the horns on stage. Page let people swing on his bass line like it was the easiest thing in the world."

Page was with Basie from the start in his mid-30s until 1942. Then he split up in a dispute with Basie, but played again with him from 1946 to 1949, until Basie temporarily disbanded the band in the early 1950s. At the height of the swing era in the 1930s, he also recorded with other swing stars such as Benny Goodman , Harry James and Teddy Wilson , and accompanied Billie Holiday . After his time with Basie, he played with Eddie Condon in New York in 1952, with Big Joe Turner ( Boss of the Blues ) in 1956 and with Ruby Braff in 1957 . He appeared on recordings by Jay McShann , Buck Clayton , Sidney Bechet , Paul Quinichette , Big Joe Turner, Roy Eldridge , Jo Jones, Jimmy Rushing, and Nat Pierce in the forties and fifties .

He died of pneumonia in 1957.

swell

1. ^ ^{A b c d e} Albert McCarthy, Big Band Jazz , Berkley Publishing, 1977
2. ↑ Since the fifth degree is in minor, the tonality is E flat major, on which the piece also ends (chord scheme: C minor (E flat) | 4 x, A flat major (instead of F minor) | 2 x, c -Moll (E flat) | 2 x, D-half diminished, G minor (half bar also over B, F in bass) | 2 x, E flat major (C minor) | 2 x). The improvisation is based on the pentatonic scales in E flat major, A flat major, and B flat major, which correspond to the pentatonic scales in C minor, F minor and G minor. In the minor pentatonic scales, the major thirds can be played on unstressed times, they correspond to the chord progression C-7, C # ° (here the major third is e), f-7 and so on.
3. ↑ For 1930 and 1931 exact occupation dates are not available.
4. ^ Hentoff, Shapiro Here me talkin to ya , Penguin 1955, p. 282
5. ^ Walter Page: About my life in music. , in The Jazz Review I (Nov. 1958), 12
6. ↑ Rainer Nolden, Count Basie, his life, his music, his records , oreos, in the original (Hentoff / Shapiro loc.cit., P. 283: I have caught Basie's orchestra at times when there was no one on the stage except Page and the horns and, believe me, "Big One" swung the band on his bass without much effort. ("Big One" was Page's nickname)
7. ^ Carr, Fairweather, Priestley, Roughguide Jazz
8. ↑ Martin Kunzler, Jazz Lexicon

Web links

• Walter Page biography
• Redhotjazz Blue Devils

literature

• Martin Kunzler : Jazz Lexicon . Directmedia, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-89853-018-3 .
• Gunther Schuller : Early Jazz. Its Roots and Musical Development. Oxford University Press, New York 1968, ISBN 0-19-504043-0 .
• Gunther Schuller: The Swing Era. The Development of Jazz 1930-1945. Oxford University Press, New York 1989, ISBN 0-19-507140-9 .
• Albert McCarthy: Big Band Jazz , Berkley Publishing 1977.
• Douglas Henry Daniels One O'Clock Jump: The unforgettable history of the Oklahoma City Blue Devils , Boston, Beacon Press 2006.