The Beiderbecke Affair

Muldaur: Talent and Character Are Not Connected

 

On May 18, 2009, I sat down with the musician Geoff Muldaur, who in 2003 released Private Astronomy: A Vision of the Music of Bix Beiderbecke. We kicked back on Adirondack chairs facing out into the woods of Charlottesville, Virginia, and Muldaur spent a good chunk of the interview watching birds through his binoculars. Nevertheless, we had a pretty good conversation. Here's the beginning of it:

Geoff Muldaur: Talent and character are not connected. It's a horrible realization for most people, but it's absolutely true. And it baffles people, because how could Ray Charles produce such warm and beautiful things when he wasn't this great guy, whereas Benny Carter, greatest guy in the world. It's so random -- obsessive-compulsive slob Beethoven. I mean, total slob. Kept his shitter under his writing desk. I mean, the place was disgusting, and he produces God's music.

So that being the case, I've never been that attracted tot he historical part of each person. But I've been very interested in the music, and on that level, of course, Bix is like this shining little nugget, an absolute diamond -- very singular in our entire history. So he becomes special for that, but when I was in Davenport, the people were starting to talk about this place down the street from the house where they say he might have molested that girl and all that shit, and I was like, man, I didn't even go there. I'm a recovering alcoholic, and to me, so much is answered by that. Why does he write that letter to Trumbauer talking about how his knees don't work? Have you ever seen that? It's to get money! Because he's an alkie, man. And at the same time he's playing these pure notes from heaven, so . . . He's just an alcoholic, man. He had a disease, plain and simple. If Bill Wilson had come along sooner, then perhaps we'd have a guy visiting colleges now and talking about his chamber works. You know, I don't know what would have happened.

[. . .]

To me this is the baffling thing. Why, and not just Bix, but primarily Bix, why do these white guys in the early twenties, in the Midwest, the Chicago area, and of course Bix in Davenport -- they hear the music of King Oliver and Louis Armstrong. Even Bix, when you're standing in his bedroom, you wonder if he could hear that music coming from the river. It's very romantic to look out across that park and to think about the wanderlust, what sounds were coming across -- So you hear that, and you've got something in your soul, and you've got tons of classical and American popular music in your bones because everyone did, because everyone had a piano in the world, and you decide to pick up the cornet, and maybe you learned a few licks from Nick LaRocca and then this guy -- who's this other guy who came through town, Hardy or whatever it was --

Brendan Wolfe: Emmet Hardy.

GM: Yeah. So, but really, the driving force is Louis Armstrong, Freddy Keppard, these guys out of Chicago, and you decide to play this instrument, and you immediately find your own voice and don't come close to imitating those guys. How does that happen? Today, the first thing kids do is try to get in to what the guys sounds like, what he did, and he didn't do any of that. He didn't play any Armstrong licks. He didn't go for that sound. He just opened up from his soul. And the same from others; look at Pee Wee Russell and a bunch of other guys. Just like, if you're listening to Johnny Dodds on the clarinet and you're a young white guy from Chicago, and you're Frank Teschemacher, and you decide not to play like that, or do you decide? Or do you just pick it up and out starts coming this stuff and you don't think it's your job to even come close to copying somebody as a tradition.

So to me, in this day and age, it's so different than what's done today. It's almost why there's so little going on. Everyone has incredible technical abilities but no one creates a new world.

So that's always been very curious to me, and then of course the whole midwestern thing, with the whole-tone moves and some of these great chordal moves, seems to have died out to black big band music. You know, the dancing became the thing, and having structured, interesting chordal changes like the Trumbauer orchestra or, you know, I'm not a big Goldkette fan, but the Trumbauer stuff is just sick good.

BW: Why the Midwest?

GM: Well, there were probably a lot of parlor pianos and the riverboat music, Chicago, and the black influence coming up from New Orleans, et cetera. I mean, the whole world was this way, but in the United States, music was just everywhere. Even when I was a kid in the early fifties, music was everywhere, man. One the street corners, people singin' quartets and stuff. Electronics almost kind of kills it in a way.

