The Disappearing Footnote

File this—as so often we must these days—under "Going to Hell in a Handbasket." It's a letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review bemoaning the tendency of nonfiction books to omit citations, whether from the foots of pages or the ends of manuscripts.

The first step on this slippery slope was when footnotes became endnotes. The decline continued when footnotes were no longer numbered, and instead the reader, if she was lucky, would find in the back of the book a page number and a shortened quotation — too often not the controversial or incomplete assertion she hoped to trace. Now even nonfiction history is published without any notes (because it is “popular”?). 

I bring it up because I thought a lot about this issue while working on my Bix book and found myself very pleased with the "shortened quotation" format. Your mileage may vary. But this letter-writer notwithstanding, I wonder how many people will actually read these endnotes, however they may be formatted.

I ask because they were meant to be read! I mean, look at what you'd be missing if you skip them altogether in Finding Bix: Roth, Portnoy, a shiksa paradise, and the twat of the United States of America.

Is It Bix? Is It French? Or Is It Some Sid-Caesarese Gobbledygook?

On Albert Haim’s Bixography forum, dedicated to all things Bix Beiderbecke, Brad Kay muses on the language of Bix’s music. His comments come in the context of a long-running debate over whether the cornet solo on a particular recording (a tune called “Cradle of Love”) is in fact Bix . . .

As Albert said, “Bix’s style was not just a set of ‘gestures’ or ‘mannerisms.’ There was a cohesiveness, a unity in the different parts of a Bix solo that must be found in a mystery solo for me to accept that indeed it is played by Bix.”

Precisely my point. What we’re talking about is Language. Bix didn’t just play jazz, he created a musical language. It is an eloquent and beautiful language, and Bix, all by himself, invented and perfected it.

What is language, anyway? How do we know a guy is talking French, and not some Sid-Caesarese gobbledygook? Well . . . because there is a consistency to fluent French. It has vocabulary, spelling, punctuation, and syntax. Paragraphs! Novels! It speaks for a whole culture. It is comprehensible down to the tiniest detail, so it can do what a language does best: communicate.

Bix’s music has just such consistencies of grammar, syntax, phrasing and storytelling—and boy, does it communicate! Unfortunately, he never got to the Novel stage, but that’s just our hard luck. Double unfortunately, we have only fragments of this language on record, a pitifully small representation of what was evidently an immense musical vocabulary. (Kind of like the poetry of Sappho, which exists today only in shreds). But just as English has (semi-) consistent details of spelling and usage, so does Bix’s music. There is a unique logic in it that is detectable down to miniscule phrases.

This website is supposed to be dedicated to the appreciation of the music, life and world of Bix Beiderbecke, the jazz genius from Davenport, Iowa. I say, if we are that interested in him, we should at least try to understand his language.

[May 7, 2006]

In Gabriel's Band

Satch on Bix, from the former’s obituary in the Chicago Tribune, July 7, 1971:

In 1959 after recovering from a serious illness he reported to Down Beat magazine that “Bix [Beiderbecke] tried to get me up there to play first horn in Gabriel’s band, but I couldn’t make the gig. It hadn’t been cleared with Joe Glaser [his manager], the union or the State Department.”

‘Ain’t had a bath for a year, dig me!’

In the Chicago Tribune on Feb. 24, 1974, the incomparable rock critic Lester Bangs reviewed Remembering Bix, a memoir by Ralph Berton.

But in the end the lapidary triumph of Beiderbecke’s art may be as significant and, ironically, a direct refutation of the appalling waste of his life. Because Bix proved, five decades ago, that sleaze and destruction, the brandishing of the degrade and déclassé, are not necessary concomitants of an alternative art form: “What was Bix saying that no other musician had ever said? Simply that this jazz wasn’t on the bottom looking up any more. It was out on the level now, reaching for the heights; not grinning sardonically or defiantly at itself as black and poor and dirty and barefoot: Yeah, baby, I’m ugly, ain’t I, I’m evil and lowdown and funky, ain’t had a bath for a year, dig me!”

That’s a lesson that far too many white jivesters, from the Rolling Stones on down, have still not learned.

It can be tough to tell where Bangs ends and Berton begins . . .

[April 8, 2008]

‘The band blared. Bix Beiderbecke blew.’

