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| Why not go with the famous photo? |
With an eye to future chapters, this post drags music back to the jazz of the 1920s - specifically to one of the genre's great innovators, Bix Beiderbecke. Even though he was born miles, and arguably worlds, away from the cities where jazz was born, Beiderbecke’s name moved in the same circles as the legends. That respect went both ways too, as noted on a Stanford University site called Riverwalk Jazz:
“Later, both Bix and Louis avowed that the other was ‘the best horn player he had ever heard.’”
I saw comparisons between Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke over and over as I dug into the latter’s legend - and it is a very much a legend. Some of those comparisons read differently today than the would have two, three decades ago. For example:
“Where Armstrong's playing was bravura, regularly optimistic, and openly emotional, Beiderbecke's contained a range of intellectual alternatives. Where Armstrong, at the head of an ensemble, played it hard, straight and true, Beiderbecke, like a shadow-boxer, invented his own way of phrasing 'around the lead.' Where Armstrong's superior strength delighted in the sheer power of what a cornet could produce, Beiderbecke's cool approach invited rather than commanded you to listen.”
Fans of American football should hear a faint echo from conversations about, say, wide receivers in that...
Leon Bismark “Bix” Beiderbecke was born into a well-to-do family in Davenport, Iowa in 1903; a lively, if pointless, dispute surrounds whether his middle name was actually Bismark or Bix, but he clearly preferred the latter and never went by anything else (as he signed off in a letter to his mother, written when he was 9-years-old, “frome your Leon Bix Beiderbecke not Bismark Remember”). His father trafficked in coal and lumber and his mother’s father was a steamboat pilot, but Beiderbecke must have fallen in love with music the second he heard it. His sister recalls him playing piano by age three - he played with his hands over his head - and, when the local press caught wind of him, they hailed him as a seven-year-old boy musical wonder,” and under headlines reading, “Little Bickie Beiderbecke plays any selection he hears.” He learned how to play a couple instruments, but he would latch onto the cornet and never let go.
His love of music proved compulsive: he sat distractedly through movies when his family took him, but he’d dash home immediately after to work out the musical score (silent movies often featured a live band back then). The final, irrevocable step came when his older brother, Burnie Beiderbecke, returned from the service after World War I with a phonograph and a 78-rpm recording of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s “Tiger Rag” b/w “Skeleton Jangle.” (I covered the ODJB, and others, in an earlier chapter.) The ODJB’s famous cornetist, Nick LaRocca, became one of Beiderbecke’s early idols, but he would collect idols throughout his career…which steered determinedly away from academics, structure of any kind really. Not even his burning love for music gave Beiderbecke the patience to learn how to read it, something that became a (lightly) recurring theme through his life.
He effectively dropped out of high school, opting instead to play with local bands (professionally) and run down to the Mississippi River to hear jazz bands playing on the steamboats. Another, frankly disturbing, incident happened during his high school years: two local boys, drawn by the screams, caught Beiderbecke in a car in a garage with a 5-year-old girl. The accusations involved hints of molestation, but he was released on bail ($1,500) and the girl’s family opted against pressing charges with an eye to protecting her. Beiderbecke’s family, meanwhile, protected him by getting him the hell out of Davenport. In the hopes of getting him away from jazz, they sent their troubled son to the Lake Forest Academy in Lake Forest, Illinois. On the north side of Chicago. To get away from jazz….
“Don’t think I’m getting hard, Burnie, but I’d go to Hell to hear a good band.”
Here, “hard” means drifting into the criminal element, but Beiderbecke, more or less, went nuts on arriving in Chicago. Going to every speakeasy that let him in, even traveling to South Chicago to hear famous jazz acts like King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, repeatedly broke curfew and supplied classmates with booze. Beiderbecke didn’t last long at Lake Forest Academy. It hardly mattered because he had found the two things that would dominate his short life: jazz and alcohol. Against his parents’ wishes, he dedicated himself to a career in music in 1922; the bottle came along for the ride.
