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Bix Beiderbecke was a hard-drinking, introspective boy from Davenport, Iowa and he blew his cornet with the sweetest tone this side of the heavenly choir. In return for drinking himself to death at age twenty-eight, we jazz lovers speak of Bix with a wistful reverence reserved for saints and martyrs.
Not that it is undeserved – no less an authority than Pops himself, Louis Armstrong, had this to say about his Caucasian counterpart: “the first time I heard Bix, I said these words to myself: there’s a man as serious about his music as I am…” And the private jam sessions in which Louis and Bix crossed horns are as legendary as any lost recording opportunity in jazz history. The enigma and legend of Bix is further enhanced by his forays into modern classical piano works. Compositions such as “In A Mist” and “Flashes” are some of the earliest substantive uses of the whole tone scale in a jazz idiom (although Duke Ellington’s “Rhapsody Jr.” beats Bix by six months). These pieces reveal a musician of unusually expansive influence, enamored of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel as much as Louis Armstrong.
Jazz literature, as well as recorded history, reveals that Bix’s late 1920s sides with Frankie Trumbauer (playing the rarely heard C melody saxophone) were the royal road to the lyrical, cool sounds associated with 1950s West Coast jazz. And the prophet who filtered their mellow message through his own genius? The man Billie Holiday dubbed the “President” of the tenor sax, Lester Young. “[Frankie] Trumbauer was my idol,” Pres recalled, “When I had just started to play, I used to buy all his records. I imagine I can still play all those solos off the record… Trumbauer always told a little story. And I liked the way he slurred the notes.” “A Tribute to Bix Beiderbecke” is in its twenty-sixth year under the delightfully odd eye of Phil Pospychala. March 5-8, devotees of the subtle delights of ‘20s jazz will descend upon the Racine Marriott for three days of swinging polyphony from two hot, young outfits out of New Orleans. There will be gold digging through shellac stacks of early jazz 78s, lectures with scholars and critics, jam sessions, rare films and free birthday cake for Bix.
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The enigma and legend of Bix is further enhanced by his forays into modern classical piano works. Compositions such as “In A Mist” and “Flashes” are some of the earliest substantive uses of the whole tone scale in a jazz idiom (although Duke Ellington’s “Rhapsody Jr.” beats Bix by six months). These pieces reveal a musician of unusually expansive influence, enamored of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel as much as Louis Armstrong.
Jazz literature, as well as recorded history, reveals that Bix’s late 1920s sides with Frankie Trumbauer (playing the rarely heard C melody saxophone) were the royal road to the lyrical, cool sounds associated with 1950s West Coast jazz. And the prophet who filtered their mellow message through his own genius? The man Billie Holiday dubbed the “President” of the tenor sax, Lester Young. “[Frankie] Trumbauer was my idol,” Pres recalled, “When I had just started to play, I used to buy all his records. I imagine I can still play all those solos off the record… Trumbauer always told a little story. And I liked the way he slurred the notes.”
