Bix, Mary Kate Olsen, Peru! Who knew?

From Odd Harbor, a 2006 novel by Jonathan Shipley:

Therto Bordy, still dressed in his Mary Kate Olsen costume, amazed everyone on the boardwalk at the pier. He, though asthmatic, could play the cornet! Who knew?! Agave knew, for one. That was what got her attracted to Therto in the first place. In Peru, when Therto was in the Peace Corps, he’d play his cornet, just like Bix Beiderbecke, wowing local Peruvians who a) had never heard a cornet before, and b) had no idea who Bix Beiderbecke was. One of those wowed? Agave Montave, a young fresh beautiful girl whose father worked as a chicken plucker in Quito. Therto played Halloween tunes, and Thanksgiving carols, as well as impressing all those who witnessed his musical mastery. The cornet! Who knew?

'The perfect anthem for the end of summer'

Marc Myers of JazzWax listens to “In a Mist”:

While “In a Mist” lasts just 2 minutes and 44 seconds, it features a dense fabric of chords and multiple rhythms. The song opens as something of a minor-key cakewalk but Bix quickly shifts to stride piano in a major key, and “In a Mist” lurches, spins and staggers until it softly reaches its destination.

For me, it’s the perfect anthem for the end of summer and start of the fall season. Bix’s haunting melody and stop-start attack was ahead of its time musically. As you’ll hear, this piano piece has multiple personalities, all of them rich with poetry.

Interestingly, “In a Mist” was recorded this time of year—nearly 80 years ago on September 9, 1927. Whenever I hear “In a Mist,” my first reaction is astonishment that Bix, the cornetist, could get so much out of the piano. My second reaction is bafflement at how complex a puzzle this song is.

This afternoon, “In a Mist” played beautifully as the dimming intensity of the summer light crept across the tops and sides of brownstones and buildings on New York’s Upper West Side.

[September 5, 2007]

Singin' the Blues

“Singin’ the Blues,” the most famous side by Bix Beiderbecke & Frankie Trumbauer, was recorded on February 4, 1927. Today, The Wall Street Journal belatedly celebrates the 80th anniversary of the event by reporting that this particular recording “changed American music.” How? It was the first jazz ballad, proving that the music could be both hot & slow. Writer Tom Nolan also points out Lester Young's affection for Trumbauer’s solo in particular.

In the winter of 1927–28, in a hotel in Bismarck, N.D., a teenage saxophonist named Lester Young heard a record being played in the room of fellow traveling musician Eddie Barefield, and knocked on the door to ask what it was: “Singin’ the Blues.” Young, who would become one of the most important figures in jazz, a primal influence on at least two generations of saxophonists, both black and white, is said to have carried a copy of that Okeh 78 in his tenor-saxophone case for years. Those who listened could often hear whimsical traces of Trumbauer and little bursts of Bix in Young’s driving, ethereal playing.

What players such as Young responded to in “Singin’ the Blues” was the way both Bix and “Tram” constructed their solos—not out of disconnected “hot licks” and tricky ’20s gimmicks, but with thoughtful, balanced phrases that “said” something. “Trumbauer always told a little story,” Lester Young observed. In 2003, a 93-year-old Artie Shaw said: “Listen to Trumbauer’s solo on ‘Singin’ the Blues.’ It’s like a poem.”

True enough, I suppose, although it might have helped if Shaw had specified which poem. Perhaps Bix scholars should get on the case . . . In the meantime, the article ends with a sideswipe delivered by another Iowa-born legend, Glenn Miller:

Bix Beiderbecke, a compulsive drinker, died in New York in 1931, at the age of 28. Ten years later, when Bill Challis, who’d done much to preserve and perpetuate Beiderbecke’s music, brought some Bix-evoking arrangements to Glenn Miller, the popular bandleader rejected Challis’s charts: He said people didn’t know or care about Beiderbecke anymore.

On the Bixography forum, one Bixophile finds this last bit to be "upsetting" and "disturbing," while another suggests that “the Glenn Miller hagiographers . . . reject anything that besmirches or speaks the truth of their hero!” This is not behavior limited to Glenn Miller types. For instance, I’ve always particularly enjoyed this inventive way of denying the claim, by Ralph Berton, that Bix may have had a gay affair with Berton’s brother Gene:

Possibly Ralph could have fabricated the Eugene incident as a rhetorical “what if” scenario as a means of coping with having had a gay brother.

Irony is a Bix fan’s best friend.

[June 2, 2007]

And Then Came the Film ...

First there were Otis Ferguson's articles. Then there was Dorothy Baker's novel. Finally, in 1950, Michael Curtiz (that’s right, of Casablanca) directed the screen version of Young Man with a Horn. Curtiz’s adaptation of Dorothy Baker’s novel improbably cast Hoagy Carmichael as Smoke. (In the book—you guessed it—Smoke is black.) Hoagy opened the film dragging on a cigarette and reminiscing about his old friend Rick Martin: “What a guy!” Carmichael wanted the part because he well understood that he would be playing himself and talking about his old friend Bix. But it must have been tough to pretend, what with Kirk Douglas, in the role of Martin, running around eating scenery. Harry James, meanwhile, blew the opposite of cool on the soundtrack, and the hero didn’t even die in the end but ran away with Doris Day! That in itself was a crime. What little chemistry existed in the film was between Douglas and Lauren Bacall (in the role of the “perverse hussy” Amy North):

AMY:  You can call me Amy.
RICK:  I bet I could.

In the end, Smoke mused, “the desire to live is a great teacher, and I think it taught Rick a lot of things. 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.”

Well, not in Hollywood he doesn’t.

[May 22, 2007]

The Good and the Bad of It

What’s interesting about the Head Butler’s love of Young Man with a Horn (1938) is that, for the most part, everyone else on the planet hates it. In fact, hating it seems to be prerequisite to becoming a Bixophile. (Here, Albert Haim, who runs a website devoted to Bix Beiderbecke, can’t resist the parenthetical assertion that Baker’s novel “failed.”) Baker conscientiously insisted that the “inspiration for the writing of this book has been the music, but not the life” of Leon Beiderbecke, but her mysteriously self-destructive, horn-playing, gin-swigging white protagonist Rick Martin will forever be one with Bix in the popular culture.

