The story of a young man and his horn

For more than 80 years, the quad Cities Symphony Orchestra has been the musical pride and joy of a bustling area in the upper Midwest that includes Davenport and Bettendorf in eastern Iowa and, directly across the Mississippi River, Rock Island and Moline in Illinois. Its repertoire ranges from classical to pop, but one night last fall the orchestra achieved a singular milestone when it played the world premiere of a symphonicjazz work by the well-known composer Lalo Schifrin called "Rhapsody for Bix." The piece is based on songs written or popularized by the legendary cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, who grew up in Davenport, where the Quad Cities Symphony is headquartered.

Bix Beiderbecke

Bix Beiderbecke taught himself to play the cornet when he was in his teens and died in 1931 at the age of 28. During his brief career, he became one of the true sensations of the Jazz Age, unforgettable to anyone who ever heard him. But over time, as jazz evolved and tastes changed, Bix faded into relative obscurity.

Nearly two decades ago, I was playing some recordings one afternoon for the avant-garde reeds player Archie Shepp. I asked Shepp if he'd ever heard Bix. He hadn't, so I put on the Frankie Trumbauer orchestra's 1927 rendition of "Riverboat Shuffle," which features Bix at his astonishing best. When it was over, Shepp took a puff on his pipe and nodded slowly. "For what he was doing, Bix was bad," he allowed, using one of the jazz musician's highest forms of praise.

Shepp had it right. Bix was bad. And now he's back. This month, the 26th annual Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Festival will draw its customarily enthusiastic crowds of 15,000 or so aficionados to Davenport for four days of celebration. Last year, more than nine bands from around the world played Bix's music and, concurrently, an international field of 20,000 runners competed in a race called the Bix-7. There were tours of places associated with Bix, and everywhere bumper stickers and lapel pins proclaimed: "Bix Lives!"

Bix is a vital presence at other festivals around the country, too, most notably in Ketchum, Idaho, and Libertyville, Illinois. The originals of his recordings are highly prized by collectors these days, and he is well represented in CD format. A dozen Bix albums are currently listed in the Penguin Guide to Jazz on Compact Disc. Every fan has his or her favorites. Mine include his early recording of "Jazz Me Blues," "I'm Coming, Virginia" and that crisp, clean solo on "Riverboat Shuffle."

When the Wolverines (above) played at New York's Cinderella Ballroom, Bix, far right, was the main attraction. He inscribed the cover of his "In a Mist" sheet music (left) for arranger Bill Challis

The qualities that strike the modern listener are the same ones that awed Bix's contemporaries: the round, shimmering tone; the deliberateness of the attack that still manages somehow to flow; the haunting sense of an artist reaching for something he couldn't quite articulate. Jazz critic Chip Deffaa likened Bix's sound to the experience of stepping into a bracing mountain stream. "The best of his solos," he wrote, "seem absolutely perfect: one cannot conceive of them being improved upon." The composer Hoagy Carmichael, who met Bix at the very outset of his career and saw him only days before his death, said he hit his notes like a mallet hitting a chime. Guitarist Eddie Condon thought Bix's horn sounded like a girl saying yes. Louis Armstrong jammed with Beiderbecke after hours in Chicago in the 1920s and revered him ever after. "I was thrilled to death with whatever Bix did," he told one interviewer. "He knocked me out. He had such beautiful tone, those beautiful phrases, fingers fast. Yeah, he was my man."

Another part of Bix's enduring appeal derives from the way he lived. Here was a handsome young man who never grew old, whose frenetic pace matched that of the new music he helped create. He was famous for his devotion to his horn and for his obliviousness to almost everything else. He played a good game of tennis and was passable at bowling. He loved baseball and boxing, and his protege, the cornetist and amateur boxer Jimmy McPartland, said he could handle himself well in a brawl. Once, McPartland remembered, the two of them were leaving a club in the wee hours when one of a trio of street thugs tried to grab McPartland's horn. "I set it down," McPartland said, "and--bang--he was gone. And then--bang--the second guy was gone. Bix took care of the third. He could really hit." Women found his reticence, gentlemanly deportment and wistful smile tremendously attractive. Perhaps they wanted to save him.

A visit to the Bronx Zoo in New York gave Bix, center, and pals in the Jean Goldkette Orchestra a chance to "charm" a snake

And he did need saving. The history of early jazz is pickled in booze, and a telling number of its pioneering exponents ran afoul of it. But nobody drank like Bix. His benders became legendary, yet still the beautifully constructed solos poured out of him, compelling admiration and surprising even Bix, who seemed to his colleagues to have no idea of how remarkable his work really was--or how he did it.