From “Quartet” by David Glines, in the autumn 1978 issue of Chicago Review:

Whiteman, in blackface, wearing a straw hat and bow tie, burst in on Gershwin, who was listening to Milhaud’s La Creation du Monde, enjoying the blues parts. The raucous din of garbage can lids drifted up tinnily from elevator shafts, the click of dice was heard from alleys where men were playing craps. All the way from Brooklyn you could smell the cabbage cooking.

“Cabbage!” Gershwin choked out, approaching tears.

“Mississippi Mud,” Whiteman responded.

“Whiteman,” Gershwin crooned rhapsodically, “I was walking down Broadway today and the Blues hit me.”

“Wang Wang, Washboard or Weary?”

“Let’s go to Paris, Whiteman.”

“What would an American do in Paris, Georgie?”

“Dance! Get the Blues!”

They broke into a soft shoe shuffle then into a full scale Broadway production tap dance routine without even having to change their shoes. Taxicab horns honked out rhythms for them.

All night they danced, played poker, told jokes, smoked Havanas, wore visors and arm bands, Broadway babies near their ears. They were too hot to cool down. Then . . . the Blues hit Gershwin right there, in the wee hours on Fifth Avenue! “Man, the Blues!” Gershwin wailed. It all happened outside an all-night diner—inside a man sitting at the counter, wearing a fedora, hunched over a cup of coffee as the last Uptown bus was pulling out with nobody on it.

Whiteman, singing in a clown suit, was ascending a stairway to the Stars. New York looked like a thirty-minute etch in a nitric acid bath. Gershwin, his hair falling out, was imitating Al Jolson on bended knee. The band blared. Bix Beiderbecke blew. The stars were out in the Bronx. The wind whistled through the gray canyons of buildings. John Sloan, in his studio, was painting a nude. Pots and pans flew out the windows of the tenement buildings. Bix blew. The nude put on her clothes. They all had the Blues. Whiteman was chasing his hat along a gutter on 42nd Street. He never came back. The Blues had settled in.

Bix, the Blitz, and Condoms (Two)

From a story in the Independent of London about the radical theater director Joan Littlewood and her protégé Howard Goorney:

Devoted to Littlewood’s style of work, Goorney remained crucial to her ensemble ideals for over 30 years, while she in turn was like a surrogate mother to him when adolescent. On one occasion [during the Second World War], she and the girls in the company decided that his melancholy appearance (a lifelong trait) was because he had just fallen in love but was likely for immediate call-up; they arranged a love-nest with a gas fire, Guinness, Bix Beiderbecke record and condoms (two) thoughtfully provided. Anxious next day for the result, they were disappointed when Goorney shook his head: “The sirens went just as I was getting down to it. I had to make for the hospital—I was on fire-guard duty.” What Goorney kept from all but Littlewood was that the nurses’ home had been hit and that all night he had been bringing out the dead.

[April 3, 2008]

Bix in the Times (Gracious Sakes!)

It is often said that Bix Beiderbecke was mentioned in print but once or twice in his lifetime. While this isn’t true, it nevertheless took until January 23, 1938—or six and a half years after his death—for the New York Times to take notice of his life. And then it was only in a letter to the editor. The occasion was Benny Goodman’s landmark Carnegie Hall concert, which critics today suggest marked the birth of swing but which the Times then only sniffed at. This is the attitude that got Robert B. Tufts of White Plains, New York, all het up.

As to your decision that swing is just a passing fad, due soon to fade, ne’er more to return, you might be interested in knowing that swing (the real article) has been played well on for twenty years now and will continue to be played for many, many years to come. Of course, swing has been lionized by the public at large only within the last three years or so, but, gracious sakes! real musicians such as King Oliver, Louie Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Jack Teagarden and Bix Beiderbecke, to mention only a few, were playing authentic swing years and years before this. The public stage of swing may, as you gloomily predict, soon die out, but there’ll be plenty of musicians who will carry on the torch for years to come.

[March 31, 2008]

Middle-Aged Man with a Horn

I’m guessing that if you gave a magazine article the title “Middle-Aged Man with a Horn” these days, not too many people would get the reference. But back in 1953, the editors of the New Republic trusted their audience to know all about the famous Otis Ferguson articles that appeared in TNR not quite 20 years earlier extolling the dead jazz hero Bix Beiderbecke. And of course there was the novel based on the articles and then the movie based on the novel.

