Blue Devils
Kansas City - The cradle of jazz?
“Louis Armstrong thought Chicago was the greatest place for a young jazz musician to have been born, and for my money there never was or never will be a better place than Chicago in the twenties. Young musicians had the best possible opportunity for learning about this music because we had most of the great jazz musicians living among us. We had wonderful clubs on the black South Side, where the likes of Louis, King Oliver, Jimmie Noone, Earl Hines, and Baby and Johnny Dodds gave us the greatest music lessons we could ever ask for. The South Side also had great singers of a caliber of Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters. On the white North Side we could hear Bix Beiderbecke, Ben Pollack, and a half dozen other greats.”
- Bud Freeman
After Storyville closed in late 1917, Louis Armstrong and King Oliver brought their New Orleans’s ragtime up the Mississippi River on paddle steamers to St. Louis and then up to Chicago.
It was in Chicago that they created a new music - a Chicago-style jazz. Perhaps Chicago, not New Orleans, was the cradle of jazz. However, at the same time in the Southwest, two important and lesser known territorial bands, Walter Page’s Oklahoma City Blue Devils and Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, were creating their own new Kansas City-style jazz that would have a huge impact on the development of the swing music of the 1930s and 1940s.
Oklahoma City Blue Devils
The Oklahoma City Blue Devils was a pioneering band with a towering reputation in the Southwest. From its rather humble beginnings as a vaudeville road show band, the Blue Devils went on to become a model for the great Count Basie bands.
In fact, Basie believed the Blue Devils to be the best band he ever heard, even surpassing Bennie Moten’s Kansas City band. In his autobiography, Count Basie recalled how much he was impressed by the Blue Devils when he first heard them in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the Summer of 1927. He writes: “Hearing them…was probably the most important turning point in my musical career so far as my notions about what kind of music I really wanted to play was concerned. There was a team spirit among those guys, and it came out in the music.” Much of the Blue Devils’ success was a result of the leadership of pianist Little Willie Lewis and, in particular, musical director and bassist Walter Page.
Beginning in 1918 as a young college student at the University of Kansas, Walter Page moonlighted with Bennie Moten’s Orchestra. However, in 1923, he left the Moten band to join Billy King’s road show Moonshine, with the “dashing Creole Beauty Chorus”, playing at Kansas City’s Aldridge Theatre on Second Street in the heart of Oklahoma City’s black community. Moonshine had been touring on the Theater Owners’ Booking Association (TOBA) circuit.
Billy King was a vaudeville comedian and blackface showman described in the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance as “a living link between the Harlem Renaissance and nineteenth-century black minstrelsy.”
From 1923 to 1925, the Billy King Road Show toured from Texas to the Dakotas and to East Coast cities like Atlanta and Savannah. It was eventually stranded in West Virginia and disbanded. After the band returned home to Oklahoma City, Walter Page, kept them together and in 1925 renamed the band Walter Page’s Oklahoma City Blue Devils.
The band would go to take the Southwest by storm and during its 16 year life-span featured such jazz greats as Count Basie, Jimmy Rushing, Buster Smith, Lester Young and Oran Hot Lips Page.
In 1928, a number of the Blue Devils left the orchestra, including co-founder Little Willie Lewis, and between 1929 and 1931 Eddie Durham, William “Count” Basie, Jimmy Rushing, and Oran Hot Lips Page had all left for Moten’s band. Walter Page kept the Blue Devils alive for a while; however, in 1935, he too would leave for Moten’s band.
Bennie Moten
Born in Kansas City in 1894, Bennie Morton dropped out of high school to pursue a musical career. He shrewdly hired some of Kansas City’s most promising musicians and built the Bennie Morton Orchestra, Kansas City’s first great jazz band and one of the most important regional bands active in the Midwest during the 1920s. His band made their first recordings on the Okeh label on September 23, 1923.
Here’s is Ada Brown singing Evil Mama Blues with the Bennie Moten Orchestra from that first recording date:
In 1926, the band signed with Victor and made many outstanding records with that label into the early 1930s.
By 1926, Bennie Moten’s sound had grown from its initial ragtime and blues roots to a more pronounced Kansas City jazz that would later become known as the “Basie sound”. For a taste of that early sound, here is Bennie Morton’s Kansas City Orchestra playing Harmony Blues from 1926:
In a little less than ten years, Bennie Moten had established himself and his bands as the model for dance bands in the the Southwest. His reign lasted from the early 1920s until his death in early 1935. In his book One O’clock Jump, Douglas Daniels writes: “Eddie Durham was one of the musicians who regarded him as “king.” Drummer Jo Jones claimed that “Bennie Moten was the greatest bandleader that ever lived.” Furthermore, “Whenever you saw…a Fletcher Henderson; whenever you saw Cab Calloway; whenever you saw a Duke Ellington…that’s Bennie Moten. You see Basie, that’s Bennie Moten.”
In 1931 and 1932, with arrangers William “Count” Basie and Eddie Durham and outstanding soloists Oran Hot Lips Page on trumpet, Eddie Barefield on saxophones and clarinet, and Ben Webster on tenor saxophone, Moten’s band was at the height of its popularity.
Here is the more developed Bennie Moten Orchestra’s Lafayette composed by Count Basie and Eddie Durham and recorded for the Victor in 1932:
After Bennie Moten’s untimely death in 1935, Basie took over the Moten band and renamed it the Count Basie Orchestra. Count Basie and his bands went on to eclipse Bennie Moten's fame. In 1937, Basie moved to Chicago and then New York, bringing Kansas City jazz to national prominence.
So maybe the cradle of jazz was neither New Orleans nor Chicago after all - maybe the cradle of jazz was Kansas City….
Here’s one more for the road. In 1936, record producer John Hammond heard the Count Basie Orchestra on the radio one day and invited them to record a session for the Vocalion label. Hammond later described the session as “the only perfect, completely perfect recording session I’ve had anything to do with.” Billed as Jones-Smith Incorporated (because Basie had already signed a record deal with Decca records), here is Oh Lady Be Good from that November 9, 1936 Vocalion session, which incidentally is Lester Young’s earliest recording.
Next week, on that Big River Called jazz, we’ll explore the beginnings of the newly formed Count Basie Orchestra.
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Until then, keep on walking….
Great stuff, Tyler. Thank you!