Read an Excerpt
Finding Bix
The Life and Afterlife of a Jazz Legend
By Brendan Wolfe University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2017 University of Iowa Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-507-1
CHAPTER 1
We had been listening to a woman in costume pretend to be the mother of the early jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke. She read a script from note cards and once or twice mistakenly referred to herself in the third person. When the trolley finally deposited our group in front of 1934 Grand Avenue we politely applauded and I leaped to the curb.
"I want to welcome you to here," our new guide said as we stood outside the Beiderbecke family home in Davenport, Iowa. She was Italian and spoke with long Mediterranean vowels, motioning our group into an air-conditioned living room. The house was remarkably unremarkable — hardwood floors except where there was carpet or tile, original fixtures except where there was plastic, antique furniture except for the pieces from Walmart. It could have been my own home, except that, judging by a few scattered piles of documents on a folding table, it looked also to be an office. On the fireplace mantle, a few copies of the film Bix: An Interpretation of a Legend (1991) stood on display, for sale. Its Italian director, Giuseppe "Pupi" Avati, had purchased Bix's house and shot several scenes here. Now its star, Bryant Weeks — wearing a stained wife-beater, his head haloed in yellow — gazed out from the front of the DVD cases, looking sweaty and mercurial.
"This is where Bix grew up," our guide said. "And this is like the piano he learned to play as a boy." She motioned to an upright against the wall. "You are wondering if it is the original, no? I am sad to report it's not. For many years, the owners have tried to convince the local museum to bring it home, but they must not trust us." She winked conspiratorially. "We also don't have the phonograph machine that he played his first jazz records on. There are so many things we don't have. Sometimes," she sighed, "I would be happy just to have a plumbing man. The toilets are so much trouble!"
As historic sites go — and Bix's childhood home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places — this was not terribly impressive. It barely hinted at Bix's importance to the music world. Where, for instance, was the sign proclaiming that he and Louis Armstrong were the most innovative jazz soloists of the 1920s, "the twin lines of descent from which most of today's jazz can be traced," to quote the critic Terry Teachout? Armstrong, of course, was one of the great geniuses of American music; he helped to invent jazz and popular music as we know it today. Bix, for his part, was the first important white soloist and the first to heavily influence black musicians. Where Satch blew hot and high, Bix, on tunes like "Singin' the Blues" from 1927, stuck it out in the middle register, exploring the melody with improvised solos that were breathtaking and nearly perfect. He invented the jazz ballad and pointed the way to "cool" jazz. He also loved classical music, and in his own handful of compositions, the most famous of which was the piano piece "In a Mist," he channeled as much Debussy as boogie-woogie. His was a hybrid musical sensibility, mixing low culture and high, black and white, Davenport and New York. It was a fully American sensibility, or so Amiri Baraka claimed back in the 1960s, creating "a common cultural ground where black and white America seemed only day and night in the same city." "And that's a profoundly racist argument," Teachout snaps in response, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The point is, Bix accomplished all of this in a career that consisted of a few hundred recordings and lasted a mere six years.
When the end came, he was twenty-eight and gin-soaked.
"I remember the day we heard Bix was dead," a saxophone player once told an interviewer. "It went around the musicians in whispers, as though nobody dared say it out loud. We couldn't believe it — it was like saying the Pope was dead. If it was true, if Bix was really gone, what the hell were we all going to do?"
That quotation appears on the first page of Bix: Man & Legend, the definitive Beiderbecke biography, published in 1974. The authors, Richard M. Sudhalter and Philip R. Evans (with William Dean-Myatt, who contributed to a discography), go on to wonder what it was about the death of "this quiet, deferential young man" that provoked "almost apocalyptic bereavement" among both his friends and people who knew only his recordings. They suggest it may have been Bix's music, with its "capacity to reach a listener and move him emotionally even at first contact," but then they decided, no, that couldn't be it; lots of jazz does that. So what was it? Sudhalter and Evans seem as dumbfounded about it as other writers, but they note that whatever it was, in the years following Bix's death it transformed their well-behaved young man into one of jazz's original and most enduring legends. It's a turn of events neither they nor anyone else seems too pleased about.
Part Keats and part Fitzgerald, Bix the legend is a nineteenth-century Romantic hero refitted for the Jazz Age. He comes in with the flappers and checks out not long after the Great Crash, a baby-faced foot-shuffler who can't read music and carries his instrument around in a brown paper bag. He is a "cardboard martyr," complains the cantankerous British critic Benny Green; "a beatific figure before whom the idolators kneel in reverence, and at whom the debunkers heave giant brickbats." He is "jazz's Number One Saint," and to boot he's got Kirk Douglas's chin. "Someday, when I'm really good, I'm gonna do things with this trumpet nobody's ever thought of doing," a wide-eyed Douglas tells Doris Day in the 1950 film Young Man with a Horn (based on the Bix-inspired novel of the same name). "I'm gonna hit a note that nobody ever heard before."
