I am reading a terrific new bio of Bix Beiderbecke, one of my Dead Boyfriends*. Really well-written, well-illustrated, and not over the head of someone who’s not a musicologist.
I adore Bix–I have two collections on cassette, and a number of 78s (mostly with Paul Whiteman or Jean Goldkette). Even before I’d heard his name, I’d stop short at the cornet solos and think, “Jesus, who is that guy?”
Any other Bix fans?
My friend Donna and I have a list of Dead Boyfriends. So what if they’re gay or alcoholic or drug addicts? They’re dead, so it doesn’t matter!
I used to have a small, much-played collection of Bix Beiderbecke 78rpm records. An ex-lover broke them into little chunks because he thought I was cheating on him (which I wasn’t). The depths to which some people will stoop in order to hurt other people’s feelings is fathomless. I expect that there is a special tier of hell for those who destroy Bix Beiderbecke records. Dante never wrote of such a thing, but surely it exists.
Bix helped get me started on a life’s love of jazz when I was, I dunno, 13 or so. In particular, his compadres Rollini and Trumbauer led me to take up the bass and C melody saxophones.
As an Iowan, I was of course aware of him through the Bix Festival. I later found out that my grandfather had briefly known Bix when he passed through the University of Iowa in 1925. Like Bix a trumpet player, Grampa Doug even played across a dance hall from Bix in a battle-of-the-bands that year. Bix didn’t care for college (he was there mostly to make up incompletes from high school and take music courses) and he soon dropped out.
Amazing how much really good music he put out in such a short life. I wonder how his sound would have evolved had he survived his life for just a little while longer.
Some recordings are available on CD.
BTW, this thread is going to be hard to search for later. Partly because I can never remember how to spell his last name. So it’s: “Yeah, that Eve thread about Bix…”
Easy. 10,000 in the front room and 10,000 in the back.
No, whose idea was it to have a footrace commemorating this guy who never ran or worked out (though one source says he was a fine natural baseball player*)?
*The baseball anecdote comes from a strange memoir called Remembering Bix by Ralph Berton, whose brother Vic, a famous drummer, worked with Bix in Chicago in the mid 20s. Among other things, Ralph wrote that his other brother, Gene, claimed to have seduced Bix.
Eve, you might like the UK comedy drama The Beiderbecke Affair (http://tinyurl.com/8kujt) and its follow ups, The Beiderbecke Tapes and The Beiderbecke Connection - a really odd, quirky, funny series from the 80s about a teacher who is obsessed with Bix and does a bit of sleuthing on the sly.
The soundtrack, full of guess-who, is a lot of fun.
I like The Guess Who as much as the next guy, but shouldn’t the soundtrack be Bix? :rolleyes:
I also recommend Bix: Man & Legend (if you can still find it), by Richard Sudhalter, a trumpeter-journalist. He and a team of co-researchers started to piece together Bix’s world in the early '60s, speaking to friends and associates now long gone, and Sudhalter wrote up the whole in an unusual, effective docudrama style, mixing “scripted” dialogue with interview quotes. There’s also a veritable assload of great old pictures, a timeline, and a full-geek discography of every record Bix made, plus a few people only think he made.
Bix is one of my favorites. I especially love the work he did with Trumbauer. I’m Coming, Virginia is one of my favorite jazz records by any artist.
Bix didn’t sound like the other big-name trumpeters of his day. He had a bell-like tone, and he had a plaintive sound without being very bluesy. He was an admirer of the impressionist composers (like Debussy), and it showed up in some of his music (like In a Mist, the only piano record he made).
Too bad he killed himself with booze. Bix was an alcoholic at a bad time for alcoholics. Bathtub gin could be toxic, and he drank a lot of the stuff.