Leon Bix Beiderbecke was born to upper-middle-class parents at a time when Davenport was still a predominantly German town. His paternal grandfather had emigrated from Germany in the 1850s and was a bank president. His father, Bismark, was an executive in a lumber and coal company. Musical ability ran in the family, but it was music firmly within the European tradition. Grandfather Carl led a choral group that performed at Lutheran services. Bix's mother, Aga-tha, was an accomplished pianist, and his sister, Mary Louise, remembered Bix being able to pick out pieces like "Pop! Goes the Weasel" when he was barely able to reach the keyboard.

When he was 7, the local paper recognized him as a prodigy: "Little Bickie Beiderbecke plays any selection he hears!" His mother planned to get him formal instruction, the paper went on, because she feared that otherwise he'd "never fancy playing by note." Pro-phetic fear. Mary Louise recalled that rather than learn to read the pieces his piano teacher gave him, Bix would simply listen to the teacher play them and then play them back, but "with `improvements.'" The teacher gave up in disgust, and that was the end of music lessons for Bix.

In a classic family grouping, baby Bix sat between Burnie (left) and Mary Louise

But it wasn't the end of the boy's noodling on the piano or of his consuming interest in music, especially the popular forms his family deplored. This music was all around him. It came through the summer air from the riverboats docked at the levee on the Mississippi to the Beiderbecke home on Grand Avenue, and Bix escaped down there whenever he could to hear that music with his friends. Once he stowed away on a riverboat and volunteered his services as a calliope player to the captain, who promptly sent him home. His whereabouts became a constant source of concern to Bismark and Agatha. A friend remembered going to the silent movies with Bix, who didn't care about the films. "He just wanted to hear the guy who played piano accompaniment," the friend said. "As soon as the show was over, he'd hurry back to his grandma's to play on her piano what he'd just heard."

Early in 1919, Bix's older brother Burnie, just back from the Army and flush with pay, bought a windup Graphophone and some records. Thus, the despised music of the "jazzers" invaded the Beiderbecke household in the form of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's versions of "Tiger Rag" and "Skeleton Jangle." It wasn't authentic New Orleans jazz, a music with strong folk roots in the black community, but a shrewd commercialization of it by five whites led by cornetist Nick LaRocca. "They were really a corny outfit," said clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow, who played with Bix in the mid-1920s. "But they were fast and energetic, and they had a gang of novelty effects that the public went wild about."

The novelty stuff didn't interest Bix, but LaRocca's work did. Shortly, he borrowed a battered cornet from a friend, and then, sitting before the Graphophone, he listened to LaRocca's parts again and again at slow speed, trying to work out the fingering on his horn. So began the making of one of the most idiosyncratic players in jazz history. The traits others noted in his few years of fame--his unorthodox fingering; his picking out a spot on the floor in front of him and playing to it--these began by the Graphophone on Grand Avenue. As for the purity of tone he eventually developed and the shapely structure of his solos, who can say where those began?

Outwardly, Bix fit in well in Davenport. He'd grown into a handsome young man, and even though he was not talkative, he was popular at school. When he chose, he could be very witty in a dry, offbeat way. Around the house he was respectful of his parents, but his obsession with music was setting him apart. He'd begun sitting in with local bands, despite his inability to sight-read. He had no interest in formal education, and when the high school informed the Beiderbeckes that he would not be promoted to the twelfth grade, they packed him off to the Lake Forest Academy, a prep school north of Chicago.

The parental strategy failed. What Bix learned at the academy was how many great bands there were in Chicago. He didn't last the year, getting bounced when he was discovered climbing down the fire escape one night with his cornet wrapped in newspaper. That was the end of schooling, and after a brief period when Bismark put him to work at the coal-and-lumber company, the young man and his horn headed straight into the unquiet heart of the Jazz Age.

Even before Bix left Lake Forest, bandleaders and fellow musicians realized he was special. In just three years, the boy from Davenport had somehow developed a distinctive, polished style that owed almost nothing to his predecessors. His sound was so clearly his own, so clearly new, that it amazed everyone who heard it. The young Benny Goodman wondered, "My God, what planet, what galaxy, did this guy come from?"

