Crash Course Timeline, No. 20: Bix Beiderbecke, Davenport, Iowa's Hippest (Drunkest) Son

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.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 9: OG Jass & a Few of Its Pioneers

What the hottest bands of the 1920s probably looked like...

I hadn’t planned on either doing a general post on 1920s jazz or touching on more half-forgotten names, but, when I learned that one of the first songs Bix Biederbecke learned by ear was the Original Dixieland Jass/Jazz Band’s “Tiger Rag,” the lack of context started to bug me. And so…

What is jazz, who started it and where? To tackle the first question, and contra Jelly Roll Morton claim that he invented it, no one really knows the answer. One can nail down some specific firsts - say, that Jelly Roll Morton wrote the first published jazz composition, or that the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (hereafter, “ODJB”) recorded the first 78 rpm album featuring jazz (“Livery Stable Blues,” b/w “Dixieland Jass Band One-Step,” Victor 18255) - but jazz, like the blues, had a long unwritten history that most people have the good sense not to fill in. In structure and theory, it has roots in blues and ragtime. Getting the a more useful answer, however, involves a couple twists and turns that still leave a handful of open questions.

“When Broadway picked it up, they called it 'J-A-Z-Z'. It wasn't called that. It was spelled 'J-A-S-S'. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, you wouldn't say it in front of ladies.”
- Eubie Blake (quoted from Wikipedia’s overview, the main source for a lot of this)

Something forbidden, in other words, some new thing let loose in the wild of "real America." And yet the crowd went wild; in one of the oldest tales of American history, "real America" wanted jazz. The first ODJB 78 was sold as a novelty, only to surprise everyone by becoming a hit. Before too long, jazz and the people who played it came to dominate pop culture and ultimately become a big enough part in daily life that sense of the forbidden fall away. And, as often happens (which, here, means almost always), that didn't take long.

To return to the question of what jazz is, the Wikieditor had one theory on the origins of its name: it might have come from the slang term, “jasm,” which means “pep and energy” (...but when?). To flag some other, appealing theories:

“Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African-American music traditions.”