Satch on Bix, from the former’s obituary in the Chicago Tribune, July 7, 1971:
In 1959 after recovering from a serious illness he reported to Down Beat magazine that “Bix [Beiderbecke] tried to get me up there to play first horn in Gabriel’s band, but I couldn’t make the gig. It hadn’t been cleared with Joe Glaser [his manager], the union or the State Department.”
In the Chicago Tribune on Feb. 24, 1974, the incomparable rock critic Lester Bangs reviewed Remembering Bix, a memoir by Ralph Berton.
But in the end the lapidary triumph of Beiderbecke’s art may be as significant and, ironically, a direct refutation of the appalling waste of his life. Because Bix proved, five decades ago, that sleaze and destruction, the brandishing of the degrade and déclassé, are not necessary concomitants of an alternative art form: “What was Bix saying that no other musician had ever said? Simply that this jazz wasn’t on the bottom looking up any more. It was out on the level now, reaching for the heights; not grinning sardonically or defiantly at itself as black and poor and dirty and barefoot: Yeah, baby, I’m ugly, ain’t I, I’m evil and lowdown and funky, ain’t had a bath for a year, dig me!”
That’s a lesson that far too many white jivesters, from the Rolling Stones on down, have still not learned.
It can be tough to tell where Bangs ends and Berton begins . . .
From “Quartet” by David Glines, in the autumn 1978 issue of Chicago Review:
Whiteman, in blackface, wearing a straw hat and bow tie, burst in on Gershwin, who was listening to Milhaud’s La Creation du Monde, enjoying the blues parts. The raucous din of garbage can lids drifted up tinnily from elevator shafts, the click of dice was heard from alleys where men were playing craps. All the way from Brooklyn you could smell the cabbage cooking.
“Cabbage!” Gershwin choked out, approaching tears.
“Mississippi Mud,” Whiteman responded.
“Whiteman,” Gershwin crooned rhapsodically, “I was walking down Broadway today and the Blues hit me.”
“Wang Wang, Washboard or Weary?”
“Let’s go to Paris, Whiteman.”
“What would an American do in Paris, Georgie?”
“Dance! Get the Blues!”
They broke into a soft shoe shuffle then into a full scale Broadway production tap dance routine without even having to change their shoes. Taxicab horns honked out rhythms for them.
All night they danced, played poker, told jokes, smoked Havanas, wore visors and arm bands, Broadway babies near their ears. They were too hot to cool down. Then . . . the Blues hit Gershwin right there, in the wee hours on Fifth Avenue! “Man, the Blues!” Gershwin wailed. It all happened outside an all-night diner—inside a man sitting at the counter, wearing a fedora, hunched over a cup of coffee as the last Uptown bus was pulling out with nobody on it.
Whiteman, singing in a clown suit, was ascending a stairway to the Stars. New York looked like a thirty-minute etch in a nitric acid bath. Gershwin, his hair falling out, was imitating Al Jolson on bended knee. The band blared. Bix Beiderbecke blew. The stars were out in the Bronx. The wind whistled through the gray canyons of buildings. John Sloan, in his studio, was painting a nude. Pots and pans flew out the windows of the tenement buildings. Bix blew. The nude put on her clothes. They all had the Blues. Whiteman was chasing his hat along a gutter on 42nd Street. He never came back. The Blues had settled in.
IMAGE: Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street (New York City) (oil, 1928; original in color) by John Sloan
From a story in the Independent of London about the radical theater director Joan Littlewood and her protégé Howard Goorney:
Devoted to Littlewood’s style of work, Goorney remained crucial to her ensemble ideals for over 30 years, while she in turn was like a surrogate mother to him when adolescent. On one occasion [during the Second World War], she and the girls in the company decided that his melancholy appearance (a lifelong trait) was because he had just fallen in love but was likely for immediate call-up; they arranged a love-nest with a gas fire, Guinness, Bix Beiderbecke record and condoms (two) thoughtfully provided. Anxious next day for the result, they were disappointed when Goorney shook his head: “The sirens went just as I was getting down to it. I had to make for the hospital—I was on fire-guard duty.” What Goorney kept from all but Littlewood was that the nurses’ home had been hit and that all night he had been bringing out the dead.
It is often said that Bix Beiderbecke was mentioned in print but once or twice in his lifetime. While this isn’t true, it nevertheless took until January 23, 1938—or six and a half years after his death—for the New York Times to take notice of his life. And then it was only in a letter to the editor. The occasion was Benny Goodman’s landmark Carnegie Hall concert, which critics today suggest marked the birth of swing but which the Times then only sniffed at. This is the attitude that got Robert B. Tufts of White Plains, New York, all het up.