Over the next year, I'll post more of this and other interviews I have collected in the course of researching my book, so stay tuned.

IMAGE: Geoff Muldaur by Petra Hanisch

Meet Abbe Niles, the Voice of Bix Beiderbecke

We can argue all day, I suppose -- and some seem to want to -- over the precise circumstances that led to the only known interview of Bix Beiderbecke containing almost no words actually spoken by Bix Beiderbecke. (See post below.) Still, I think it's clear that an anonymous Davenport reporter took a nationally syndicated interview of Abbe Niles and inserted Niles's words and ideas into the mouth of Beiderbecke.

But who was Abbe Niles? It turns out he was a pretty interesting writer and thinker. A lawyer by trade with no special training in writing or music, he nevertheless was, by the mid-1920s, a leading popular music critic with a special love for blues and jazz. Here's an excerpt from an essay by Elliott S. Hurwitt in Ramblin' on My Mind: New Perspectives on the Blues (David Evans, ed.; 2008) in which Niles defends African American folk music from, of all people, James Weldon Johnson:

In an essay in The Nation in late 1926 Niles made one of th his strongest statements regarding the power and originality of America's black musical culture. The occasion was an offer to several writers to discuss influences on American culture from "other than Nordic sources," in the words of the magazine's editors. Niles chose this forum to defend the spirituals both against those who undervalued them and those who felt they had to be made more respectable or improved by symphonic development, in this case including James Weldon Johnson: "More can be asked from no body of folksong than may be found among the spirituals . . . it is difficult to appreciate Mr. Johnson's concern that Negro themes should be commonly employed in this country as material for music in the larger forms."

Niles pointed out that Johnson's "anxiety" ultimately led, "in grosser form," to Paul Whiteman's egregious rhetorical question: "What folksong would have amounted to anything if some great writer had not put it into a symphony?" Niles had an answer for Whiteman, and it shows his usual independence of mind, "Dvorak's use of Negro themes doubtless helped the spirituals toward recognition, but the weaving of an integral living thing like a folksong into the structure of a symphony may . . . invigorate the latter only at the expense of the former; it is by no means written that the 'New World Symphony' will outlive 'Go Down, Moses.'"

Because I haven't read Niles's full argument, I'm not completely sure how a folksong is harmed by its association with a symphony, or why we must value folk music as "integral" and "living" above high art. This smacks of the primitivism that Niles, according to Hurwitt, despised in Carl Van Vechten. (Notice, by the way, that Van Vechten took the photo of Johnson in the Wiki article linked above.)

Anyway, Niles had the opportunity to become influential beyond the intellectual Left when he became the music critic for Bookman magazine. He certainly influenced the woman who interviewed him and whose article was stolen by the reporter in Davenport. She took a sentence from one Niles's Bookman columns and slightly rewrote it for her own story. Here's Hurwitt again:

Niles's journalistic career reached a peak in 1928, when his regular column, "Ballads, Songs and Snatches," appeared in a magazine called The Bookman. Niles's work soon caught the eye of people in the music business, and major record companies like Victor began sending him everything they released in the pop music field. he was also sent books, sheet music, and other materials. Before long, Niles and his wife became overwhelmed by the sheer volume of records and other items arriving at their door. His regular column was discontinued a year after it began, and after early 1929 Niles's reviewing and similar activities were much reduced.

He was, after all, a Wall Street lawyer by trade. He must have been busy. Still, it sounds to me like he was a forerunner of the professional newspaper critic. Having served in that role myself, I can relate to the feelings of being overwhelmed by all the new music and, in my case, books, too. It's easy to burn out; more than that, though, it's easy to lose perspective and your criticism suffers as a result. 

Whatever the case was with Niles, his words and ideas have managed to live a long life in the mouth of Bix Beiderbecke.