What seems strange is that the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would connect these bits of pop culture to a political theorist like James Burnham, a former Communist who believed that the managerial class—not the workers—were going to take over the world. Which was not a bad insight, but Schlesinger was never impressed. In the March 16, 1953, issue of the New Republic he accused Burnham of being a man “in permanent apocalypse, a catastrophic thinker whose tiresome prophecies of doom can only dazzle once. He is the Bix Beiderbecke of our political journalism, only he has hit that high note once or twice too often.”

As far as strange Bix references, this one ranks right up there. Is it pluriactive? Okay, maybe not. But either way, it got me to wondering whether there is a Bix Beiderbecke of anything anymore. Oh wait. Eminem, for those who haven’t heard, is the Bix Beiderbecke of rap. But who would today’s Bix Beiderbecke of political journalism be?

[March 18, 2008]

Clint Eastwood, Bixophile

Clint Eastwood, who directed the Charlie Parker biopic Bird, on Bix:

As a kid I really liked Bix Beiderbecke. I played cornet when Bix was like the biggest thing around. And then Young Man with a Horn came out and it was just way off, the breathing and the dubbing. It was really bad. I left the theater thinking an opportunity to do something special was really missed. I don’t think the people who made the movie really understood the music or really liked jazz. Jazz, I felt, was a true American art form that had never really been depicted. I just thought with Bird we could do something better.

(From: “Clint Eastwood: An Interview,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 3, Spring 1989)

‘We try to live one hundred days in one day’

In 1956, Mike Wallace interviewed Billie Holiday for his program Night Beat.

WALLACE: Billie, why is it that so many jazz greats seem to die so early? Bix Beiderbecke, it happened, too, Fats Waller wasn’t too old; Charlie Parker . . .

HOLIDAY: Well, Mike, the only way I can answer that question is: we try to live one hundred days in one day. We try to please so many people . . . Like myself, I want to bend this note, and bend that note . . . Sing this way and sing that way and get all of the feeling, and eat all of the good foods, and travel all over—all in one day, and you can’t do—.

That last, unfinished sentence says it all, don’t you think?

(The interview excerpt is taken from “A Solo Long-Song: For Lady Day” by Leon Forrest, Callaloo, Vol. 16, No. 2, Spring 1993.)

[March 7, 2008]

Two Jazz Greats, a Balding, Pear-Shaped Cartoonist, and a Midget Convenience-Store Clerk Walk into a Bar

The lead review of last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review considers Beautiful Children, a novel by Charles Bock that introduces readers to a motley lineup of characters. There is, for instance, “a balding, pear-shaped cartoonist, burdened with the name Bing Beiderbixxe, playing Doom-like video games into his 20s and nurturing sociopathic fantasies.” Here I’m quoting reviewer Liesl Schillinger, who also mentions “a midget convenience-store clerk” and “a stripper who attaches sparklers to her pneumatic bosom to score extra tips.”

Schillinger is polite enough not to mention that Beiderbixxe’s burdensome name is what one might expect were Bing Crosby and Bix Beiderbecke to collide head-on. They were great friends, those two, so it’s a nice thing they didn’t. Still, such a name! Later in her review, Schillinger returns to Bing:

Early in the novel, Newell, Kenny and Beiderbixxe, the cartoonist, meet at a Saturday talk in a comics store called Amazin’ Stories, where Beiderbixxe has come to discuss his illustrated series, “Wendy Whitebread, Undercover Slut.” Newell isn’t impressed. Too young and undereducated to pick up on Beiderbixxe’s ironies, he’s bored. “Honestly, it wasn’t exactly easy to get jazzed about Bing Beiderbixxe,” he thinks, puffed up with preteen scorn. “From the looks of things, Newell wasn’t alone in this opinion. The store was largely empty, just a few underclassman types solemnly wandering the new arrivals racks, and three or four guys standing a respectful distance from the autograph table, nodding and listening, but seeming unconvinced.”

Again, Schillinger is too polite to point out the almost sophomorically obvious irony of not getting “jazzed” about a man whose very name tangles together two of the all-time greats of jazz. But that is to Schillinger’s credit and perhaps a sign of the book’s charm.

Albert Haim, it should be said, has never been so easy to charm as me. On his Bixography forum, the retired professor calls the name “tasteless.”

Which is exactly why I love it.

