The Beiderbecke Affair

Bix’s Diary: February 17, 1927

The Goldkette Orchestra has had a busy month. Besides being mentioned in John O’Hara’s debut novel Appointment at Samarra, there’s the gig at New York’s Roseland, then off to Springfield, Massachusetts (a “flop,” according to pianist Paul Mertz), Detroit, and finally Ann Arbor for a university “J-Hop” opposite old rival Fletcher Henderson. The band continues to record on the straight and narrow such numbers as “Sunny Disposish” (Feb. 3), while Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer buy their own studio time and make jazz history with “Trumbology,” “Clarinet Marmalade,” and “Singin’ the Blues” (Feb. 4).

On Feb. 17, Goldkette settles in back at the Graystone in Detroit. Bix, though, is in New York cornet-shopping at a music store on West 48th Street owned by one Hans Bach, whose brother Vincent is an instrument-maker. Bix is interested in Vincent’s Stradivarius models and ends up purchasing two of them. The first Vincent personally tests for his customer in the store. Bix takes that one with him and has the second—a gold-plated beauty with Bix’s name engraved into the bell—sent to him in Detroit.

The second cornet would be found in Bix’s apartment at the time of his death. The first has disappeared.

• Sunny Disposish – Jean Goldkette and His Orchestra [Mp3]

ADDITIONALLY: 16 mm home movies of Bix and the Goldkette band, shot by Paul Mertz

This is one in a series of posts following the career of early jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke. The diary is based on the research found in Bix: The Leon Bix Beiderbecke Story by Philip R. and Linda K. Evans.

Bix’s Diary: January 21, 1927

After playing through Christmas and New Year’s, the Goldkette band wraps up its appearance at the Graystone Ballroom in Detroit. (Regarding the New Year’s Eve appearance, D.A.C. Magazine reported that “Jean Goldkette gives orders, ‘to toot to kill until there isn’t a shake left in the most festive hoof.’”) Tonight the boys leave for New York and another gig at the legendary Roseland.

This is one in a series of posts following the career of early jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke. The diary is based on the research found in Bix: The Leon Bix Beiderbecke Story by Philip R. and Linda K. Evans.

Bix’s Diary: December 11, 1926

The Jean Goldkette Orchestra is back in Detroit for an extended run at the Graystone Ballroom. In November, Bix took a few days’ leave to attend his older brother Burnie’s wedding. (The ceremony was in lovely Maquoketa, Iowa. Here’s a society-page write-up [jpg].) Bix was the best man and, during the reception, sat in with the band.

A few weeks later, the great Paul Whiteman stopped in the Motor City. His is the most popular and highest-paid band in the country—the papers call him the King of Jazz—but Bix showed no sign of being impressed. When the two were introduced, Bix is said to have remarked, “Your name sounds familiar somehow!”

Luckily for Bix, Whiteman didn’t take it personally.

For tonight’s concert, Goldkette and company perform excerpts from Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which was commissioned for Whiteman two years prior.

This is one in a series of posts following the career of early jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke. The diary is based on the research found in Bix: The Leon Bix Beiderbecke Story by Philip R. and Linda K. Evans.

Bix’s Diary: November 5, 1926

After its triumphant run at the Roseland Ballroom in New York, the Jean Goldkette band returns to Detroit. At the hotel, clarinetist Don Murray finds an old cabinet organ in his room, and the musicians take their turn noodling on the keyboard. Years later, Paul Mertz will swear that this is when he first heard Bix play the chords for “In a Mist.” The tune would be famous in no small part for its mixture of jazz with French Impressionist ideas. Arranger Bill Challis would recall Bix coming into his room at the Gotham Hotel and playing Debussy and Stravinsky. “Bix expressed his enthusiasm for the music in no uncertain terms,” he said.

While Bix and Challis bask in high art, pianist Howdy Quicksell and Murray are busy stealing street signs. The police actually stop Mertz as he attempts to carry a chocolate-smeared ladder up the stairs to his room.

IMAGE: Stravinsky also got in trouble with the police. More can be found here and here (takeaway: don’t mess with “The Star Spangled Banner”).

This is one in a series of posts following the career of early jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke. The diary is based on the research found in Bix: The Leon Bix Beiderbecke Story by Philip R. and Linda K. Evans.

Bix’s Diary: October 12, 1926

The Jean Goldkette Orchestra and the Fletcher Henderson band both play the Roseland Ballroom in New York. “Two of the finest—unquestionably the finest Dance Orchestras in the world—playing alternately,” brags the ad in The New York Times. It’s a classic battle of the bands. Who can make the kids shimmy harder? Will it be the local band Louis Armstrong taught to swing or will it be Bix Beiderbecke’s outfit from the Midwest?

