Greg--
Thought you'd be interested
to know that Bix was almost exactly 60 years
older than you. I'm sure you'll raise a mug in his honor at
your grand Beer
Pong bash next weekend!
Sorry for the length of
this email (articles from today's Quad City Times);
I found some of it
interesting, and thought you might find it interesting,
too (if you find the time
to read it).
Am sure you had a great
time at Mardi Gras--enjoy next weekend, and Happy
Birthday!
Love, Celia
------------------------------------
Celebrating the birth of
Bix
By Jim Arpy
The golden Bach cornet is
mute at the Putnam Museum, and its master sleeps eternally in Oakdale Memorial
Park, oblivious to all of the plans to celebrate his 100th birthday.
Monday’s his birthday, and
it’s not only Quad-Citians who will sing “Happy Birthday” to Davenport-born Bix
Beiderbecke, who made major contributions to jazz and left a musical legacy
still admired worldwide. Memorials have already been held, or are planned, in
Wisconsin, New Jersey, Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio – even in the Netherlands.
It has been 72 years since
a doctor, in a shabby New York apartment, leaned over a thin and pale Bix and
solemnly intoned, “This boy is dead.” Bix was 28 years old.
The official cause of death
was listed as pneumonia, but others who loved and worried about him knew it was
his drinking that had sapped his talent and shortened his life. Maybe Louis
Armstrong, who knew how fans bought him drinks and kept him up all night, hit
it right when he said, “Bix died of too much love.”
Can this “boy” really have
been born 100 years ago? Not in the minds of his fans, where, frozen in time,
he is forever the “Young Man with a Horn,” the fallen soul of the “Roaring ’20s
Jazz Age.”
His birth certificate shows
that Leon Bix Beiderbecke was born at 2 a.m. in the family home at 1934 Grand
Ave., Davenport, on March 10, 1903, to Bismark and Agatha Beiderbceke, a
middle-class family with a rich heritage in the classics. He was a musical
wunderkind almost from the beginning.
When he was 4, Bix
discovered he could stand on tiptoe in front of the piano to press the keys.
With a little experimentation, he tapped out a rough but recognizable “Mister
Dooley,’’ then a popular tune.
By the age of 5, the
youngster, born with a perfect ear and pitch sense, was a kindergarten student
at Tyler School, just across the street from his home. He could play several
simple piano melodies with one finger. He also could sing in tune, and later,
at Davenport (now Central) High School, he sang in the glee club and performed
on the piano and cornet. As his hands
grew, allowing greater
reach on piano keys, so did his repertoire.
His piano teacher, Prof.
Charles Grade of Muscatine, would assign 7-year-old Bix a lesson to practice
until the next week, but he always assented when the boy asked to play each
selection over again immediately after hearing it, “just so I’ll know how it
sounds.”
But each time, Bix’s
uncanny musical memory would click on, and he’d play the selection back exactly
as Grade had played it — note for note — including any mistakes the good
professor made. After a few weeks of this, Grade demanded that Bix learn his
lessons “the right way,” with no preview performances, forcing the boy to
sight-read through each new lesson.
Bix progressed, but not as
the professor had expected. The future star sight-read each selection, but once
he saw how it went, more or less, he filled in the details hazy to him with his
rare musical imagination.
That did in Professor
Glade, who told Mrs. Beiderbecke, “I play something for him; he plays it back —
with improvements. I don’t think I can be of any further assistance to you, or
to him.”
It’s true that throughout
his brief career, Bix was a poor music reader, yet it is one of the many
incongruities of his life that his piano compositions are still played, and “In
A Mist” (introduced by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, with Bix on piano, at
Carnegie Hall) and “Davenport Blues,” are
considered classics.
Still, he is remembered
mostly for his unmatched sounds and innovative skill as a cornetist, playing
largely by ear and soaring imagination. His old recordings continue to win many
converts to jazz, among them celebrated composer and conductor Lalo Schifrin,
who said, “I heard my first recording of Bix and was amazed. I’d never heard
anything so beautiful and I knew then
I had to learn to play that
music.”
But, again there is the
enigma — Bix didn’t follow conventional methods of playing the cornet. He
taught himself to play on a $35 horn he bought from a Davenport High School
buddy, Fritz Putzier, and for his whole amazing career used the wrong fingering
technique. Some mistake! But many feel strange fingering was at least partly
responsible for his bell-like pure tones.
Hoagy Carmichael once
recalled feeling breathless and having to lie down in awe the first time he
heard Bix on cornet.
Much as he loved music
growing up, Bix was a regular boy, and by all accounts a natural athlete,
excelling in baseball, and especially tennis. He had girl friends, too, but his
absorption with music left little time for anything else.
It’s an often-told story
how 15-year-old Bix was first mesmerized by jazz when his older brother,
Burnie, returned from duty in World War I with a wind-up Columbia graphophone
and a record of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, pressed by Columbia Records.
Bix immediately began to play the cornet parts over and over and over.
In his conservative German
household, where jazz was as welcome as termites, it conquered young Bix
without a fight, opening a new world of music that would grow bigger and
brighter, and only finally fell silent on that somber August 6th, 13 years away
in Bix’s future.