[February 6, 2008]

‘His eyes like cinders in his head’

Canadian writer Dave Margoshes’ new collection of stories, Bix’s Trumpet, recently won the Saskatchewan Book Award. I’ve only read the title story, but it’s hard-boiled to a fault:

The way the story went, Bix pawned it, the real Bix, I mean, the great Beiderbecke, out of work for a week, broke, trading shining brass bulbs and valves for five bucks for booze, meaning to redeem it, of course, but a gig came up out of town, short notice, and the pawnshop was closed, someone lent him a horn, and when he came back to the city, weeks later, the trumpet was gone. Bix’s father—my Bix’s father, who, years later, sober for the first time in ages, would fall from the roof of their Highland Park house, breaking his back and leaving a stain on Bix somehow, almost as if it had been his bones breaking under the weight of his father’s fatal fall—Bix’s father, the story went, won it in a crap game, took it in lieu of a fifty dollar marker, not that he could play it but, shit, man, Beiderbecke’s trumpet, the great man’s own horn, that was something. That was the story.

This kind of stylistic overdrive happens a lot in fiction about Bix. Take Frederick Turner’s 1929, whose prose rat-a-tats like a tommy gun:

(Herman) remembers one morning in particular after a long night, when he found himself under the hood of the Big Shot’s Caddie, a maroon seven-ton tank with steel chassis and bulletproof windows, his eyes like cinders in his head, his whole body numb with fatigue: installing a new carburetor and set of plugs and adjusting the idle while Machine Gun Jack McGurn breathed down his neck, telling him every few minutes how the Boss needed his rig at a quarter-to-noon sharp, and with every clipped reminder his fingers got slower and thicker while his eyes sizzled and blurred, and he was just pulling back from under the long gleam of the hood and wiping those fingers on a rag while the Caddie purred like a pussy when here came a clatter of footsteps down the rampway beneath the Metropole, and it was the Big Shot himself—Capone—swaggering surrounded by bodyguards . . .

Mannered, yes. But also fun. This exchange from Bix’s Trumpet is something else altogether:

“There ain’t no fucking faking, man. I mean, no faking, period. This is it, man, in every sense of the word.”

“Yeah, but can a cat like you, a cat with a flugelhorn for a heart, fall in love?” I reproached him.

“I’m hip, babe. I don’t know, just don’t know. The road to purity is a twisted one.”

Indeed.

[January 18, 2008]

At War with Himself

A contrarian take on Bix Beiderbecke’s music can be found at Recording Surface:

Almost without exception, his solos are marked by hesitations, errors, and failings. Even on some of his most famous recordings, such as “I’m Comin’, Virginia,” there are missed opportunities and jazz heterodoxies—times where his solo grows so quiet that it becomes indistinguishable from the ensemble playing behind him, moments where skipped and displaced notes create not so much an exaggerated syncopation (as they do in, say, Louis Armstrong’s brilliant “Potato Head Blues”) as a sense of incompleteness and fragmentation. While it’s true Bix’s trumpet did have a clear tone and he did play at a slower, more relaxed pace than most jazz musicians of the ’20s, he also did not really display exuberance and confidence. Instead, almost every note he played sounded like a struggle—against himself.

I recently wrote some notes on “I’m Comin’, Virginia” that conform, according to Recording Surface, to the standard “jazzist take”:

In this, his longest solo, Bix is at the height of his powers. He eschews the gutbucket growls and half-valves that were just becoming popular with Duke Ellington and instead digs deep into the melody. In true Impressionist style, with all the manly restraint of Henry James, he suggests rather than declaims the tune’s dark melancholy, taking Trumbauer’s solo—the handoff is just perfect—and gently refining it. His “correlated” phrases (Bix’s term) build, one on top of the other, until Bix finally leaps up to a (relatively) high register and delivers what Richard Sudhalter rather dramatically described as “Caravaggio-like shafts of light.”

Read the whole post, though. It’s interesting. And Bix would do well, I think, to have more of his listeners challenge, rather than simply worship, his music.

[November 19, 2007]

On How, in the End, Bix’s Friends Couldn’t Save Him (And Lucy Grealy's Friends Couldn't Save Her, Either)

I’ve been hard at work lately on Bixology, my book-in-progress about the romantic legend of Bix Beiderbecke. Here is an excerpt from Chapter 11, about Bix’s relationship with his friends, especially late in his life. In particular, I am interested in the role played by the friends of addicts. What can they possibly do to help? And is it fair to accuse Bix’s friends of not doing enough to save him—he drank himself to death at just 28—only to mythologize him, and by extension themselves, once he was gone? Hoagy Carmichael went so far as to give Bix (in the guise of Rick Martin) a happy ending in the 1950 film Young Man with a Horn.