As implied by the note on reading music, Beiderbecke was entirely self-taught; an unusual fingering followed from that - he did what worked as he learned - but that didn't hold him back. He either joined or formed his first band, The Wolverines (named for the Jelly Roll Morton (also covered earlier) number, "Wolverine Blues"), in the early-mid-1920s; however it happened, they became “Bix Beiderbecke & His Wolverines.” Based in a Hamilton, Ohio speakeasy called The Stockton Club, they drew enough attention to have Gennett Records approach them to record. They put 15 sides on shellac (I think, at that time), including “Fidgety Feet” and “Jazz Me Blues.” I found a couple notes on this period - including a quote/ode on Wikipedia’s page that noted “an already discernible inclination for unusual accidentals and inner chordal voices” in his solos, and called that 78 “a pioneer record” - but most informative impression I read on the Wolverines showed up in Riverwalk Jazz’s post:
"Typical Wolverines live performances featured solos followed by multiple choruses in which all the instruments improvised at the same time, each chorus hotter than the last. These extended hot sessions could never be captured on recordings due to the typical 3-minute playing-time limit of 78-rpm discs.”
Beiderbecke continued to watch, listen and learn from everything around him - e.g., he borrowed from Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and, due to an introduction to Eastwood Lane by a piano tutor, he composed “In a Mist,” one of his six own compositions he recorded. Perhaps related (I don’t know, honestly), he moved on from the Wolverines in 1924 to sign on to Jean Goldkette’s Orchestra. Despite a healthy reputation, he came on as a 3rd cornet, but he bumped into his limitations even there. As a natural improvisor, and one who couldn’t read music, he struggled with playing an assigned part within a complex arrangement. In the hopes of catching him up, someone had the idea of sending Beiderbecke to the University of Iowa to study music; this last attempt at formal education ended in another expulsion after a drunken brawl at a local bar.
Beiderbecke’s drifting days started during this time. The few online biographies I found (and most of them cover the same ground) have him popping up in various entertaining locales across the upper Midwest. Despite warnings from others (e.g., “Look out, he’s trouble. He drinks and you’ll have a hard time handling”), Beiderbecke made some of his most enduring friendships in those settings - e.g., Frankie Trumbauer at a Michigan resort, a man who chemistry and circumstance turned into both a friend and something of a guardian, as well as famous people like Hoagy Carmichael, who wrote “Riverboat Shuffle” for his "firm friend," Beiderbecke.
Goldkette never lost Beiderbecke’s number, and the two reconnected during the later 1920s. Beiderbecke was part of the group dubbled “Goldkette’s Famous Fourteen” that participated in an October 1926 “battle of the bands” against the Florence Henderson Orchestra at New York’s Roseland Ballroom. Henderson’s Orchestra was one of the biggest of the era, but Goldkette’s boys blew them off the stage. According to Wikipedia, Fletcher’s trumpeter, Rex Stewart recalled being “amazed, angry, morose, and bewildered” by the size of the gap between present professional and future legend.
Even bigger things awaited Beiderbecke: the next year saw him join the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, an ever bigger outfit that Henderson’s (from what I’ve read elsewhere, Whiteman’s band had fainting groupies). Purists didn’t cheer the move - short version, they viewed Whiteman, et. al. as hacks/sellouts - but Beiderbecke embraced it as the music school he never attended. Both the orchestra and its people took to Beiderbecke - who, by all accounts was likable as he was "trouble" - to the extent that they wrote arrangements tailored to his solos; to name a few, “From Monday On,” “Back in Your Own Back Yard,” and “Sugar.” It was going well enough…at least until “Little Bickie’s” “daily dosage” of three pints of whiskey and 20 cigarettes per day caught up and hauled him down.
He bounced in and out of the Paul Whiteman orbit for the next few years; it was actually during the filming of a 1929 release called, The King of Jazz, where Beiderbecke’s drinking finally got ahead of him; too much down time, too many baleful influences. The final break came when he destroyed a Cleveland, Ohio hotel room with the monkey howling on his back (attempting sobriety led to the fit). The band shipped him back to Iowa to convalesce, where his parents kindly paid his bill. In a classy, touching gesture, Whiteman still put his chair on stage and kept it empty as a symbol of their hope that he would return.
