Songs For Swooners

Check out The Rugburns – the fun-pop combo San Diego singer-songwriter Steve Poltz played with through the 1990s – on YouTube, and there you'll see Gregory Page, ripping into his bass with all the gusto of any red-blooded pop-slinger. Yet, catch him anywhere on his latest and ninth tour of Australia, or check out his solo albums and you'll discover as smooth a jazz crooner as you'll find this side of Tony Bennett. Only Page writes his own songs in the vein of the Great American Songbook. No, actually, his mellow jazz goes back even further – to the 1920s and, you might be even more surprised, to the crooners of Ye Olde England.

“After The Rugburns gigs I was still going into the hotel rooms or the van putting on music that I really loved,” the charming Page, who was born in North London but relocated with his parents to San Diego when he was 14, at the height of punk, explains. “Like Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and Glenn Miller. So I've always had this love that doesn't always reflect exactly what I'm currently part of at the time. The Rugburns were a great outfit and we had a lot of fun. I got to see America for the first time through the eyes of a fifteen-passenger van and a rock band, basically hotel rooms and vending machines for dinner.

“But the love of this old music was never far from where I was at. I was always a little bit out of step in some ways,” he laughs at the fact that as punk was literally erupting outside, he was listening to records by 1930s British dance bandleader Al Bowlly, who is credited with inventing the crooning style. “Punks were not as interested in creating music as creating chaos, and I was very afraid of that culture, so my way was to resort to these old 78 rpm records that we had up in the attic. That's what I kind of identified to. My friends were Billie Holiday and these tortured black artists in America. I was a skinny kid from North London, what was I doing identifying with this part of the world? But somehow it just resonated really deep within me. I never thought that I would have a career trying to rediscover some of this stuff.”

The dislocation between what Page listened to then and creates now and the music he was playing in The Rugburns is even more remarkable when you consider his parents were both musicians themselves. Originally coming to London from Ireland, where they'd been in show bands, his saxophonist mother ending up in an all-girl band called The Beat-Chics, who shared a bill with The Beatles in Spain in 1965. Page managed to skip his parents' Beat Boom heyday and go back to his grandparents' “pop music”.

“Over the years I kind of lost my way a little bit,” Page admits. “I did a rock album, then I did a sort of indie rock album, and then kind of an instrumental art record. So there have been other genres that I've been trying to follow, but [I was] always leaning back. But then the last five or six albums I've done have definitely been in the direction of the music I really like listening to.”

Though he's touring just with his guitar and local double bassist, Liz Frencham, his latest album, Shine, Shine, Shine, is the culmination of all his musical ambitions. It was recorded live with a Big Band Orchestra and anchored by bassist Bob Magnusson, who's played with Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn and Biddy Rich. From Australia, he's taking Frencham to London to open for another San Diego buddy, Jason Mraz, at the O2 Arena.

Gregory Page will be playing the following shows: