DEEP JAZZ FROM BERLIN

VIPER`S DRAG is dedicated to play Thomas "Fats"Wallers music, his own compositions as well as some cool  tunes of his repertoire. Due to the special lineup  ( trumpet, altosax, bass, drums, no piano ) the band has a new and fresh approach, classic and catchy swing played with a modern attitude.  

Thomas Waller was an outstanding and extremely gifted musician and composer, who revolutionized the stride-piano style and composed numerous songs , some of them becoming all-time-standards like "Honeysuckle Rose" or "Ain`t Misbehavin`".

He was the first one to play jazz on organs and he also was the first one to compose a jazz waltz, the famous "Jitterbug Waltz".

And he was so famous that he has even been hijacked by Al Capones gang to play on his birthday party !

One might wonder which kind of musician he would have been without the racist society of that time, as most people don`t know that he loved and recorded classical music, which has never been released, cause black people were rather supposed to be the clowns in the music-circus . A journalist once stated that the special humor of guys like him was nothing else than their way to deal with their situation and control their pain by ironizing it.

VIPER`S DRAG wants to recall the special energy and power of this music, remembering also the troubles our predecessors had to go through, and in deep love and respect for the man who created it, Thomas Waller.