As to your decision that swing is just a passing fad, due soon to fade, ne’er more to return, you might be interested in knowing that swing (the real article) has been played well on for twenty years now and will continue to be played for many, many years to come. Of course, swing has been lionized by the public at large only within the last three years or so, but, gracious sakes! real musicians such as King Oliver, Louie Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Jack Teagarden and Bix Beiderbecke, to mention only a few, were playing authentic swing years and years before this. The public stage of swing may, as you gloomily predict, soon die out, but there’ll be plenty of musicians who will carry on the torch for years to come.
To hear Goodman’s homage to Bix from that concert, check out the Bix Mix.
From “Funky” by Peter Tamony in American Speech (Vol. 55, No. 3, Autumn 1980):
Perhaps the earliest definition of funky is recorded in a brief glossary in Time’s cover article on Dave Brubeck (8 Nov. 1954): “Funky, adj. Authentic, swinging.” A week later, Walter Winchell strictured, “Time mag goofed with its jazz glossary. Said ‘Funky’ means authentic swing. Real hipsters say it means old-time rickety jazz” (San Francisco Call-Bulletin, 15 Nov. 1954). Obviously, the downhome connotation was being extended by a rebirth of feeling in jazz. The celebrated Bix Beiderbecke was said to have been funky because of his careless personal habits. “It was not just a joke that jazz clubs have been and are called ‘toilets.’” So the adjective was transferred to the rawness, the earthiness of blues played in closely packed, often unventilated, seven-day-sock joints with clogged plumbing, in which most black and white jazzmen have been sentenced to employment.
I’m guessing that if you gave a magazine article the title “Middle-Aged Man with a Horn” these days, not too many people would get the reference. But back in 1953, the editors of the New Republic trusted their audience to know all about the famous Otis Ferguson articles that appeared in TNR not quite 20 years earlier extolling the dead jazz hero Bix Beiderbecke. And of course there was the novel based on the articles and then the movie based on the novel.
What seems strange is that the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would connect these bits of pop culture to a political theorist like James Burnham, a former Communist who believed that the managerial class—not the workers—were going to take over the world. Which was not a bad insight, but Schlesinger was never impressed. In the March 16, 1953, issue of the New Republic he accused Burnham of being a man “in permanent apocalypse, a catastrophic thinker whose tiresome prophecies of doom can only dazzle once. He is the Bix Beiderbecke of our political journalism, only he has hit that high note once or twice too often.”
As far as strange Bix references, this one ranks right up there. Is it pluriactive? Okay, maybe not. But either way, it got me to wondering whether there is a Bix Beiderbecke of anything anymore. Oh wait. Eminem, for those who haven’t heard, is the Bix Beiderbecke of rap. But who would today’s Bix Beiderbecke of political journalism be?
Clive James on Bix Beiderbecke:
I listened to most of Beiderbecke’s Jean Goldkette and Paul Whiteman sides before I left Sydney, but it wasn’t until I was down and out in London in the early 1960s that I first heard “I’m Coming, Virginia.” An Australian homosexual ballet buff persuaded me to sit down and listen to a piece of music that he held to be the most beautiful thing in his life: better even than Swan Lake.
For a while “I’m Coming, Virginia” became the most beautiful thing in my life too. The coherence of its long Bix solo still provides me with a measure of what popular art should be like: a generosity of effects on a simple frame. The melodic line is particularly ravishing at its points of transition: there are moments when even a silent pause is a perfect note, and always there is a piercing sadness to it, as if the natural tone of the cornet, the instrument of reveille, were the first sob before weeping.
IN ADDITION: Courtesy of my friend Elliot, a moment from Bob Dylan’s radio show this week. Dylan reminds his listeners that the jazz standard “Skylark” was originally called “Bix Lix” in honor of composer Hoagy Carmichael’s old friend. In this version from 1941, Anita O’Day accompanies Gene Krupa’s big band.
Clint Eastwood, who directed the Charlie Parker biopic Bird, on Bix:
As a kid I really liked Bix Beiderbecke. I played cornet when Bix was like the biggest thing around. And then Young Man with a Horn came out and it was just way off, the breathing and the dubbing. It was really bad. I left the theater thinking an opportunity to do something special was really missed. I don’t think the people who made the movie really understood the music or really liked jazz. Jazz, I felt, was a true American art form that had never really been depicted. I just thought with Bird we could do something better.
(From: “Clint Eastwood: An Interview,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 3, Spring 1989)
Today would have been Bix Beiderbecke’s 105th birthday. Besides being one of the great soloists in jazz history, Bix is also one of American culture’s most fascinating characters. If, according to yesterday's Washington Post Book World, the poet Homer has become “a legend, not a personage whose life we can chart more or less accurately,” then Bix has remained both—a real person and a legend. Which, believe me, causes all kinds of problems.
Thanks to Ted for the support, by the way. It’s very much appreciated.
The banner image is a detail from Grant Wood’s “Young Corn.” Now owned by the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Community School District, it was painted in 1931: the same year Bix Beiderbecke died and a year after Wood painted “American Gothic.”