Its closing lines come straight from Hoagy’s lips:

 He learned that you can’t say everything through the end of a trumpet, and a man doesn’t destroy himself just because he can’t hit some high note that he dreamed up. Maybe that’s why Rick went on to be a success as a human being first—and an artist second. And what an artist.

Carmichael biographer Richard Sudhalter makes the case that Carmichael, not the screenwriter, wrote those words, but he also ignores the heartbreaking irony. Bix did indeed destroy himself, and while Hoagy certainly felt the loss, he responded by drowning himself in parties, alcohol, and all that anecdotage. Did he feel torn and guilty about Bix’s death? Did these feelings of guilt drive him to forget his friend for the legend? Sudhalter doesn’t speculate and neither, over the years, has anyone else.

Instead, we allow Bix to suffer, we encourage it even, because it serves our mythic needs. The literary critic Sven Birkerts wrote about this in 2003 after the overdose death of writer Lucy Grealy, an outsized character who had battled disfiguring cancer all her life. “Reading Lucy’s work we realize how vigorously we cling to the myth of inwardness, the idea that personal suffering can become a source of strength,” Birkerts wrote in the Boston Globe. “When she died, we lost, along with the person, some of the consolation of that myth, though of course most of us will renew it elsewhere and in others. It is that essential.”

Birkerts then noted Grealy’s love of attention and wondered, cautiously, whether it had made her a co-conspirator in her growing legend. “It was all the more sad, then, in recent years, to catch glimpses of what was happening in her hidden life,” he wrote. “For the hopeless side of Lucy had found its way first to painkillers, then to heroin, and through heroin came the downward pull of oblivion. That her decline was as gradual as it was suggests to me that there were rallying surges of resolve, and renewals of faith in the possibility of transformation, if not outward then inward. Certainly there was the care and attention of her many friends.”

Notice how Lucy, like Bix, isn’t to blame for her addiction—the action belongs to “the hopeless side of Lucy,” an “it,” not a “she.” Notice, too, the way Birkerts imagines her pain in the feel-good terms of “resolve,” “renewal,” and “transformation.” Initially, he had seemed skeptical of fetishising other people’s suffering, but not any more.

And then there are the friends. When it first appeared, I e-mailed the Birkerts essay to a buddy of mine, a recovering alcoholic who had once met Grealy. His reply was quick and fierce:

I find it appalling that her friends aren’t angry, at her, at themselves. A “slow downward spiral into pain killers, then heroin.” Just how the fuck does that happen out of “friend’s” notice? (And I know that it does); what allows people (and those around them) the luxury of such a spiral . . . do her scars pay her fare on that particular train? Do the rest of us just have to suffer the long lines in stand-by and economy?

I’ll suggest that suicides tend to come when people view their lives as a sequence of diminished returns. They remove “the shock of possibility” from their lives, supplant real risk with drama, and in cahoots with “friends and family,” they begin to live their own fictions.

There is little evidence that Bix consciously lived his own myth, but stories have a way of looping back into our reality, controlling what they once only described or explained. His friends saw Bix as a boy genius destined to die, a hapless victim of fate, a kid without “his own strong mind.” Even Bix seemed to believe that (“Life has passed me by,” etc.), so that when he did finally die, his death was both the culmination of all the stories about him and the cause of still more. Bix himself, meanwhile, drifted farther and farther away. Who was he? Like Hoagy, we will always wonder. What seems clear is that Bix’s friends didn’t kill him. In the face of alcohol and addiction, friends are powerless. Lucy Grealy’s friend, the novelist Ann Patchett, discovered as much. “What she was suffering from was beyond me to fix,” she wrote in a 2003 essay for New York magazine, an essay that was later expanded into the memoir Truth & Beauty (2004), “so I did what I knew how to do for Lucy: I made her happy for a little while.”

It wasn’t enough.

While he was alive, Bix’s friends tried to save him. Or they didn’t try to save him. He died either way, and their gift to him, which was also a kind of apology, was Rick Martin.

He deserved better.

[November 2, 2007]

'The greatest cornet player that ever drove a llama'

Hoagy Carmichael loved to tell stories about his friend Bix Beiderbecke. “The only time I ever met Carmichael,” Benny Green once wrote, “he had half a dozen Bix stories at his fingertips, stories I had never heard before, and I confess I found myself wondering whether Carmichael had either.”