Even if it took a couple years, the foreshadowing says it all. The end came in Queens, in 1931, and in a freakout that had him telling his “rental agent” (assuming that’s a landlord) that “there were two Mexicans hiding under his bed with long daggers.” After trembling since George Kraslow (his rental agent) arrived, Beiderbecke collapsed into his arms and never recovered. He died August 6, 1931, at just 28 years old.
To raise something that didn’t come up anywhere else but toward the end of everything I read, Beiderbecke was a hero/symbol of his “jazz-mad generation.” Wikipedia pulled some quotes from contemporary sources on how his generation viewed him and, because they sound so familiar, two seem worth sharing. In terms of cultural context, the first:
“Hundreds of young collegians who couldn't recall a strain of Beethoven or Wagner could whistle Bix Beiderbecke choruses.”
…leads so nicely to the second:
“Perhaps ‘Bixie's’ death at the age of twenty-eight also is symbolical of the futility of the ‘jazz-mad generation's’ quest for self-expression.”
I know enough about how 18th-century popular music evolved into 19th-century popular music, and how everything changed more than most modern (which, here, means early 21st century) listeners can fully appreciate. Every genre after ragtime prompted one iteration of moral panic or another - though, honestly, most boiled down to, 1) what syncopation did to dancing, and 2) racist panic, both of which count as first cousins, if not nuclear siblings - and that genre offers a fairly credible peg as the beginning of popular music as the world knows it today. The idea that Beiderbecke’s fans could hum his tunes but not the works of Beethoven or Wagner was less a difference in concept - as implied by the notes on 18th and 19th century popular music above - but one of scale. The twin phenomena of permanent recorded music and mass marketing acted as the nitrous that let popular music leave classical forms in the dust. Whether authentic or manufactured and mass-marketed, self-expression has been at the heart of what the mast majority of people have listened to since ragtime. By most accounts I read, Beiderbecke embodied that change, and in the rock-star vein.
Naturally, his early, “tragic” death fed the legend and it took multiple, yet predictable forms - e.g., other famous people swearing they knew him back when; a 1950 movie called, Young Man with a Horn, starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, Doris Day, and with contributions on and off screen by Hoagy Carmichael himself; or Davenport, IA celebrating its most famous song with the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Festival, the Bix 7 road race, and all kinds of ancillary kitsch. I have no reasonable beef with that - how many dead idols do later generations have? - because Beiderbecke truly sounds revolutionary, even if my ears are too dumb to hear what made him so. At the same time, it is…just weird hearing about someone living a rock-star life right around 30 years before rock-‘n’-roll happened, and around 50 years (give or take) before the rock star concept lead to even more casualties.
About the Sampler
I included several of the songs above in the sampler - though not “Jazz Me Blues,” for some reasons I can’t begin to understand. I did, however, add “For No Reason at All in C” and “In the Dark” to rep what I understand to be the "piano side" of Beiderbecke’s repertoire. After that, the sampler is mostly made up of songs I liked. Whatever my ill-educated ear hears or doesn’t, most of the compilations on Spotify arranged Beiderbecke’s songs according to who he was playing with. For instance (and excluding songs linked to above), you have a handful of collaborations with his friend Frankie Trumbauer - e.g., “Ostrich Walk” and “Trumbology” - a selection with Paul Whiteman - e.g., “Mississippi Mud” (the rest are above) - and a bunch with Jean Goldkette - .e.g., “My Pretty Girl,” “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover,” “I’m Proud of a Baby Like You,” “Slow River,” and “Clementine (From New Orleans).” The rest look like a grab-bag from his various side projects (he had a lot), including, “Sorry,” or just a bunch of strays - e.g., his elegant “I’m Coming Virginia,” “Singin' the Blues,” and one of Beiderbecke’s most famous tunes, and one only he could write, “Davenport Blues.”
The piano numbers aside, most of what I heard this past week sounds like New Orleans jazz to me: swirling, busy, with a lively tempo, and vocals that come in 20+ bars later than I’m used to. And that’s when they come in at all. Biederbecke accounts for the swirling, gliding, feinting melody that plays over the foundation. Dated, in other words, and impressive, but also hard to hear as something new, especially just shy of a decade and all kinds of technical/technological innovations later. The quotes above about the generational divide did as much as anything to bring home to broad idea that, at one point in the early 20th century, Bix Beiderbecke played the hottest sound around.