More and more, jazz became
everything. His friends have recalled how Bix used to sneak out of school to
savor the music of vaudeville shows and silent movies, where music was provided
by pianists, or orchestras, in the theater pits. Naturally, his grades
suffered. Big time.
Rich Johnson, Moline,
musical director of the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Society, and an untiring Bix history
researcher, a few years ago located a rare transcript of Bix’s high school
grades.
“Boy, were they awful! His
only good grades were in music, otherwise he was failing just about everything
else,” Johnson said. “It’s no wonder his parents sent him to Lake Forest
Academy near Chicago, hoping he’d do better.”
Poor parents. They never
dreamed they’d opened the seductive portal to Jazz Heaven — Chicago, a Mecca of
hot jazz clubs, like the Friar’s Inn, where, ducking out of his dorm room and
catching the train into Chicago, Bix might revel in the steamy jazz of the New
Orleans Rhythm Kings, or drop into the Black Cat Room in the basement of the
Edgewater Beach Hotel, which featured a regular five-piece combo.
Soon he was sitting in with
some of the bands, and even sooner he would be asked to depart permanently from
Lake Forest Academy for too many late-night-in-Chicago escapades and other
violations of school rules.
He made an effort to forget
jazz and work in his father’s coal yard, but the music wouldn’t free him, and
finally he didn’t try to fight it. Back in Chicago, his circle of musician
friends cheered the prodigy’s return and his fame continued to grow. As his
cornet prowess matured, Bix was much in
demand to play in many
Windy City small combos. He’d even sat in with seasoned celebrities, such as
Louis Armstrong, who admired Bix’s playing as much as Bix did his.
Work and recording sessions
followed with many other bands as Bix won a reputation as a show-stopper.
Eventually the group he was with renamed themselves the Wolverines and gained
lasting fame, especially with jazz-crazy college crowds.
The Wolverines were a key
step in Bix’s heady career. His next major move was touring with the popular
Jean Goldkette Orchestra, then one of the largest and most-liked in the
country. Bix’s reputation continued to grow, sometimes almost bordering on hero
worship. In time, he had an offer from the King of Jazz, Paul Whiteman, leader
of the most popular and prosperous
jazz band in America.
Working for him was the
pinnacle of a jazzman’s career, the Big Time. Bix had “arrived,” and, from
records and personal appearances, was a celebrity. Modest and unassuming, he ducked the limelight whenever possible.
But fans pursued him, pushed drinks on him, dragged him to all-night parties,
and even invaded his hotel rooms at all hours. Good-naturedly, Bix put up with
it all.
Unfortunately, Bix’s
drinking was growing, too, affecting his health and his playing. Alcoholism
then was not known as a disease, but in October 1929, he entered the Keeley
Institute in Dwight, Ill., known throughout the Midwest for its success in the
treatment of alcoholism. He was found to be in more serious condition than the
average patient, but was discharged Nov. 18. It
was noted on a final Institute
report that “his chances for full recovery are not good.”
During this time, Bix was
on leave from the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, and believed that when he had
conquered his personal devils he would go back. It was never to be, though
Whiteman had kept his chair open and retained him on full salary.
Bix couldn’t regain his
strength for endless recording sessions and long, tough tours. Worse, some of
the magic was drained and gone from the golden horn. Still, he remained sober
for seven months. Then he began drinking again, even more than before. And the
shadows began to gather around him.
Hoagy Carmichael’s doleful eulogy rang too true: “He was our golden boy,
doomed to an untimely end.”
The Great Depression, that
began with the stock market crash in 1929, slowly devastated the music
industry. Desperate people singing “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” wouldn’t
flock to theaters and night clubs. Transporting big bands across the country
became too expensive. Some broke up; others cut back on personnel.
Too, talking movies came in
1927, siphoning off many of the bands’ customers. Radio cut into profits, too,
though it did offer some playing jobs, but mostly only for those who could read
music, which left Bix out.
Bix, often worn out from
illness and drinking bouts, many times missing engagements, or choruses, was
off the Whiteman payroll. In 1930 and ’31 he found himself taking small, poorly
paying gigs, and only occasionally playing up to his potential. Saddened by the
erosion of his once-magnificent talents, he turned more and more to gin for
comfort.
Some who knew him then told
how former friends and fans, who had cheered and praised Bix in his heyday,
then propped him against bars, fed him drinks and encouraged him to play,
booing and snickering when he blew lots of clinkers.
“He’d try,” recalled jazz
great Red Nichols, “and they’d double over laughing at the sound of it. These
same guys, many of them who owed their styles to him, never could come close to
equaling what he’d done. Now they were using him for fun.”
In all other respects, Bix
was exemplary, and here’s as note for the would-be detractors, who have blatted
it about that Bix was addicted to marijuana. Dick Turner, a ’20s musician with
Bix, said, “There was this one time — he was always getting credit for what in
those days they called
‘muggles’ (marijuana). I
remember at my place a guy I went to school with —a musician — ...started to
prod Bix, “How’s this and how’s that, and how is the muggles?”