In true dime-store fashion, Baker populated her novel with shady black musicians with names like Smoke and Art (“In the first place maybe he shouldn’t have got himself mixed up with negroes”) and a barroom siren, the lovely Amy North, who is described by Clifton Fadiman, in his Foreword to my 1943 edition, as “a perverse hussy.” Ultimately, though, Baker aimed high, just like Rick, telling us that her story is about “the gap between the man’s musical ability and his ability to fit it to his own life,” about “the difference between the demands of expression and the demands of life here below.”

This is the sort of stuff drove that drove Benny Green nuts. In The Reluctant Art he grumbled, “Bix was obviously the greatest white jazz musician Miss Baker had heard about, so she grafted on to him the hack figure of the artistic genius who is romantically frustrated.” However, John Paul Perhonis, in The Bix Beiderbecke Story (a 1978, unpublished dissertation), notes that Baker had been tight with Otis Ferguson, author of the original article “Young Man with a Horn,” and that “she was not interested in Bix’s life, but rather . . . she wanted to say something about the music—the good and bad of it, and the built-in mortal hazards.”

And where she left off, Kirk Douglas, Doris Day, and Lauren Bacall would soon pick up.

[May 22, 2007]

A Desperate Man, a Sorehead, a Fatalist

In his review of Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn, the Head Butler mentioned the fact that the novel’s title was taken from a pair of articles by Otis Ferguson. “Young Man with a Horn” (1936) and “Young Man with a Horn, Again” (1941) were both paeans to Bix Beiderbecke. So who was Otis Ferguson?

Alfred Kazin described The New Republic’s reviewer as “a sandy, caustic, wild ex-sailor,” a “desperate man, a sorehead, a fatalist” who “despised high culture,” a proto-gonzo who “radiated a desire for ‘kicks,’ for some ultimate sensation.” He found that ultimate sensation in Beiderbecke. For Ferguson, Bix was less an actual historical figure than a convenient extension of the author and his politics: he was a “born natural,” “swinging free and bold,” a “kid with a prank, riding down the whole length of a chorus like a herd of mustangs.” He was the archetypical everyday American, “so generally hardy that an old sweater was all he found necessary for an Iowa winter.” “Jazz was the country where he grew up,” Ferguson wrote—and this is when Bix first ascends to godhead—“the fine high thing, the sun coming up to fill the world through morning.” Such prose is exhilarating in its way (the Head Butler can only say wow) but it also set back jazz scholarship for years and led to Baker’s legendary bit of typecasting. In the end, Bix died young and so did Ferguson, who perished in World War II.

[May 22, 2007]

The Lost Bix Beiderbecke–Jimi Hendrix Connection

The Head Butler, whose tastes are nothing if not varied, loves Dorothy Baker’s 1938 novel Young Man with a Horn. (According to the Butler, it is the great novel of the 1920s, behind Gatsby.) “It’s a story,” he writes, “about genius and glory and doom, about a boy who taught himself how to play piano and trumpet and was, at 20, bound for glory, and well before his 30th birthday, was dead.”

Which is to say it’s a story about Bix Beiderbecke. Except that it is decidedly not about the Bix of history, but about the Bix of myth. Said myth is an ingenious blend of the false and the true, the historical and the legendary. It concerns itself with Bix the romantic hero, “jazz’s Number One saint” (to quote Benny Green), the Bix of our imagination.

And sometimes this is the only Bix we have.

When the Head Butler unexpectedly imagines Bix as “the white version of Jimi Hendrix,” he should understand that he is referencing only the Bix of myth. In this case, he comes to us in the guise of Dorothy Baker’s Rick Martin. He is, to quote the Butler, “a good-looking lad in a world dominated by black artists who do it, he feels just a bit better than he ever will. That’s Bix Beiderbecke’s relation to Louis Armstrong, and that’s Rick Martin’s sense of himself in comparison to his black idols. Is it surprising, then, that he never sleeps? That he drinks and drinks and drinks? That his romances are duds?”

The historical evidence suggests that Bix was not, in fact, a white Jimi Hendrix. (Does the Butler know anything about Jimi Hendrix?) Still, this is not to say that admiration of Young Man with a Horn is misplaced. It’s a novel. That it does not treat Bix Beiderbecke as a historian or music critic might need not reflect on its quality.

Up there with The Great Gatsby, though? I don’t think so.

[May 21, 2006]

All Thumbs

Eugene “Rosy” McHargue, on hearing Bix Beiderbecke play the piano in 1926:

He played the tune called “Jazz Me Blues,” and he must have played it for twenty minutes that day. I have never heard anything like that in my whole, dreary life! He played it on piano—all wrong fingering—he played runs with these two thumbs—and he always seemed to make it. The sound he got—he really didn’t have to play much, because this sound always caused everybody to shut up and listen. I can’t describe it—it was just more like sort of a chime ringing—he got this tone on it. And I have heard and seen people cease talking to each other, just when he played some simple melody. His whole musical life was about ten years—his age, from about twenty to about thirty. A lot of that, of course, he was boozed up most of the time. But if anybody happens to ask about Bix Beiderbecke—yes, he was the best cornet player I ever heard, and could be the best jazz musician I ever heard. I will tell anybody that—I’ll tell the Devil that if he asks me!

The Laugh in Grief's Way

I am reading the new Colorado Review, and there is a poem by Graham Foust called “Nine-Eleven in a Joke.” It ends with these lines:

Today’s blazing is a place we’ve only heard of.
And you say: “The laugh in grief’s way
Is grief’s way with us.”

This poem arrived in my mail box just a few days after writing this, about the difficulties (or supposed difficulties) between Bix Beiderbecke and his stern German father Bismark. They are difficulties that have been chalked up to jazz or sex, but could have simply been adolescence. And remember, in the 1920s, the whole idea of adolescence was quite new.