Never mind that Bix didn't play trumpet; he played cornet. Or that he didn't go for the high notes — the whole point of his style! The legendary Bix is the artist shooting for something he can't quite reach. "Bix was as usual gazing off into his private astronomy," Ralph Berton writes in his memoir Remembering Bix, also published in 1974. (On that book's first page, Berton one-ups the old saxophone player and compares Bix to Jesus himself; a young James Dickey, in an unpublished essay dated 1943, throws in Napoleon, Alexander the Great, and Beethoven for good measure.) "Bix did not let anything at all distract his mind from that cornet," Armstrong recalled. "His heart was with it all the time."
In the movie, this sort of behavior clearly concerns Doris Day. "You've got to have some other interest or you'll go off your rocker," she advises her young man. "I know, you need a hobby, like collecting stamps or a dog."
Poor Kirk! I always feel bad for him at this moment — stamps?!? — even as I am left wondering what part of all this is Bix and what part is legend. Sudhalter and Evans's answer is to focus their book — rather tediously sometimes, for Bix's life was not terribly exciting — only on what they know to be true. And in a way, their instincts are just as maternal as Doris Day's. They hope to protect Bix not from himself but from his legend, which they compare to "40 years of underbrush" and at which they solemnly promise to hack away, "destroying the popularly accepted image to get at the person of fact, flesh and blood." (One suspects that Benny Green would approve.) That in the end the underbrush always wins is, of course, hardly surprising. Sudhalter, who did the writing, and Evans, who contributed the research, squabbled so much — over the use of invented dialogue, over the question of whether one of Bix's girlfriends had an abortion, even over the order of names on the book's front cover — that after Man & Legend's publication they suffered a dramatic falling out. Already a contentious bunch, Bixophiles happily chose sides and began to call each other names. In a 2003 interview, I asked Sudhalter about the controversy. "For twenty-five years, Phil Evans never stopped spewing anger, vituperation, and venom," he said. "I'm still surprised when I come across people whose opinions of me have been shaped by him."
Evans died in 1999, Sudhalter in 2008. And because of their conflict, Bix: Man & Legend, the first jazz biography to be nominated for a National Book Award, remains out of print. Bix, however, manages to live on — just not here on Grand Avenue. This place seems strangely empty of any Bix, real or imagined.
"Come," our tour guide said, grabbing my arm. "I will show you upstairs."
CHAPTER 2
I grew up with Bix. All of us from his hometown did, and still do, although we never actually knew him. In Davenport he exists in two dimensions only, everywhere on posters for the annual Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Festival, on the side of a downtown parking garage, on sweaty T-shirts and plastic beer cups, his image cast forever in the same pose, lifted from the most famous photograph of him: face round, hair perfectly parted down the middle, his tux perfectly pressed. Perfectly recognizable, he has over the years become part town mascot, part Golden Calf. Bill Wundram, white-haired columnist for the local Quad-City Times, insists on calling him "Bixie," as if he were still in knickers, sneaking away from the large family home on Grand Avenue and down the steep hill to the Mississippi River, where he could listen to riverboat musicians from New Orleans. There's his name on a thousand bumper stickers — in block serif letters, white on red: "Bix Lives!" — as if he hadn't already died a slow, pathetic death in a Queens boarding house back in 1931, so young, so far away from his family, and screaming, said his landlord, "that there were two Mexicans under the bed, with long daggers, waiting to kill him." "Jazz's Number One Saint" is right: in a city where the Mexicans now have largely displaced the Germans, he rises again, every third weekend in July. Kitschy Dixieland musicians in red-and-white-striped shirts and suspenders crowd the band shell to blow their clarinets at seniors in lawn chairs, while many more folks crowd Third and Fourth streets for the arts festival, browsing craft booths and eating tenderloins. Bix bobblehead dolls can be picked up farther down River Drive at John O'Donnell Stadium, home of the minor league baseball team that until recently was known as the Swing of the Quad Cities. (The team logo depicted baseballs floating out of the bell of a pastel saxophone.) Most popular of all, however, is the Bix 7, an elite seven-mile road race independent of the music festival but until recently held each year on that same Saturday. It was a regular excuse for my aunt Sara to host an early morning cocktail party, her house conveniently situated on a bluff near the turnaround on McClellan Boulevard, where tens of thousands of runners, invariably led by a Kenyan or two, passed by, and then passed by again, before heading back down to the river. For that reason, I suppose, the word "Bix" for me has always carried with it the salty smell of sweat and the taste of mimosas. Bix is a season. Bix is a party. Bix is a great Davenport reunion. The colorful posters change every year, but Bix is always the same. His cornet, which rests on an unseen knee, is always silent.