Here’s one of the stranger. It comes from Carmichael’s 1946 memoir, The Stardust Road. In it, Hoagy tries to describe Bix to his oddball surrealist friend William “Monk” Moenkhaus. In the process, he seems to mistake King Oliver for Louis Armstrong while treating Bix as both a god and a “little boy.”

I remember trying to explain Bix to Monk. I remember trying to put Bix together for Monk, so that he would see him and hear him and feel him the way I did. It was like the telling of a vivid dream and knowing that it wasn’t making sense.

“A man put the mark on him, Monk, marked him for greatness.”

“A man with a horn. . . . What is man but a puny thing. . . . Best forgotten, all but the I. . . . The I as in Beiderbecke,” Monk said.

“He was a black man with a golden horn and he played the boats, those floating palaces, that plied the rivers in the warm moon drenched nights of summer. The man was King Oliver . . . he played a trumpet.”

“Not in this world?” Monk said, but he was listening.

“The boats came and tied up and the townspeople would go aboard and the boat would go down the river, ten miles or so, and the come back while the people danced or just sat on the upper deck and stayed cool.”

“And little boy Bix, he blew his horn!”

“Yeah, he went on one of those boats one night and King Oliver was playing. After that he never was quite the same. He knew from that night on that the horn was for him, and he could say what he had to say on it.”

“As a matter of fact,” Monk said, “I am perhaps the greatest cornet player that ever drove a llama.”

[October 30, 2007]

'Walking Negro walks'

A footnote to my review of Stephan Talty’s Mulatto America:

Talty writes that jazz music is not merely an amalgam of sources—blues, ragtime, classical, brass band—but “that the music is comfortable playing all these musics from the inside. The borrowings are not mocking or unsure but marked by total confidence.”

Here, Talty owes at least an attribution to Ralph Ellison, who famously attacked LeRoi Jones’ argument in Blues People (1963) that blues and jazz were black artistic responses to cultural alienation. In a scathing review of that book (reprinted in Living With Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings [2001]), Ellison wrote: “The master artisans of the South were slaves, and white Americans have been walking Negro walks, talking Negro-flavored talk (and prizing it when spoken by Southern belles), dancing Negro dances and singing Negro melodies far too long to talk of a ‘mainstream’ of American culture to which they’re alien.”

In other words, black people helped create the American cultural mainstream, even if they didn’t always get full credit for their contributions or reap the monetary rewards. And they didn’t, of course. This has been true from Elvis to Eminem. But this is hardly to say that Elvis was, or Eminem is, a thief. To the contrary, they’re participating in the same cultural mix as black artists. Neither would exist without the other. Said Ellison, “the most authoritative rendering of America in music is that of American Negroes” (emphasis added).

That argumentcasts doubt on what has always been, for sentimental reasons, a favorite quote of mine from Blues People. Jones gives Bix Beiderbecke credit for transforming jazz from a black music to an American music.

The point is that Afro-American music did not become a completely American expression until the white man could play it! Bix Beiderbecke, more than any of the early white jazzmen, signified this development because he was the first white jazz musician, the first white musician who brought to the jazz he created any of the ultimate concern Negro musicians brought to it as a casual attitude of their culture. This development signified also that jazz would someday have to contend with the idea of its being an art (since that was the white man’s only way into it). The emergence of the white player meant that Afro-American culture had already become the expression of a particular kind of American experience, and what is most important, that this experience was available intellectually, that it could be learned.

I always liked the idea of giving Bix credit for making jazz into an art form, but from Ellison’s perspective, this is hogwash, even self-loathing hogwash. Jazz didn’t need white people playing it to become art. But it did need white people to exist. American culture has always been a wonderful mixture of influences. Black people borrowed from African and European music to create jazz, and players like Bix felt right at home for that reason. Far from being interlopers, Bix and his fellow white innovators were participants in American music. (See Richard Sudhalter’s Lost Chords [2001] and the controversy surrounding its publication for more.)

[October 22, 2007]

Bix + Girls = Not So Much

From the musician Brad Kay:

My appreciation of Bix in high school was the last nail in the coffin of my social life for several years (until I dropped out of college). In that era of “Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” to openly admit that I liked “Mississippi Mud” and “Singin’ the Blues” was as effective (where girls were concerned) as announcing that I had smallpox. But I was never much of a “joiner” in the first place, so maybe I was better off. I just stuck with the 78s until “my people” started coming around.