Okay. Let’s try another tack. To understand Bix & His Father, one must first understand irony. Not the irony of Oedipus & Fate, but the irony of rock and roll.

To understand the irony of rock and roll, however, one must understand “the stink of shit,” to quote Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow, “the smell of Passchendaele, of the Salient,” which was “[m]ixed with the mud, and the putrefaction of corpses.” It was the smell of the Great War.

And to fully understand the smell of the Great War, and so to fully understand the irony of rock and roll, one must understand how, the more it stank, the more people laughed. They “shouted with laughter,” the British veteran Philip Gibbs remembered in his 1920 memoir Now It Can Be Told. It was “the laughter of mortals” who had been tricked into believing that progress overcame the primitive, that perfection was somehow possible. “Now that idea was broken like a china vase dashed to the ground,” Gibbs wrote. “The contrast between That and This was devastating . . . The war-time humor of the soul roared with mirth at the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled.”

By this formulation, rock and roll is not a music but a reaction, a childish reaction. And Keith Richards’ guitar solos roar with—

“What the hell?” I imagine Bix saying. “I played jazz for crying out loud.”

So look at it like this: the subtext of American life is rock and roll. It’s in the speed of traffic, the sex of spring break, and the vernacular of that moment when a politician takes off his jacket and rolls up his sleeves. This shift away from Queen Victoria and toward Keith Richards began in the Jazz Age, but it didn’t fully take hold until the 1950s, when the music’s supreme vitality and childishness took control of what George W. S. Trow calls the Assumed Dominant Mind, or the various social and cultural understandings that we all take for granted even when we don’t all subscribe. And we don’t. When, in 2004, the Bix 7 road race in Davenport put Elvis on its poster and hired an Elvis impersonator to unveil it while shaking his hips and singing, “A whole lotta running goin’ on,” the Bixography forum erupted in outrage. Albert Haim objected that “there is absolutely no connection between the music of Bix and that of Elvis Prestley [sic] or Jerry Lee Lewis” and that making such a connection was an “abomination.” Another Bixophile offered that “Bix could have kicked Elvis’ ass in a race any day”—but her playground taunt only served to the prove the point: a less-than-adult sensibility has prevailed. According to Trow in My Pilgrim’s Progress (1999), the hydrogen-bomb reality faced by post-World War II America was too terrible. The smell of Auschwitz, like the smell of Passchendaele, was too unbearable, and into that void walked television. Into that void walked Elvis.

In Which Bix Beiderbecke Is Asked to Work on Behalf of America’s Farmers

Bix died and was born again a metaphor. He has become, as we've seen, a trance, emotion & love, courage & memories; he’s a riddle wrapped in an enigma; he’s a pickup line. (Jazz, for that matter, is politics, freedom, and blogging.) Now, Bix is a shining example of the "general discourse of pluriactivity" and an apparently troubling trend that encourages Iowa farmers to embrace said pluriactivity . . . which is what again?

Dictionaries are innocent of this word, but German research papers are not. According to one, the term is 20 years old and coined as an attempt “to gather under an often loosely defined concept a plurality of atypical employment forms, going from multi-salaried employment (the same job for several employers), to combination of statuses (employed and independent) and/or professions (peasantry and commerce), via polyvalent employment (several professions for several employers).”

What does this have to do with Bix? “I firmly believe that there are thousands of Bixs in Iowa, and other agricultural states,” the anonymous MySpace blogger writes, “who in their adolescence are wrongly dissuaded of their multiple talents simply because their community leaders cant envision a way to gainfully express them.”

What does this have to do with pluriactivity?

Maybe, your son or daughter is a great painter. Fine. But painting is a hobby, not a profession, so focus on math so goes the conventional wisdom.

I can accept that. I can accept that beat poets, free jazz improvisers, abstract artists and the like will always have trouble making a living here in Iowa. New York, San Francisco and Paris are great places for people with those interests to find their niche. But what about agriculturists? In Iowa, of all places, shouldnt agriculture be a viable pursuit?

It should. I’m still not clear what this has to do with Bix, but the cause is good so I’ll shut up. Except to say that the wonderful photo (that accompanies this blog post about Bix & pluriactivity) is not of Bix but of trombonist Jack Teagarden.

SPEAKING OF MYSPACE: Bix, like everyone else in the world, has his own page. He lists his musical styles as “Indie/Grindcore/Christian” and lets visitors know that “I like to play the trumpet and blow my horn. I also like to drink whiskey and tute my whistle.”

He has 96 friends.

IMAGE: One of Bix’s friends—at least in real life—was Pee Wee Russell. And that’s one of Pee Wee’s paintings above. Pluriactivity in action: When he wasn’t barking through his clarinet, he was “producing a series of seemingly abstract canvases that were actually accurate chartings of his inner workings.”

[August 14, 2006]

How Many Miles Apart Are Their Two Nothings (Part 2)

When Julio Cortázar died in 1984, he left behind an unpublished story, a manuscript with not so much a title as a heading: “Bix Beiderbecke.” In 2003, it was collected in the novelist’s complete works in Spanish, but to my knowledge it has not yet been translated into English. [That knowledge, it’s worth emphasizing, is slim. – Ed.] A Portuguese version appears in the current issue of the Brazilian magazine The Storm, while the original, in Spanish, can be found here.

Still, I don’t properly speak either of those languages. (An abiding love of Mariza does not count, apparently.) What is left but Babelfish? Keeping in mind that translation is a tricky business, the Portuguese version begins something like this:

I am Panamanian and has times alive with Bix. Escrevo and step for the following line: nobody will go to believe, if they believed, they would be as I and do not know nobody thus. Not accurately I, but to little as I. What it is an advantage because in this way I can write without that it imports me that they read or not, that to the end burns this with the last match of the last cigarette, or that leaves it abandoned in the street, or that gives for any one to it, so that makes what to give in the roofing tile; everything will be distant, so distant of me and Bix.  I write because it does not have more what to make and because it is certain or it will seem certain for that am as I.