The kids who'd seized on jazz and dancing in a way comparable to the phenomenon of the rock revolution of the 1960s heard that newness in his playing and took him to their hearts in unprecedented fashion. When he sat in with Jimmie Caldwell's Jazz Jesters at a Chicago high school dance early in 1922, Caldwell hid him behind the piano because Bix didn't have a tuxedo. But, said Caldwell, soon the "kids started screaming for him so much that we had to move him down front. Every time he took a solo, they'd go wild. It was eerie." A few weeks later, at a suburban girls school, the headmistress pulled Caldwell aside during an intermission and ordered him to silence Bix. "That nice boy of yours is exciting my girls!" she exclaimed. It was the same when he appeared on college campuses with an aggregation that eventually became known as the Wolverine Orchestra.

In part, it was Bix's youthful appearance and careless manner that endeared him to the younger generation. After hours, when fans took him partying, they found he liked the things they liked, especially Prohibition alcohol, which he could consume in enormous quantities. With the aid of booze, said Eddie Condon, "he drove away all other things--food, sleep, women, ambition, vanity, desire. He played the piano and the cornet, that was all."

And how he could play. Single-handedly, he lifted the Wolverines from amateur status to a popularity that spread all the way to Broadway. When they opened at the Cinderella Ballroom, there were almost as many musicians in the crowd as dancers. Violinist Hal Duffy remembered hearing the Wolverines, "and Bix's notes fell all over Broadway . . . great notes!" Among those on whom the great notes fell were bandleaders Jean Goldkette, who was based in Detroit, and Paul Whiteman from New York. The former made Bix an offer, and he accepted.

In the summer of 1926, Goldkette sent a band including Bix, clarinetist Pee Wee Russell and saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer to Hudson Lake, Indiana, to play a club called the Blue Lantern. In their definitive biography Bix: Man & Legend (Schirmer Books), authors Richard M. Sudhalter and Philip R. Evans, with William Dean-Myatt, vividly re-create the atmo-sphere. It became a beautiful, bibulous summer for the musicians, playing nights for dancers at the barn-like club that hung out over the lake, then jamming and drinking until dawn. Days, the men spent re-covering and lazing about the shore. Hygiene was at best casual, and the cottage Bix shared with other band members was littered with liquor bottles, half-empty cans of sardines and bottles of sour milk. The cottage also contained an old piano Bix often played, working out modern chord structures that seemed odd to some of the more straightforward jazzmen who heard them.

When the full Goldkette band went East on tour that fall, it played a Boston suburb where teenage trumpeter Max Kaminsky went out to hear Bix. His tone, Kaminsky recalled, "was so pure, so devoid of any tinge of sentimentality or personal ego, that it was the nearest thing to perfect beauty I have ever heard." When the awestruck youngster got up the nerve to introduce himself to his idol at a break, he discovered that Bix was as shy as he and kept nodding his head while staring at his cracked patent-leather shoes.

In New York, the white players from the Midwest found themselves pitted at the Roseland Ballroom against one of the very hottest of the black bands, the Fletcher Henderson group, which included trumpeters Rex Stewart and Joe Smith and reedmen Coleman Hawkins and Buster Bailey. On opening night, Fats Waller sat in on a few numbers.

Henderson's men felt confident they'd blow the white boys out of the room. But they reckoned without Bix and Trumbauer and the band's arranger, Bill Challis. At the end of the night, the Henderson men conceded they'd been "cut." "We simply could not compete," Rex Stewart admitted.

Less than a year later, the Goldkette band was on the financial rocks. Paul Whiteman, the 300-pound impresario, knew Bix and Trumbauer could brilliantly set off his huge orchestra with carefully spotted solos. He wanted the best in the business, he told them, and he was willing to pay for it.

Although White-man was known as the "King of Jazz," his group was a symphonic orchestra that bridged the gap between light classical numbers like George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" (one of its staples) and music for dancing. It was filled with first-rate musicians, some--like the Dorsey brothers and Bing Crosby--headed for individual stardom. To be asked to join it represented the supreme achievement in the field, and an excited Bix called home to tell Bismark and Agatha he'd hit the very top. Their reaction was decidedly cool, quite the opposite of the acclaim he now enjoyed.

When young people swarmed around Bix after a concert, he greeted them all with unfailing kindness. With his bashful smile, he'd invariably ask, "Well, how's everything down there?" And then, leaving, "Well, I'll see you down there!" "Chances are," said Whiteman, "he never knew where `down there' was, but he just wanted to be nice to everybody." "He was a kindred spirit," said violinist Matty Malneck, and after hours his young admirers would spirit him away to some place where there was a piano and drums and liquor, and Bix would stay there until morning, playing and drinking. When Malneck roomed with him, Bix was taking a slug of gin before getting out of bed.