IMAGE: W. C. Handy (center) with Abbe and Katherine Niles. Abbe Niles was a friend of Handy's and an important advocate of his work. This photograph, which appears in Ramblin' on My Mind, comes from the Edward Abbe Niles Papers at the Watkinson Library, Trinity College, Hartford.

Bix Beiderbecke (The Fake Interview)

The title of my book-in-progress is Finding Bix, and what better place to go looking for the legendary jazz cornetist than in the text of his only known newspaper interview? The unsigned article, headlined "'Jazz Is Musical Humor,' Says Davenport Composer and Cornetist of Whiteman's Band," appeared in the Davenport Democrat and Leader, Bix Beiderbecke's hometown newspaper, on Sunday, February 10, 1929.

When he died just two years later, Beiderbecke left behind very few words (a handful of letters, some anecdotes from friends), so this interview represents a real bonanza of Bix-speak. And yet biographers have long been skeptical that it reflects his actual words. 

Turns out their skepticism was justified. I can now say for sure that it's a fake.

First some background: In the interview, Bix expounds on the origins of jazz and his employer Paul Whiteman's landmark 1924 Aeolian Hall concert, the one in which he premiered Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. "By cacophonic combinations [Whiteman] proved what a change came over the face of Melusina and Terpsichore in a decade," the anonymous Davenport journalist writes. (Who? What?)

Bix goes on to famously suggest that "Jazz is musical humor." 

The humor of jazz is rich and many-sided. Some of it is obvious enough to make a dog laugh. Some is subtle, wry-mouthed, or back-handed. It is by turns bitter, agonized, and grotesque. Even in the hands of white composers it involuntarily reflects the half-forgotten suffering of the negro. Jazz has both white and black elements, and each in some respects has influenced the other. It's [sic] recent phase seems to throw the light of the white race's sophistication upon the anguish of the black.

Scholars such as Richard M. Sudhalter (who put the word interview in scare quotes when writing about it in Bix: Man & Legend) and Jean Pierre Lion never came right out and said why they doubted the article's authenticity. But presumably they wondered how a kid who had consistently struggled academically would be given to musings just a few years later on "the half-forgotten suffering of the negro." 

I shared that skepticism and decided to dig a little deeper. Phrases like cacophonic combinations and Melusina and Terpischore seemed especially to stick out. It didn't take long before Google pointed me toward So This Is Jazz by H. O. Osgood, published in 1926. "Cacophonic combinations" appears in his introduction, while the other bit comes from his review, reprinted elsewhere in the book, of Whiteman's Aeolian Hall concert.

That's pretty minor stuff, I admit, but it suggested to me that the Democrat's writer wasn't above a bit of plagiarism.* Still, he (or she) didn't appear to be making up Bix's actual words. Or at least that's what I thought until I happened upon a nationally syndicated article, published several months earlier, in The Evening Standard Independent of St. Petersburg, Florida. "The Official How and Why of Jazz -- From a Lawyer" by Louise Garwood is an interview with Edward Abbe Niles, a Harvard Law graduate, a Rhodes scholar, and a fancy-pants Wall Street lawyer (Cadwalader, Wickersham, and Taft). He also was, at the time, the author of Encyclopedia Britannica's entry on jazz. He even wrote an introduction to W. C. Handy's 1926 anthology of blues.

Niles was an expert, in other words, and a beautifully educated one, too. So at this point it should come as no surprise that he declared jazz to be "musical humor." And unlike Bix, he was given to musings on the half-forgotten suffering of the negro. After the jump, you'll find that Bix's words (except at the very end) are all more or less exactly Niles's words. (Both interviews are there. Compare them for yourself.) There's more to be said, I suppose, but this is enough for now. You can see the Niles interview in its original context here. More on Niles and the blues here.

* The jazz musician Brad Kay pointed out here an instance where the reporter actually seemed to be lifting from an earlier article in the Democrat about Bix's mother.

UPDATE: Discussion on the Bixography Discussion Group forum begins here and here.

IMAGE: Bix Beiderbecke, bandmates, and giant snake