In Spanish, however, the story has a slightly different vibe:

I am Panamanian and does short while that alive with Bix. I write it and passage to the other line, nobody is going to believe it, if they believed it would be like I and I do not know of whom I am like. Not exactly I, but at least like I. Perhaps it is an advantage because I can write it without it matters to me that they read it or no, that in the end burns this with last phosphorus of the last cigarette. Or it leaves it left in the street, or occurs it to anyone so that it does what it gives the desire him; everything will be or behind, so behind me and of Bix. I write It because I do not have another thing that to do and because is certain or it will seem certain to him to which is like I.

And so the real “Bix Beiderbecke” shall, for the time being, remain as elusive as the real Bix Beiderbecke, so distant of me, so behind me and of Bix . . .

[August 8, 2006]

How Many Miles Apart Are Their Two Nothings (Part 1)

When I opened Hopscotch, I happily discovered that the Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar didn’t just dig jazz; he dug Bix Beiderbecke, writing about the dead cornet player as if he were still alive and “sparring fraternally” with his bandmates, writing about music (gasp!) as if listening to it & understanding it still mattered. Take this moment, from page 40 of the Pantheon edition (translated by Gregory Rabassa):

But then an incisive guitar came on which seemed to signal a transition to something else and suddenly (Ronald had alerted them by holding up his finger) a cornet broke loose from the rest of the group and blew the first notes of the melody, landing on them as on a diving board. Bix took off with everything he had, and the clear sketch was inscribed on the silence as if it had been scratched there. Two corpses sparred fraternally, clinching and breaking, Bix and [short-lived guitarist] Eddie Lang (whose real name was Salvatore Massaro) played catch with I’m Coming Virginia, and I wonder where Bix is buried, thought Oliveira, and Eddie Lang, how many miles apart are their two nothings that one future night in Paris were to fight, guitar against cornet, gin against bad luck, jazz.

Oh, man. I read for moments like that, and I listen to music to feel the feelings that inspire such writing.

Bix shows up again 29 pages later, deep inside a sentence that would make Henry James or W. G. Sebald or Leonid Tsypkin proud, a sentence that may begin as a chore but I’m telling you will end as a privilege . . .

No one seemed disposed to contradict him because Wong had quietly appeared with the coffee and Ronald, shrugging his shoulders, had turned loose Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians and after a terrible scratching they reached the theme that fascinated Oliveira, an anonymous trumpet followed by the piano, all wrapped up in the smoke of an old phonograph and a bad recording, of a corny prejazz band, all in all like those old records, showboats, Storyville nights, where the old only really universal music of the century had come from, something that brought people closer together and in a better way than Esperanto, UNESCO, or airlines, a music which was primitive enough to have gained such universality and good enough to make its own history, with schisms, abdications, and heresies, its Charleston, its Black Bottom, its Shimmy, its Fox Trot, its Stomp, its Blues, to label its forms, this style and the other one, swing, bebop, cool, a counterpoint of romanticism and classicism, hot and intellectual jazz, human music, music with a history in contrast to stupid animal dance music, the polka, the waltz, the zamba, a music that could be known and liked in Copenhagen as well as in Mendoza or Capetown, a music that brings adolescents together, with records under their arms, that gives them names and melodies to use as passwords so they can know each other and become intimate and feel less lonely surrounded by bosses, families, and bitter love affairs, a music that accepts all imaginations and tastes, a collection of instrumental 78’s with Freddie Keppard or Bunk Johnson, the reactionary cult of Dixieland, an academic specialization in Bix Beiderbecke, or in the adventures of Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver, or Thad Jones, the vulgarities of Erroll Garner or Art Tatum, repentance and rejection, a preference for small groups, mysterious recordings with false names and strange titles and labels made up on the spur of the moment, and that whole freemasonry of Saturday nights in a student’s room or in some basement café with girls who would rather dance to Stardust or When Your Man Is Going to Put You Down, and have a sweet slow smell of perfume and skin and heat, and let themselves be kissed when the hour is late and somebody has put on The Blues with a Feeling and hardly anybody is really dancing, just standing up together, swaying back and forth, and everything is hazy and dirty and lowdown and every man is in a mood to tear off those warm girdles as his hands go stroking shoulders and the girls have their mouths half-opened and turn themselves over to the delightful fear and the night, while a trumpet comes on to possess them in the name of all men . . .

The rest of that sentence, in which Ella Fitzgerald appears in Vienna and Oscar Peterson in Perpignan, in which “man is always more than a man and always less than a man,”  is hereby reserved for those of you who seek out the book.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I read the first passage to my wife. Her reaction was approximately as follows: “I didn’t know, when you were reading it to me, if I was supposed to like it or hate it. But I liked it . . . I mean, at least until he started describing Bix’s music.”

[August 7, 2006]

Jackson Pollock & Bix Beiderbecke Are Both Dead, But Only Bix Is a Blamming, Slamming, Fun-Cramming Party

Anniversaries abound in the coming days. The New Yorker reminds us that on August 11 it will have been 50 years since a drunk Jackson Pollock crashed his Oldsmobile into a tree, killing himself and a passenger. [One is tempted to be a smartass here and offer up “In My Merry Oldsmobile," a 1927 foxtrot capably rendered by Jean Goldkette & His Orchestra and featuring Bix Beiderbecke, about whom more in a moment. –Ed.] Marking such an event is “dismal enough,” writes Peter Schjeldahl, but, he admits, it’s also “glamorous, in its way. Pollock, like other doomed artists and martyrs to fame in his era—Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean—advanced and, by destroying himself, oddly consecrated America’s postwar cultural ascendancy. Sometimes a new, renegade sensibility really takes hold only when somebody is seen to have died for it.”*

Handy Axiom: It is easiest to find a death glamorous, not to mention sacred, when you are not the one doing the dying.