With that, the usually
mild-mannered Bix exploded. Turner said, “Bix laid right into him, saying ‘I
never smoked one of those in my life. I don’t know where guys get that idea!’ ”
Bix historian Rich Johnson,
trying to track down those rumors of Bix’s drug usage, has done extensive
research on the subject.
“Nowhere, not from anyone
who knew him, not from any reports, was Bix known to smoke marijuana or take
any kind of narcotics. And no one who knew Bix ever knew him to lie.”
Jazz buff and radio
personality Jim Grover of Ohio once said of Bix: “When the jazzmen of the ’30s
needed a hero, they chose Bix, the high school dropout, the self-taught
musician, who had been part of the two most successful bands of the 1920s.”
What made his playing so
unusual and difficult for others to copy?
Carmichael said, “The perfection that was Bix’s music resulted from his
economy of notes.”
Bix’s friend and famous
arranger, Bill Challis, said much the same thing: “He put so much meaning into each note. Most everyone else
depended on the fancy curlicues to sound good.”
Agatha and Burnie brought
Bix home to Davenport on a long, sad train ride from New York, and he lay in
the baggage compartment in his coffin in a tuxedo, the only decent article of
clothing they could find in his cluttered New York apartment.
Among the hundreds of
floral tributes at his funeral was a six-foot cornet, fashioned entirely from
roses. It came from Paul Whiteman. Davenport radio station WOC played his
records all day long. Someone brought a wind-up phonograph to the graveside to
play “In a Mist” just before his coffin was lowered.
Not a single jazz musician
or friend of Bix’s helped carry the coffin down the gravel drive. Those who
did, according to fellow musician Wayne Rohlff of Davenport, were “wealthy
friends of the family, who were either selected by Burnie, or by Bix’s
parents.”
Second Article:
Celebrating the birth of
Bix from here to The Netherlands
By Jim Arpy
Bix Society President Ray
Voss says he wasn’t surprised that Bix 100th birthday celebrations
are being held in a lot of places besides his hometown.
Still, when musician Joep
Peeters of Breda, The Netherlands, e-mailed that Bix will be honored in his
city, too, Voss did raise an eyebrow or two, but quickly regained his
composure.
“I’m not really very
surprised because we know there are so many organizations throughout the world
dedicated to Bix and his memory,” he said.
Peeters said his city’s
jazz festival has taken place every year since 1971. He recalled that Bix sound-alike Tom Pletcher played there in the
’70s with the Sons of Bix band. He said that for March 22-23, he has put
together a Bix Beiderbecke Weekend in Breda’s Tulip Hotel Keyser.
“On Saturday night there
will be a Bix Ballroom Extravaganza with a 12-piece Goldkette band and a Bix
ensemble, plus a vocal trio, and on Sunday a concert with an 8-piece band
playing the Frank Trumbauer arrangements,” Peeters wrote. “I hope there will be
some 500 people in the audience.” (Bix played with both Goldkette and
Trumbauer-directed bands.)
In Ohio, David (Bart)
Bartholomew of WMKV-FM started on March 8 to once again broadcast a series of
now-famous interviews with persons who knew Bix or are well-informed about him.
As it did in 2001, the show will run for 10 consecutive weeks, with two
half-hour segments airing each time. Each broadcast will be repeated at 10 p.m.
EST the following Thursday.
Detailed information about
the radio program is given on http://wmkvfm.org.
Voss explains that the Bix
Society is urging Bix 100th birthday celebrations to help the group kick off
plans to establish a $250,000 endowment fund to provide for young people’s jazz
camps, programs and workshops. The Society has trained dozens of area youths
for the past six years in its Bix Beiderbecke Youth Jazz Bands.
The Bix Beiderbecke Memorial
Jazz Band, led by Bill Donahoe, whose playing in Davenport in 1971 provided the
nucleus for the Bix Memorial Jazz Festival, will be helping out again in Bridgewater,
N.J. on March 15. They’ll celebrate with a major concert celebrating Bix’s Centennial.
Their Big Bix Birthday Bash
has become an annual event in Bridgewater. The nine-piece Bix Memorial Band has
been reunited from all over the country for this occasion.
The nationally circulated
Mississippi Rag, devoted to Bix’s kind of music, in March dedicated its front
cover to Bix, along with a story about him.
And, in far-off Sydney,
Australia, the New Wolverines Jazz Band, frequent players at the Bix Festival,
began their 100th Bix Anniversary with their first weekly concert dubbed “Bix’s
100th Birthday.” Naturally, the only music they played was his.
Appropriately added to
Bix’s list of honors this year was a Grammy nomination in the Historical Album
category. He, Frank Trumbauer and Jack Teagarden were nominated for a
collection of their work on the Okeh label entitled “The Complete Okeh and
Brunswick, Frank Bix Beiderbecke. Frank Trumbauer and Jack Teagarden Sessions
(1924-36).”
No, he didn’t win, but as
Musical Director Rich Johnson of the Bix Society says, “How many guys who have
been dead 72 years have ever been even nominated for a Grammy?”