Till the next one…which, for the record, will be Paul Whiteman. And I’m excited about what comes after.
“Later, both Bix and Louis avowed that the other was ‘the best horn player he had ever heard.’”
I saw comparisons between Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke over and over as I dug into the latter’s legend - and it is a very much a legend. Some of those comparisons read differently today than the would have two, three decades ago. For example:
“Where Armstrong's playing was bravura, regularly optimistic, and openly emotional, Beiderbecke's contained a range of intellectual alternatives. Where Armstrong, at the head of an ensemble, played it hard, straight and true, Beiderbecke, like a shadow-boxer, invented his own way of phrasing 'around the lead.' Where Armstrong's superior strength delighted in the sheer power of what a cornet could produce, Beiderbecke's cool approach invited rather than commanded you to listen.”
Fans of American football should hear a faint echo from conversations about, say, wide receivers in that...
Leon Bismark “Bix” Beiderbecke was born into a well-to-do family in Davenport, Iowa in 1903; a lively, if pointless, dispute surrounds whether his middle name was actually Bismark or Bix, but he clearly preferred the latter and never went by anything else (as he signed off in a letter to his mother, written when he was 9-years-old, “frome your Leon Bix Beiderbecke not Bismark Remember”). His father trafficked in coal and lumber and his mother’s father was a steamboat pilot, but Beiderbecke must have fallen in love with music the second he heard it. His sister recalls him playing piano by age three - he played with his hands over his head - and, when the local press caught wind of him, they hailed him as a seven-year-old boy musical wonder,” and under headlines reading, “Little Bickie Beiderbecke plays any selection he hears.” He learned how to play a couple instruments, but he would latch onto the cornet and never let go.
His love of music proved compulsive: he sat distractedly through movies when his family took him, but he’d dash home immediately after to work out the musical score (silent movies often featured a live band back then). The final, irrevocable step came when his older brother, Burnie Beiderbecke, returned from the service after World War I with a phonograph and a 78-rpm recording of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s “Tiger Rag” b/w “Skeleton Jangle.” (I covered the ODJB, and others, in an earlier chapter.) The ODJB’s famous cornetist, Nick LaRocca, became one of Beiderbecke’s early idols, but he would collect idols throughout his career…which steered determinedly away from academics, structure of any kind really. Not even his burning love for music gave Beiderbecke the patience to learn how to read it, something that became a (lightly) recurring theme through his life.
He effectively dropped out of high school, opting instead to play with local bands (professionally) and run down to the Mississippi River to hear jazz bands playing on the steamboats. Another, frankly disturbing, incident happened during his high school years: two local boys, drawn by the screams, caught Beiderbecke in a car in a garage with a 5-year-old girl. The accusations involved hints of molestation, but he was released on bail ($1,500) and the girl’s family opted against pressing charges with an eye to protecting her. Beiderbecke’s family, meanwhile, protected him by getting him the hell out of Davenport. In the hopes of getting him away from jazz, they sent their troubled son to the Lake Forest Academy in Lake Forest, Illinois. On the north side of Chicago. To get away from jazz….
“Don’t think I’m getting hard, Burnie, but I’d go to Hell to hear a good band.”
Here, “hard” means drifting into the criminal element, but Beiderbecke, more or less, went nuts on arriving in Chicago. Going to every speakeasy that let him in, even traveling to South Chicago to hear famous jazz acts like King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, repeatedly broke curfew and supplied classmates with booze. Beiderbecke didn’t last long at Lake Forest Academy. It hardly mattered because he had found the two things that would dominate his short life: jazz and alcohol. Against his parents’ wishes, he dedicated himself to a career in music in 1922; the bottle came along for the ride.