And speaking of the “doomed,” this coming Sunday marks the day, 75 years ago, when Bix Beiderbecke died a pathetic, gin-soaked death in a Queens boarding house. Like the commemoration of Pollock’s death,** it’s an occasion that could well be described as “dismal enough” were it not for the fact that it will also mark my second wedding anniversary. No, Kate & I did not choose August 6 out of some morbid tribute to Bix, although he did happen to figure briefly in our courtship. I described the moment in an essay last year:

Bix is a mystery. Bix is “a riddle wrapped in an enigma,” according to the website of the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Society. And in the smoky shadows of a bar in downtown Bangor, Maine, Bix is a pickup line. This is where, on a particularly cold January evening, I met my future wife. I immediately angled the conversation to music, and when she professed a love for jazz, I smugly tested her on whether she’d heard of Bix Beiderbecke.

“You’re from Davenport?” she exclaimed a few moments later, touching her hand on my arm. “That’s so cool!”

Bix, it should be said, is not only a mystery. He is a “blamming, slamming, fun-cramming party,” according to Quad-City Times columnist Bill Wundram on the occasion of last weekend’s Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Festival in Bix’s hometown of Davenport, Iowa. “Bix is a trance,” said Wundram. He’s also “emotion and love,” “courage,” and “being happy.”

Bix is memories, of guys like the late Les Swanson, who would tap his cane to the jazz and munch a cheese sandwich alongside the levee bandshell. He knew Bix well; played piano alongside him; and always grumbled at the weekend Beiderbecke hoopla: “Bix would just raise his hands in horror.”

The horror! The horror! Bix is Kurtz! Inarguably, though, Bix is dead. Is that romantic somehow? Just as Bix would likely be unimpressed by the festival that bears his name, so might he have been unimpressed by the idea that his death was anything but “squalid.” That’s Terry Teachout’s word, by the way. I interviewed Teachout earlier this year—on the weekend of Bix’s birthday, it turned out—and he reminded me of a jazz musician’s perspective. “They don’t see themselves as romanticized, self-destructive figures, and Bix Beiderbecke didn’t either,” Teachout said. “He didn’t know what the hell was happening to him, I’m sure. He was a drunk and he was killing himself and he couldn’t help it and he didn’t know why. Sad and pitiful.”

Bix may be “jazz’s Number One Saint” (Benny Green), but is this how you want your kids to behave? Kirk Prebyl doesn’t. He talks to students in Davenport about Bix’s “bad choices,” and the students seem to respond. “I would have followed my dreams (like Bix),” eighth-grader Emily Beard told the Quad-City Times, “but I don’t want to drink.”

Bix, then, is a cautionary tale. He is an excuse for self-help. “Will power alone can’t conquer such tragedies,” the Rev. Richard Wereley, pastor of Davenport’s First Presbyterian Church, explained a year ago during his annual Bix liturgy. “No one understood that better than Beiderbecke. If you’re in the midst of defeat, crippled by personal crisis or abuse or addiction, get help now. Turn to someone who will lift you up.”

Choices, of course, can go either way. “What would music be like if he’d lived to be an old white-haired guy like me?” Prebyl asked.

Where there’s a question, Wikipedia has an answer. In this case, it’s Alternate History Wiki, which posits that Bix sailed through the Great Depression in Benny Goodman’s band, even blowing a masterful, eight-chorus solo on “Sing Sing Sing” at the famous Carnegie Hall concert in January 1938. Then things got really interesting.

In 1943, tired of jazz and the commercial aspects of the music world, Beiderbecke stunned America by announcing his retirement from brass playing and jazz to concentrate on piano and formal music. He moved to New Haven to improve his piano playing and study classical music with Paul Hindemith at Yale, then to California in 1947 to work with Darius Milhaud, then on to Paris for further study. His 7th Symphony, debuted at Carnegie Hall in 1952, was the most acclaimed formal music work by an American performed in that decade. He made only one surprise return to the jazz world, playing on cornet alongside Miles Davis with the Gil Evans Orchestra at the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival, performing music from Bix’s beloved Porgy & Bess. Returning to Paris in 1963, Beiderbecke taught composition, retiring in 1974. He never married.

Certainly not. That would be very un-Bix. He finally died in Paris at the gray old age of 85, one year older than Charlie Parker.***

Would that it were so.

* The occasion for Schjeldahl’s article, by the way, is an exhibit at New York’s Guggenheim called “No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock Paintings on Paper.” No limits, true, just trees . . . I am reminded that New York was not always so hot for Pollock’s work. How else did his Mural—commissioned for a cocktail party at Peggy Guggenheim’s apartment, it became, according to Leonhard Emmerling, “a turning-point in twentieth-century art”—end up at the University of Iowa?

** Pollock connects to jazz mythically through Bix; he connects directly through Ornette Coleman, who featured “White Light” on one of his album covers.

*** The connections between Bird and Bix are endless (for instance, they both “Live,” apparently), but I like this story, found in Young Chet by William Claxton: “Bird had a rather limited education, but he was extremely bright and quick, and had a way with words. He was very articulate. If he couldn’t find a word to describe something, he would invent one that sounded completely appropriate. So when he coined the term ‘Bixelated,’ it seemed perfectly logical to us. It was during our conversation that I had asked him about Chet Baker. He went on with his answer, “. . . Yeah, that little white cat is kinda Bixelated—you know, a kind of Bix Beiderbecke quality. Reminds me of some of those old Bix records my Mama used to get for me. Like Bix, Chet’s blowing is kinda sweet, gentle, yet direct and honest.’”

[August 3, 2006]

Let That Be a Lesson for Us All

The meatheads at Modern Drunkard magazine salute those “excellent bedfellows” jazz & alcohol.

Yes, Bix Beiderbecke was a drunkard. One of the best in our lineage. His intoxicatedexploits caused innumerable hassles for bosses and fellow musicians, but his music more than compensated . . . Let that be a lesson for us all. In our endeavors, whatever we choose them to be, let hooch lift us to greater and greater heights of art and beauty. Just make sure someone wakes you up when it’s your time to shine.

For Bix, who died in 1931 at the age of 28, that was easier said than done. Consider this recollection from his landlord, George Kraslow:

During the next few weeks Bix did no outside work of any kind and did not leave the building save to buy gin. He seemed to be struggling with himself and drank almost continuously. [On the evening of his death,] his hysterical shouts brought me to his apartment on the run. He pulled me in and pointed to the bed. His whole body was trembling violently. He was screaming there were two Mexicans hiding under his bed with long daggers. To humor him, I looked under the bed and when I rose to assure him there was no one hiding there, he staggered and fell, a dead weight, in my arms.