“I bumped into two of those [Henderson] musicians recently,” Goldkette pianist Irving Riskin remembered, “Benny Carter and Don Redman, who as you know are now big in their own right. W hen they spoke of the first night hearing us at the Roseland, Don said, ‘Boy, that was great,’ and Carter interpolated, ‘That wasn’t great, that was frightening!’ Which made me feel we must have had a pretty good band. Something to be proud of.’”

• My Pretty Girl (Take 2) – The Jean Goldkette Orchestra [Mp3]

• Sugar Foot Stomp – Fletcher Henderson and His Orchestra [Mp3]

IMAGE: Fletcher Henderson and His Orchestra

This is one in a series of posts following the career of early jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke. The diary is based on the research found in Bix: The Leon Bix Beiderbecke Story by Philip R. and Linda K. Evans.

Bix’s Diary: October 11, 1926

Bix is playing with the Jean Goldkette Orchestra out of Detroit, perhaps the hottest white band in America. After a barnstorming tour across America, the “Famous Fourteen” have landed in New York, ready to take on all comers. Or to just play for tea time. Whatever pays.

A few nights earlier, Bix was presented by a club owner with a six-by-ten-inch wooden replica of a front tooth. (Laughs all around.) This was in honor of Bix’s single false tooth, which sometimes slips out during performances, causing him to scramble on hands and knees to find it. That night he played especially well on a new tune called “Baby Face,” leading one witness to later gush, “I can state now, if I could turn back the clock to just one moment in Bix’s life, I would rather hear that impromptu flight again than anything else I ever heard him do.”

Tonight, however, it’s just the sweet tunes, dreck like “Idolizing” and “Hush-a-Bye.” Remembered the band’s arranger Bill Challis: “My favorite was ‘Hush-a-Bye.’ It was a dog. I didn’t like it. Even if it was good, I wouldn’t have liked it.”

IMAGE: The Goldkette boys on tour, armed and ready to gig. That’s Bix, fourth from the left.

This is one in a series of posts following the career of early jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke. The diary is based on the research found in Bix: The Leon Bix Beiderbecke Story by Philip R. and Linda K. Evans.

Bix’s Diary: An Introduction

Here is one of the books I brought with me to Virginia: Bix: The Leon Bix Beiderbecke Story by Philip R. and Linda K. Evans. At 602 pages, it’s a big red doorstop with poor binding and, on its cover, a painting of a dreamy-eyed Bix. (By accident or design, this Bix also comes outfitted with a Mona Lisa smile and a shimmering orange nimbus.) The book itself is a singularly thorough, even compulsive work of scholarship. Meticulously organized into a day-by-day, year-by-year chronology of Bix’s life, it reads more like the authors’ research notes than a traditional biography. A day may occupy pages or, in the instance of Thursday, March 18, 1926, a mere nine words: “Bix and Pee Wee Russell had dinner at Ruth’s.” Telegraphic descriptions are accompanied by info-laden charts and tables, newspaper clippings, orchestra programs (Bix often attended the St. Louis Symphony), set lists, personnel lists, personal letters, photographs (including a family album of far-flung, present-day Beiderbeckes), and verbatim transcripts from interviews with friends and acquaintances. “Bix came in and borrowed some cigarettes,” the aforementioned Ruth recalled in 1973. “I was smoking Camels and I think that was his brand, too.” There is an index of song titles and a section devoted to the particulars of Bix’s cornets. And lest you wonder why the boldface print, Philip Evans explains in his Foreword: “So as not to confuse the reader, we have bolded Bix’s name/names when it is referring to the Bix. Also his words whether in comments, his letters or newspaper articles, have also been bolded.”

While explicitly declaring war on all things “anti-Bix”—from the Evanses’ perspective, a short list would certainly include these two films and Ralph Berton’s memoir—the ironically titled Leon Bix Beiderbecke Story is also at war with narrative itself. It is a colossus of facts, filled with information of all kinds, both pertinent and otherwise. It is not, however, a story. Stories are the means of myth, after all, and the Bix myth, promulgated in these many “flawed,” “unfortunate,” “self-serving,” “imaginary,” “reckless,” “arbitrary,” and “often politically correct” novels, biographies, memoirs, and movies, is perhaps the chief source of what really is an astonishing amount of misinformation. “Happily,” the book tells us, “the error-ridden glut has now been rendered kaput, obsolete—fit only for a hungry paper-shredder and a bottomless compost pit.”

Well, I doubt that, actually.

Either way, I thought it would be fun to use Evans & Evans as the basis for an occasional feature called Bix’s Diary. Of course, Bix was no Samuel Pepys; for starters, he had much better pitch! But over half a century, Phil Evans, who died in 1999, gathered enough minutiae about his favorite musician that the ebb & flow of a jazzman’s life begins to appear.

So check back regularly and find out what tune Bix recorded today or what brand of cigarette he most likely smoked after . . .