As implied by the note on reading music, Beiderbecke was entirely self-taught; an unusual fingering followed from that - he did what worked as he learned - but that didn't hold him back. He either joined or formed his first band, The Wolverines (named for the Jelly Roll Morton (also covered earlier) number, "Wolverine Blues"), in the early-mid-1920s; however it happened, they became “Bix Beiderbecke & His Wolverines.” Based in a Hamilton, Ohio speakeasy called The Stockton Club, they drew enough attention to have Gennett Records approach them to record. They put 15 sides on shellac (I think, at that time), including “Fidgety Feet” and “Jazz Me Blues.” I found a couple notes on this period - including a quote/ode on Wikipedia’s page that noted “an already discernible inclination for unusual accidentals and inner chordal voices” in his solos, and called that 78 “a pioneer record” - but most informative impression I read on the Wolverines showed up in Riverwalk Jazz’s post:
"Typical Wolverines live performances featured solos followed by multiple choruses in which all the instruments improvised at the same time, each chorus hotter than the last. These extended hot sessions could never be captured on recordings due to the typical 3-minute playing-time limit of 78-rpm discs.”
Beiderbecke continued to watch, listen and learn from everything around him - e.g., he borrowed from Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and, due to an introduction to Eastwood Lane by a piano tutor, he composed “In a Mist,” one of his six own compositions he recorded. Perhaps related (I don’t know, honestly), he moved on from the Wolverines in 1924 to sign on to Jean Goldkette’s Orchestra. Despite a healthy reputation, he came on as a 3rd cornet, but he bumped into his limitations even there. As a natural improvisor, and one who couldn’t read music, he struggled with playing an assigned part within a complex arrangement. In the hopes of catching him up, someone had the idea of sending Beiderbecke to the University of Iowa to study music; this last attempt at formal education ended in another expulsion after a drunken brawl at a local bar.
Beiderbecke’s drifting days started during this time. The few online biographies I found (and most of them cover the same ground) have him popping up in various entertaining locales across the upper Midwest. Despite warnings from others (e.g., “Look out, he’s trouble. He drinks and you’ll have a hard time handling”), Beiderbecke made some of his most enduring friendships in those settings - e.g., Frankie Trumbauer at a Michigan resort, a man who chemistry and circumstance turned into both a friend and something of a guardian, as well as famous people like Hoagy Carmichael, who wrote “Riverboat Shuffle” for his "firm friend," Beiderbecke.
Goldkette never lost Beiderbecke’s number, and the two reconnected during the later 1920s. Beiderbecke was part of the group dubbled “Goldkette’s Famous Fourteen” that participated in an October 1926 “battle of the bands” against the Florence Henderson Orchestra at New York’s Roseland Ballroom. Henderson’s Orchestra was one of the biggest of the era, but Goldkette’s boys blew them off the stage. According to Wikipedia, Fletcher’s trumpeter, Rex Stewart recalled being “amazed, angry, morose, and bewildered” by the size of the gap between present professional and future legend.
Even bigger things awaited Beiderbecke: the next year saw him join the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, an ever bigger outfit that Henderson’s (from what I’ve read elsewhere, Whiteman’s band had fainting groupies). Purists didn’t cheer the move - short version, they viewed Whiteman, et. al. as hacks/sellouts - but Beiderbecke embraced it as the music school he never attended. Both the orchestra and its people took to Beiderbecke - who, by all accounts was likable as he was "trouble" - to the extent that they wrote arrangements tailored to his solos; to name a few, “From Monday On,” “Back in Your Own Back Yard,” and “Sugar.” It was going well enough…at least until “Little Bickie’s” “daily dosage” of three pints of whiskey and 20 cigarettes per day caught up and hauled him down.
He bounced in and out of the Paul Whiteman orbit for the next few years; it was actually during the filming of a 1929 release called, The King of Jazz, where Beiderbecke’s drinking finally got ahead of him; too much down time, too many baleful influences. The final break came when he destroyed a Cleveland, Ohio hotel room with the monkey howling on his back (attempting sobriety led to the fit). The band shipped him back to Iowa to convalesce, where his parents kindly paid his bill. In a classy, touching gesture, Whiteman still put his chair on stage and kept it empty as a symbol of their hope that he would return.
Even if it took a couple years, the foreshadowing says it all. The end came in Queens, in 1931, and in a freakout that had him telling his “rental agent” (assuming that’s a landlord) that “there were two Mexicans hiding under his bed with long daggers.” After trembling since George Kraslow (his rental agent) arrived, Beiderbecke collapsed into his arms and never recovered. He died August 6, 1931, at just 28 years old.