NOW HERE’S A SCENE: At Oakdale Cemetery in Davenport, Iowa, last summer, in a special ceremony beside Bix’s grave, the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Band played a couple of sacred numbers, including “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” The band’s cofounder & trumpet player, Bill Barnes, then acknowledged the death earlier in the year of Bix’s nephew R. Bix Beiderbecke. The Beiderbecke family, seated to the band’s left, had buried him only the day before.

“Richard didn’t play the cornet, but he sure could drink like his uncle,” Barnes joked. “I can still hear him now, with that voice of his, yelling, ‘Gimme another martini!’”

Recalling the band’s first trip to Davenport more than 30 years ago, Barnes mentioned in particular the transportation that locals had wrangled to pick band members up from the airport. “And let me tell you, there was a bar on that bus,” he said. “You can bet we had a nice ride to the hotel that night!” With that, the boys belted out “Davenport Blues”—a rendition so muddled & unrehearsed, one wondered if the band hadn’t just ridden that bus again for old times’ sake.

NOW HERE’S ANOTHER SCENE: It’s January 26, 1925, at the Gennett Recording Studios in Richmond, Indiana. Bix and friends Tommy Dorsey on trombone and Don Murray on clarinet are committing "Davenport Blues" to wax. They’re clearly drunk, “which is regrettable,” sighs Bix biographer Jean Pierre Lion, “because Bix conceived in the issued take a brilliant and often luminous improvisation, unfortunately marred by an imprecise attack and a tempo dissolved by excessive drinking.”

As it happens, alcohol would play a role in the deaths of all three. Murray went first, in 1929, after falling, drunk, from the running board of a car in Los Angeles. Dorsey died of food poisoning in 1956, but it didn’t help that the heavy drinker had likely mixed liquor and barbiturates that night.

As an antidote to Modern Drunkard, try Jazz and Death: Medical Profiles of Jazz Greats by Frederick J. Spencer, M.D.

[July 18, 2006]

Hef & Bix (Take 2)

This is from Brad Kay, a regular and regularly thoughtful contributor to the Bixography forum:

I happen to know Hugh Hefner a little, through music, and let me assure you the guy really is a dedicated jazz fan. I used to play around town (L.A.) with Johnny Crawford (some of you may remember him as the kid actor on ’50s TV hit, “The Rifleman,” starring Chuck Connors). Johnny and Hefner are old pals. According to Johnny, one day in the ’70s, during a lull in his acting and rock ’n’ roll crooning career, He and Hef were hanging out at the mansion, and HH said, “Forget this rock ’n’ roll! I want you to hear something!” And he pulled out one after the other of the [Paul] Whiteman Victors with Bing [Crosby] and Bix. This changed Crawford’s whole karma. For the next 15 years Johnny yearned to sing like young Bing (which he does, admirably), and to have a band like Whiteman’s! Eventually, around 1991, he ran into me and my bunch, and we ended up as “Johnny Crawford and his 1928 Jazz Orchestra.” We worked together for about two years, including gigs at the mansion. Hefner had his birthday at our club in ’92. That evening, I played “I Can’t Get Started” with Ray Anthony on trumpet, and backed up Mel Torme on “Stardust”! Hefner loves talking about Bix, and will pause, even when being assaulted from all sides, to do so.

Of course, there’s the Playboy Jazz Festival, and the magazine’s formerly extensive jazz coverage, but we’ll just stop here.

[June 19, 2006]

Bix Porn (IV): The Hugh Hefner Connection

Turns out Hef loves Bix. I should have figured; why else would Playboy have chosen to distribute the artsy & relatively obscure 1981 documentary Bix by the French-Canadian filmmaker Brigitte Berman? (It’s quite a good film, by the way.) Anyway, with the Playboy Jazz Festival in full swing this weekend, Hefner namedrops the early jazz star to the Los Angeles Times, which reports:

A traditionalist at heart—[Hefner] frequently refers to his affection for legendary ’20s cornetist Bix Beiderbecke—he looks forward to this year’s New Orleans tribute, with the cross-generational presence of native sons Branford Marsalis, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and 22-year-old trumpeter Christian Scott.

Hefner has mentioned Bix to other reporters, too. In a 2004 article about Hefner’s religious proclivities, the Chicago Sun-Times found room for Bix’s name just below the subhead “Worship, bunny style”:

When [Hefner] thinks about how he might worship his creator God, the Playboy founder also talks about music—jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke, the Midwestern cornet player who drank himself to an early grave at age 28 in particular—and his backyard.

Christ. This is not exactly journalistic writing at its best; still, I like how we get Hugh Hefner, God, Bix, and a sweet backyard all in the same thought. Unfortunately, the yard ends up getting all the attention (5.7 acres, 50 coastal redwoods, hot tubs, a zoo with squirrel monkeys).

It’s also interesting how the article connects Bix and Hef as fellow Midwesterners (the former from Davenport, Iowa, the latter a Chicago native). There are deeper connection perhaps. Hefner’s father, reports the Sun-Times, “was an accountant with whom he says he spent little time as a child.” Bix’s father was a successful businessman with whom he had a notoriously strained relationship.

“Our family was Prohibitionist, Puritan in a very real sense,” Hefner, who was raised a Methodist, said. “Never smoked, swore, drank, danced. All the good stuff. Or hugged. Oh, no. There was absolutely no hugging or kissing in my family.”

The story about Bix—by which I mean the story about Bix, not necessarily the truth, which is more elusive—suggests that his family, all of them respectable, church-going Presbyterians, were similarly repressed. In fact, their repression is seen more or less as a product of Davenport’s repression, which is itself a distinctively Midwestern thing. (See Sarah Vowell.) For Bix, such an uptight upbringing is said to have resulted in a) a predilection for young girls and/or men; b) an interest in jazz, a music that, in 1919, the year Bix turned 16, “inspired feelings of terror among local Baptists [in South Carolina] such as what might have been aroused by a personal appearance of Yahweh”; and c) an unusual thirst for bathtub gin.

