Wild Bill Davison (Jan. 5, 1906 —Nov. 14, 1989) was an American jazz cornet player who recorded some 800 songs and traveled extensively in his 70-year career.
William Edward Davison was born in the northwest Ohio town of Defiance. The son of Edward Davison, an itinerant worker, and Anna Kreps Davison, a homemaker, he was raised by his maternal grandparents from the age of seven on. Davison displayed a love for music, as well as a natural ability to master musical instruments, at an early age. He first learned to play the mandolin, guitar, and banjo. He joined the Boy Scouts mostly because it provided an opportunity for him to learn the bugle. At age 12 he graduated from the bugle to the cornet. The sharper tones of the trumpet never really appealed to Davison, and he stayed with the cornet for the entirety of his musical career. His ear for music was so keen that after hearing a song only once he could reproduce its melody perfectly and elaborate on it with perfect chord progressions and harmonic improvisation. His ability to read music was limited, but it was a skill that he really did not need for the style of music that most interested him.
From his very early teens through the age of 17, Davison played with the Ohio Lucky Seven, an experience that helped to strengthen his musical skills. But, more importantly, he spent much of his spare time studying the playing styles of other horn players he admired. Among his early musical influences were Louis Panico, a trumpet soloist with the Isham Jones Orchestra, Bix Beiderbecke, and Louis Armstrong. From 1923 to 1925, Davison was the featured soloist with the Chubb-Steinberg Orchestra of Cincinnati, moving in 1926 to the Detroit- based Seattle Harmony Kings, with which he played until 1928. When not playing gigs with these groups, he led smaller jazz bands that he put together with musicians who enjoyed the same type of music as he did.
Davison earned an enviable reputation in Midwest jazz circles, eventually winning a featured solo position with Chicago's Benny Meroff Orchestra in 1928. The four-beat, swinging jazz that Davison and other white jazz musicians of the era were playing fell more into the category of swing than the two- beat Dixieland—or New Orleans style—jazz. It came to be known as "Chicago-style" jazz, mostly because it was a sound associated with jazz musicians in the Windy City. In the early 1930s, a number of Chicago area musicians—most notably jazz guitarist Eddie Condon—left the Midwest for New York City, taking with them the label of "Chicago-style" jazz.
Despite his obvious talent and formidable reputation as a jazz stylist, Davison stayed behind in the Midwest when many of his contemporaries from the region migrated to the big time in New York. Whether it was a lack of self-confidence or ambition that held him back is unclear, but for most of the 1930s he played clubs in Chicago and Milwaukee, rarely venturing outside the region. Leaving the Meroff Orchestra in 1931, Davison formed a 12-piece band of his own, building the ensemble around his cornet and the woodwind brilliance of Frank Teschemacher, who played both the clarinet and the alto saxophone. Based in Chicago, Davison's band quickly earned the admiration of fellow musicians, both white and black. Davison's moniker of "Wild Bill," which accurately described the musician's lifestyle off the bandstand, was first used by a Chicago-area promoter who billed him as "Wild Bill Davison, the White Louis Armstrong."
In 1932 he was driving the car in which Teschemacher was killed (his auto was blindsided by a taxi), after which Davison spent the remainder of the 1930s in exile in Milwaukee. By 1941, he was in New York and in 1943 made some brilliant recordings for Commodore (including a classic version of “That’s a Plenty”) that solidified his reputation. After a period in the Army, Davison became a regular at Eddie Condon’s club in New York City, where he performed from 1945 to 1957. In the 1950s, he was quite effective on a pair of albums with string orchestras, but most of his career was spent fronting Dixieland bands either as a leader or with Condon. until his last concert at the New School for Social Research in New York in April 1972 .
Davison played with over 100 bands and made more than 20 albums between 1965 and 1975. During his later years, he fronted his own band and toured often in the United States and in Europe. He recorded constantly, had a colorful life filled with remarkable episodes, and was active up until his death in Santa Barbara, California, on November 14th 1989.at the age of 83, which came after surgery for an abdominal aneurysm, performed shortly after his return from a concert tour to Japan. Davis was cremated, and his ashes were buried in his hometown of Defiance.
More than a decade after Davison died, record companies continue to reissue some of the more than 800 songs he recorded during his 70-year career. (Edited from AllMusic, Britannica, All About Jazz & Wikipedia)