To raise something that didn’t come up anywhere else but toward the end of everything I read, Beiderbecke was a hero/symbol of his “jazz-mad generation.” Wikipedia pulled some quotes from contemporary sources on how his generation viewed him and, because they sound so familiar, two seem worth sharing. In terms of cultural context, the first:
“Hundreds of young collegians who couldn't recall a strain of Beethoven or Wagner could whistle Bix Beiderbecke choruses.”
…leads so nicely to the second:
“Perhaps ‘Bixie's’ death at the age of twenty-eight also is symbolical of the futility of the ‘jazz-mad generation's’ quest for self-expression.”
I know enough about how 18th-century popular music evolved into 19th-century popular music, and how everything changed more than most modern (which, here, means early 21st century) listeners can fully appreciate. Every genre after ragtime prompted one iteration of moral panic or another - though, honestly, most boiled down to, 1) what syncopation did to dancing, and 2) racist panic, both of which count as first cousins, if not nuclear siblings - and that genre offers a fairly credible peg as the beginning of popular music as the world knows it today. The idea that Beiderbecke’s fans could hum his tunes but not the works of Beethoven or Wagner was less a difference in concept - as implied by the notes on 18th and 19th century popular music above - but one of scale. The twin phenomena of permanent recorded music and mass marketing acted as the nitrous that let popular music leave classical forms in the dust. Whether authentic or manufactured and mass-marketed, self-expression has been at the heart of what the mast majority of people have listened to since ragtime. By most accounts I read, Beiderbecke embodied that change, and in the rock-star vein.
Naturally, his early, “tragic” death fed the legend and it took multiple, yet predictable forms - e.g., other famous people swearing they knew him back when; a 1950 movie called, Young Man with a Horn, starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, Doris Day, and with contributions on and off screen by Hoagy Carmichael himself; or Davenport, IA celebrating its most famous song with the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Festival, the Bix 7 road race, and all kinds of ancillary kitsch. I have no reasonable beef with that - how many dead idols do later generations have? - because Beiderbecke truly sounds revolutionary, even if my ears are too dumb to hear what made him so. At the same time, it is…just weird hearing about someone living a rock-star life right around 30 years before rock-‘n’-roll happened, and around 50 years (give or take) before the rock star concept lead to even more casualties.
About the Sampler
I included several of the songs above in the sampler - though not “Jazz Me Blues,” for some reasons I can’t begin to understand. I did, however, add “For No Reason at All in C” and “In the Dark” to rep what I understand to be the "piano side" of Beiderbecke’s repertoire. After that, the sampler is mostly made up of songs I liked. Whatever my ill-educated ear hears or doesn’t, most of the compilations on Spotify arranged Beiderbecke’s songs according to who he was playing with. For instance (and excluding songs linked to above), you have a handful of collaborations with his friend Frankie Trumbauer - e.g., “Ostrich Walk” and “Trumbology” - a selection with Paul Whiteman - e.g., “Mississippi Mud” (the rest are above) - and a bunch with Jean Goldkette - .e.g., “My Pretty Girl,” “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover,” “I’m Proud of a Baby Like You,” “Slow River,” and “Clementine (From New Orleans).” The rest look like a grab-bag from his various side projects (he had a lot), including, “Sorry,” or just a bunch of strays - e.g., his elegant “I’m Coming Virginia,” “Singin' the Blues,” and one of Beiderbecke’s most famous tunes, and one only he could write, “Davenport Blues.”
The piano numbers aside, most of what I heard this past week sounds like New Orleans jazz to me: swirling, busy, with a lively tempo, and vocals that come in 20+ bars later than I’m used to. And that’s when they come in at all. Biederbecke accounts for the swirling, gliding, feinting melody that plays over the foundation. Dated, in other words, and impressive, but also hard to hear as something new, especially just shy of a decade and all kinds of technical/technological innovations later. The quotes above about the generational divide did as much as anything to bring home to broad idea that, at one point in the early 20th century, Bix Beiderbecke played the hottest sound around.
Till the next one…which, for the record, will be Paul Whiteman. And I’m excited about what comes after.
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