Sex, drugs, and hot music. Hefner has famously eschewed the drugs, but not the other two. And of course it’s all because of no hugs.

“There was a point in time when my mother, later in life, apologized to me for not being able to show affection,” he told the Chicago paper. “That was, of course, the way she was raised. I said to her, ‘Mom, you couldn’t have done it any better. And because of the things you weren’t able to do, it set me on a course that changed my life and the world.’”

I’m sure that made her feel tons better.

PREVIOUSLY: Bix & erotic spanking (“Oh golly gosh!” she protested half-heartedly, “you’re surely not going to spank me again, are you?”); Bix the Lewd, Bix the Lascivious; the Bix Beiderbecke story for gay men 

[June 17, 2006]

Like a Poet Saying Yes

J. B. Spins calls attention to the collection Jazz Poems, edited by Kevin Young, and even quotes from Dana Gioia’s “Bix Beiderbecke (1903-1931)”:

He dreamed he played the notes so slowly that
they hovered in the air above the crowd
and shimmered like a neon sign.

Ian McCluskey, meanwhile, is a self-described “Mad angel-headed hipster in the starry dynamo of night,” as well as a blogger-poet. His May 13 entry, “Hitchin Desert Blacktop,” uses Bix in an unexpected juxtaposition:

Brakemen and Bix Beiderbecke. Long lonesome
and bald tires. Pintos and bays, sorrels and dun.
If you say the names of the desert it’s a letter
you type, old Smith-Corona chatter and click clack
of the Santa Fe.

Bix appears in other poems, as well, including Michael Longley’s “To Bix Beiderbecke.” It begins this way:

In hotel rooms, in digs you went to school.
These dead were voices from the floor below
Who filled like an empty room your skull,

Poet Rod Jellema, in 1999, wrote the epically titled “Bix Beiderbecke Composing a Suite for Piano, 1930–1931, mist, candlelights, cloudy, flashes, dark.” It ends this way:

Shaded from morning stabs of light, 
he got back to where he was going all along, 
the dreaming mind, the diamond-making dark.

Other poets have been content to merely celebrate Bix’s moniker. There is, for instance, Hayden Carruth’s “The Fantastic Names of Jazz,” which reads, in full:

Zoot Sims, Joshua Redman,
Billie Holiday, Pete Fountain,
Fate Marable, Ivie Anderson,
Meade Lux Lewis, Mezz Mezzrow,
Manzie Johnson, Marcus Roberts,
Omer Simeon, Miff Mole, Sister
Rosetta Tharpe, Freddie Slack,
Thelonious Monk, Charlie Teagarden,
Max Roach, Paul Celestin, Muggsy
Spanier, Boomie Richman, Panama
Francis, Abdullah Ibrahim, Piano
Red, Champion Jack Dupree,
Cow Cow Davenport, Shirley Horn,
Cedar Walton, Sweets Edison,
Jacki Bvard, John Heard, Joy Harjo,
Pinetop Smith, Tricky Sam
Nanton, Major Holley, Stuff Smith,
Bix Beiderbecke, Bunny Berigan,
Mr. Cleanhead Vinson, Ruby Braff,
Cootie Williams, Cab Calloway,
Lockjaw Davis, Chippie Hill,
And of course Jelly Roll Morton.

Finally, Bix’s shadow can be seen in Philip Larkin’s 1954 ode to another early jazz legend, “For Sidney Bechet”:

On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.

This sounds suspiciously like the wisecracker Eddie Condon’s 1947 description of Bix’s music, which, he attested, “came out like a girl saying yes.”

[May 29, 2006]

Iowa, Land of Propinquity (Or Where Carl Van Vechten Gets Kinky & Sasha Frere-Jones Gets Stinky)

Terry Teachout recently marveled at what he called Carl Van Vechten’s “propinquity,” which is to say, where Carlo was, so too the action. A friend of mine explained in an e-mail:

Did you know that Van V. was one of the NYC intellectuals who helped resuscitate Herman Melville’s dead reputation with two essays in 1921? Van V. was also the guy behind breaking Stravinsky in the States, and he was the first serious dance critic in America. Zelig-like—I like that image. Actually, Van V. was a throw-back to the 1890s aesthetes, people like Oscar Wilde, Stephen Mallarme, and that other French poet, Baudelaire. Only difference, Carlo wore an assortment of masks and traveled freely in the highest stratum of society, lunching with grouchy Theodore Dreiser, having George Gershwin as his nightly piano player, and being one of the best friends to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Besides which, he was James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Ethel Waters’ closest white friend. And I don’t think those people (excepting Johnson) had many friends, period. Added to which, he was one of the few people to remain loyal to two complete rebels, Zora Hurston and Chester Himes. Carlo was a mighty, mighty cultural force in this republic’s artistic history.

This is why Americans should be interested in Carl Van Vechten. For my part, I’m interested in him because he’s from Iowa, because, like the early jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, he was a well-off white boy from Iowa, although not only that. He was a well-off white boy from Iowa who made his mark through black culture, a dangerous proposition in the 1920s. And, in retrospect, they both had an uncertain and equally dangerous sexual life. (Now throw in Grant Wood . . .)

Despite being married, Van Vechten was clearly gay, and a new study of his homoerotic photography has just been published. In it, James Smalls expertly addresses VV’s various boundary-crossings:

In a review of Van Vechten’s notoriously salacious novel Nigger Heaven, which appeared in 1926, the playwright Avery Hopwood went so far as to jokingly alert readers to the possibility that Van Vechten was an imposter and not white at all [. . .] What Hopwood was hinting at was Van Vechten’s indulgence in what has been termed “racechange”—that is, the “traversing of race boundaries, racial imitation or impersonation, cross-racial mimicry or mutability, white posing as black passing as white, pan-racial mutuality.” The phenomenon, as forming a critical nexus in the birth and shifting foundations of American modernism, both unveils and questions interracial contacts and cross-cultural mixings. The dynamics of these cross currents are volatile, ongoing, incomplete, and, like identity itself, can not be denied, ignored, or oversimplified. As Van Vechten’s theatrical metaphor for Van Vechten who, in his social life, consciously played multiple roles through which he projected himself as avid guardian, artist, patron, victim, and savior to black America. His multiple social, literary, and artistic activities garnered him a key position in the social and cultural imagination of both whites and African Americans. The calculated and impassioned exploitation of African Americans and their culture was to become Van Vechten’s ticket to notoriety and fame.