If this were Borges, there might be talk of el asombro, or la sagrada horror — that "holy dread" in the face of meaningful words, in the face of what the Kiowa essayist N. Scott Momaday calls "that ancient and irresistible tradition of vox humana"; in other words, there might be the observation that the sound, the wonderful sound of Bix's instrument, "like a girl saying yes," as Eddie Condon famously put it, what made Bix Bix, for crying out loud, is largely absent. Or at least it was from the Bix I knew growing up in Davenport, and from the Bix everyone else I knew knew. Who was Bix? We didn't know.
Bix was a genius, and I learned this, it turns out, from the Italians.
"What are you-a doo-ing in my film?" he howled. "Oh, Christ!" he howled, such that even his modish eyeglasses, which hung suspended from a string around his thick and hairy neck, trembled. This was Pupi Avati. Pooooo-pee, as it was pronounced. And his pidgin squawking impressed its victim. His spittle flew the short distance from his neatly cropped beard to my bare, eighteen-year-old cheeks, speckling an otherwise adequate makeup job. "Oh, good God!" Pupi raged. "Please, makeup," while, for a brief moment, the tape continued to roll "My Pretty Girl" at full volume, oblivious. I was on the set of Bix: An Interpretation of a Legend (it would later screen at Cannes), which Pupi and his brother, the producer Antonio Avati, had traveled all the way from Rome to Davenport to make, and which I had come to participate in through the good offices of my high school orchestra teacher, who was serving as a consultant to the film. My job each day was to get my hair slicked back, don a period suit, and pretend to play the fiddle in a re-creation of the mid-1920s St. Louis band fronted by C-melody saxman Frankie "Tram" Trumbauer and his protégé Bix Beiderbecke. "My Pretty Girl": what a great dance number, with extras flailing about doing the Charleston, the band bouncing up and down on the stand, shiny black shoes tapping, and Tram and Bix up front trading solos. The fiddle player, meanwhile, got a solo break, too, and on this day Pupi was filming a tight close-up, that huge camera of his wheeled up against my jaw like an X-ray machine at the dentist's office. "Now, don't-a look," he begged me, before yelling, "Playback!" and then, "Action!" I pretended to play with the music, but I couldn't help it. "Jesus goddamn Christ!" he howled. I always turned and looked, take after take. And "My Pretty Girl" rolled on.
I fell head over heels for "My Pretty Girl" that day and, on another afternoon of shooting, for "Singin' the Blues"; I fell in love with Bix's bell-like tone ("surefooted as a mountain goat," according to Mezz Mezzrow; "like a mallet hits a chime," according to Hoagy Carmichael), the cool reserve, the exquisitely controlled improvisation; I fell in love with the romance of Bix, the jazz and swing of Bix ("I just sat there," said Max Kaminsky, "vibrating like a harp to the echoes of Bix's astoundingly beautiful tone. It sounded like a choirful of angels"); I fell in love with my seemingly exclusive discovery that Bix existed outside of Davenport, that he was a musician of heroic stature. Only later did I learn that it wasn't actually Bix on the tape. It was a Dixieland band imitating Bix, a displaced Dixieland band somewhere in Italy — Tom Pletcher on cornet, joined by names like Fabrizio Cattaneo and Fabiano Pellini — blowing Bix's solos note for note, the DNA of their choruses an almost perfect match.
No matter. It might as well have been Bix. For me, it was Bix.
Bix was a kid from the cornfields. Bix is a guy named Tom. Bix is Italian. As I unintentionally and rather haphazardly began my quest to unmask the many faces of Bix, I learned this lesson over and over again: the closer I got to Bix, or at least to someone I thought might be Bix, the more he retreated. Even his recordings weren't to be trusted. "One cannot hear Bix Beiderbecke from the tall corn of Iowa without feeling this is singularly ours and it is about time we wake up to the fact," declared the program notes to a Carnegie Hall concert, "From Spirituals to Swing," performed several years after his death. But can one hear Bix? According to his contemporaries, those crackly old 78s sounded nothing like him; such primitive technology never came close to capturing his horn. How could it? This is particularly frustrating to accept in our cocksure age of compact discs and digital technology, although it's worth noting that sound geeks can just as easily use their computers to correct a faltering pitch as illuminate a perfect one. (Without such programming, one suspects that — poof — Top 40 would cease to exist.) Upon hearing digital sound for the first time, the German conductor Herbert von Karajan reportedly exclaimed, "all else is gaslight!" "Well, what's wrong with gaslight?" retorts the Irish poet and 78 aficionado Ciaran Carson in his book Last Night's Fun (1996). "For you can use your imagination, make figures out of shadow."
Bix is a specter, then, flitting in and out of the snaps and pops of a wax record. Even while listening to Bix, to the real, honest-to-god Bix, he is a shadow.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Finding Bix by Brendan Wolfe. Copyright © 2017 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