[October 16, 2007]

'What a wonderful, impossible name!'

From A Green Desire, a 2001 novel by Anton Myrer:

And later still there was a smoke-laden cave of a room where a fat, jovial black woman asked Central in a ringing contralto to give her Doctor Jazz. Behind her on the stand a jazz band thumped and wailed, and a young man with his hair parted neatly in the center, his cherubic face dead white, tilted high a gleaming horn and the melody spilled forth in bursts of pure hilarity, like pealing bells, like heralds in royal fanfare, and she knew she’d never heard anything played with such reckless abandon in all her life.

“Who is he?” she demanded, clapping her hands. “I’ve got to know.”

“Beiderbecke,” said Chapin, who always, distressingly, knew everything. “Bix Beiderbecke.”

“Bix?” she cried, laughing. “What a wonderful, impossible name! Anyone called Bix—”

'I feel alone, even with you'

From “Image of Song Unsounded,” an essay by Alfred Schwaid, published in Chicago Review, September 22, 1995:

In the morning the first thing you see on the lake is the mist. You’re high up enough to think you’re in the clouds anyway; for a while you nearly believe you actually are. He was still asleep. I relit the fire. Then I went down with a canvas bucket to get water for our coffee. When I came back he was up, warming his hands at the fire. It’s chilly in the morning, he said. He was used to a warmer climate. He took the water from me and made the coffee. I made sourdough pancakes that we ate with strawberry jam. In the morning when there are no stars you are left directionless. He and his wife once had traveled through a rain forest, only at night for that reason, to a beach. He knew the stars like you do the face of your watch. Our lives depended on it, he said. I would not mind at all being lost here, I told him. The difference is, in your case, you were traveling through the wilderness with the objective of reaching someplace outside it. I never watched the stars that closely.

I was reminded of Bix Beiderbecke’s composition, “In a Mist,” but never mentioned it to him. If I had I would have had to tell him how often it was in my thoughts. Then, after pouring the coffee he surprised me; he reached into his pack for a flask and laughed while he poured in the rum.

[...]

The concise clarity of Charles Demuth + The convoluted brightness of Charles Burchfield = Bix Beiderbecke.

We were supposed to stay at the lake for a week, but on the third day I could see him growing restless. We could start back out as soon as you want, I told him. I’ve never been this long away from my wife, he said. I wanted to stay. I knew that by following the stars he could find his way out alone at night. If I couldn’t, I would have been happily lost. But I had an obligation to go back with him. When we went together into our wilderness we were three, he said; when we came out we were only two. Now, it’s funny but I feel alone, even with you.

He moved in an integument of rags and dirt and smells, and I called him Canned Heat to no one but myself.

Bix: Like a Maggot Through a Corpse

From “Jazz and Poetry,” an essay by Richard Frost, published in The Antioch Review, June 22, 1999:

Musicians, whose most natural and constant language is music, typically resort to musical sounds when talking about music. The jazz trombonist Preston Jackson, telling about Bix Beiderbecke, spoke—sang would be more accurate—the following:

One thing about Bix, he was clean . . . and, his tone—he had a beautiful tone. First thing, a guy has to have a nice tone to sound like him. And the next thing, uh, it was just like, you say, Louie Armstrong—I could tell Louie Armstrong’s playin’, I don’t care if you have a thousand cornet or trumpet players playin’—I don’t mean at the same time, but individually I’m speakin’ about. And I could tell Bix too, because there hasn’t been anybody playin’, uh, if they played in that vein, they didn’t play long. Understand? That was New Orleans style. . . . This is a melody, that Bix was playin’. Da ah-, da-da, la da-da, da-da-da. But he phrases it so, and that beautiful tone, it was outstanding. Da, ah, da-da. When he got, um, dah-de-dot-dot-da. Da, dot-da dot-dot-da. Da da-da da da de-da de-dot-da. A-la-la la-la. De, dah, da-da, a-dada dada de da da-da-da-da-da-da, uh-uh, ulm, ah, la-da, do do da do-do dah-dah, da-da-da da-da. Dah, da-da-da, da-da, dot-dot-da. But only slower, and he’s just playin’ it slow, and that beautiful tone. It was flowin’. I mean, I agree with Hoagy. He was threadin’ . . . like a maggot, through a corpse. He was flowin’, the tone was flowin’, he was singin’.