Crossing. Passing. Traversing. A colleague at work once told me that, despite the prevailing stereotypes, he was convinced that Iowans are more cosmopolitan than many other Americans. It’s right in the middle of everything, he said. People are always passing through. Iowans are always leaving and always returning. Iowa, in other words, has propinquity.

Patron, victim, and savior. These words suggest that Van Vechten’s life was as complicated personally as it was socially. Michael Eric Dyson combines the two (the social & the personal) when he slams Bix Beiderbecke for stealing black culture: “A major way many white youth articulated their alienation, and affirmed their sanity, authenticity, and legitimacy, was by latching hold of the mores mediated through the artistic values of black culture as expressed in the imaginations and visions of its great artists. What happens is predictable: Bix becomes better known . . .” blah blah blah. It’s not true, but that hardly matters.

Of course, the more things change . . . Look at the stink over Sasha Frere-Jones & Stephin Merritt. The former is a music critic for The New Yorker. He thinks (bizarrely) that the latter, of the band The Magnetic Fields, is a “cracker.” Why? Because he is “intent on diminishing or excluding the work of African-American musicians.” How? He thinks hip hop sucks. “I think it’s shocking that we’re not allowed to play coon songs anymore,” Merritt has said, “but people both black and white, behave in more vicious caricatures of African-Americans than they had in the 19th century. It’s grotesque.”

I think Merritt’s right. It is grotesque. But that’s the point, or at least part of the point. This is black posing as white passing as black. Hip hop is dangerous stuff, and whether you go there, whether you cross that boundary or decide, for whatever reason, not to, still matters.

[May 12, 2006]

On Not Being a Self-Respecting Jazz Writer

I am not a jazz musician, a jazz critic, or even a jazz writer. I am however, a writer who is working on a book about a jazz musician. This, it turns out, is a perilous place to be. Consider this paragraph from Terry Teachout’s 1997 review of a Louis Armstrong biography:

But Laurence Bergreen is a professional biographer, not a jazz scholar (his previous books were about Al Capone, Irving Berlin and James Agee, an oddly assorted trio [Ed: Not to mention the explorer Magellan]), and the very first sentence of Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life—“In the beginning, he was a sound, and only a sound: a strange blend of happy cacophony and tormented caterwauling”—points to trouble ahead. No self-respecting jazz writer would have allowed a fruit-filled sentence like that to get into print, and Bergreen, though clearly an assiduous researcher, writes as if jazz were a foreign language he had studied late in life for the sole purpose of writing Armstrong’s biography.

I’ve read Bergreen’s book and accept most of Teachout’s criticisms (Teachout, meanwhile, is working on his own biography of Armstrong). But I flinch at the phrase “self-respecting jazz writer.” What does this mean exactly? Is “jazz writer” a guild one must join before intruding upon the genius of Louis Armstrong? In a way, yes. The assumption here is that Bergreen should, if not be a musician exactly, at least be knowledgeable of the music. “Revealingly, neither ‘West End Blues’ nor any other Armstrong solo is reproduced in musical notation,” Teachout observes. “Imagine a biography of Mark Twain that contained no excerpts from his writings!” I can’t. But neither can I imagine very many readers who could make heads or tails of a transcribed Armstrong solo. The two are hardly the same.

Teachout well understands the irony of that first sentence: rather than jazz, it seems to call on the Bible and on Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist (“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo . . .”). The author’s roots, then, are literary, not musical.

But Teachout seems to be saying more, that there is, in fact, a literary style to jazz writing that Bergreen should but does not adhere to. (Such a style might be found here.[Ed.: Notice use of word fruit as in TT above.]) If that is true, I may be in trouble. I ain’t no Mezz Mezzrow or, for that matter, Terry Teachout.

[March 4, 2006]

Three Shots in the Continuing Battle over Race and Jazz

From “Jazz & The White Critic: 30 Years Later” by Amiri Baraka:

Yet, to be bluntly precise, just as the history of European “Classical” music would not be essentially changed by the exclusion of the many non-European artists who have contributed to it, by the same measure Afro-American music, which is the Soul of what must be regarded as American Classical music, would not be changed if not a single white artist’s contributions were included. And, face it, this analysis is not black chauvinism, but like they say, hard fact!

From “Black and White Blues,” posted yesterday by Nick Dellow on the Bix Beiderbecke web forum:

Jazz is a wonderful music that speaks for itself—close your eyes while you listen and you will see and hear that it is shaded from black to white and all the tones in between. It’s roots are black, of course, and throughout its history black culture has played a fundamental, vital, central role in its development, but to dismiss or at least marginalise the role of other cultures—“white” cultures if you want to be simplistic about it (though one might refine this by saying Italian, Jewish, Spanish, etc.)—is nonsensical and historically inaccurate.

Why do you think jazz started in New Orleans? Obviously (well, obvious to some), because the place was a cultural melting pot, with black and white cultures (Italians in particular) working together to create a new form of popular music. What a shame that some of its latter-day decedents who have been handed down this rich musical heritage have decided to obfuscate its true history in order to create a pastiche that fits modern politically correct sensibilities.

From the forthcoming Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans by Thomas Brothers:

The story of how, out of this [New Orleans] milieu, one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century emerged is uniquely African American and therefore uniquely American. To understand jazz as American in this way is to work with a social conception of the music that is quite different from the familiar story of jazz as an American musical gumbo, a melting pot of many different ethnicities.

[February 28, 2006]