Whiteman kicked off his 1928 fall tour with a concert at Carnegie Hall that featured Bix playing his own piano composition, "In a Mist." Then they were off: Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee. Sudhalter and Evans note that in New Orleans, Bix's old hero LaRocca paid him a visit backstage. On into Texas; when the nation elected Hoover President, the band was in Wichita Falls. Five days later, in Tulsa, Bix stumbled aboard what he thought was the train to Ponca City only to discover it was not. At the next stop he got out, hunted up a pilot, and the two of them flew--and drank--to Ponca City. He made it to the afternoon performance but slept through the evening concert.

Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota. When the band was in Clinton, Iowa, Bix's brother was the only family member who made the 30-mile trip from Davenport. Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio. A Thanksgiving concert in Charleston, West Virginia, back to Ohio and then Toronto, Buffalo and Boston. By early December, they were back in New York.

A few days later, Bix was hospitalized with pneumonia. After he rejoined the band, he had an attack of delirium tremens and tore up his hotel room. Eventually, Whiteman sent him to Davenport to recuperate. Convalescing there at the house on Grand Avenue, Bix found in an upstairs closet all the recordings he'd proudly sent his parents, still unopened.

Once again, Bix rejoined the band but drank more recklessly than ever. His famously sunny disposition darkened under the relentless deluge of alcohol, and it was harder now for friends to make contact with the Bix everybody loved. Up on the bandstand, he began passing out upright, his horn on his knee. "Wake up Bix," reads a notation on a Whiteman score from this time, a reminder to a section mate to get Bix ready for a solo.

Nobody could believe Bix was finished; after all, he was such a young man. He alone seemed to sense the truth of his condition. According to Sudhalter and Evans, while convalescing again back in Davenport, he confided his fears to his high school sweetheart. "It was almost as though he longed to be just a young boy again," said Vera Cox Korn, "riding his bike no hands down the hill near our house to show off for me. . . . Now here he was back from New York, with a funny little mustache, and looking kind of fat and not at all healthy. He kept on saying he felt he'd reached the top and there was no other height to reach, therefore the only direction was down, and that he was afraid sometimes."

In the spring of 1930, Bix began a fitful period of freelancing and resumed late-night jamming and boozing. Soon he was drinking straight alcohol flavored with lemon drops, and one day when he stood up for a solo on a radio broadcast his mind went blank and he couldn't play a note.

He made one last attempt at a comeback, at life itself, playing some New England college dates, but the other players found him undependable. His behavior was somber and erratic; his health was failing. One night in New York he talked trombonist Jack Teagarden into going down to the morgue to look at the corpses. At Amherst College, he played in a group that included the hot new trumpet star Bunny Berigan. He was afraid to solo, but the kids kept hollering for him, just as they had a lifetime ago in Chicago; and for that night, anyway, he gave them the old Bix, running through numbers like "At the Jazz Band Ball" that had made him their darling.

No one saw much of him in the summer of 1931. Health problems lingered. He'd moved out of Manhattan to a small apartment in Queens and had taken up with a girl. He hardly ever left his room except to buy gin. Other tenants complained about his late-night piano playing, but they never heard the cornet. Then one night Bix suffered another attack of delirium tremens, this one fatal, and so, for the final time, he was put on a train for home.

Down at the Davenport depot, two morticians met the train and conveyed the casket to the funeral parlor. When they raised the lid, Kenny Shields, a 19-year-old apprentice, was shocked to find inside a young man laid out in a tuxedo and bow tie. "Who is he?" Shields asked the other mortician. "Oh," he was told, "he's just some drunken musician from New York City."

But that wasn't the end of Bix. Players and fans told stories about him, and McPartland, Red Nichols and Bobby Hackett preserved something of his sound in their playing. During Benny Goodman's epochal 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall, Hackett cast a reverential hush over the black-tie audience when he played, note for note, Bix's solo on "I'm Coming, Virginia." Around that same time, Dorothy Baker wrote her popular novel Young Man With a Horn, based loosely on Bix's life; the 1950 movie of the same title starred Kirk Douglas. Bix was the subject of a steady stream of critical assessments, a full-scale biography, a film documentary and a 1990 feature film by the Italian director Pupi Avati. Today at least one new biography, by Philip Evans, is in the works and a recording of "Rhapsody for Bix" is being planned.

Last fall, a few weeks after the premiere of "Rhapsody," I made a pilgrimage to Bix's home territory, beginning with a drive from Chicago to Hudson Lake, where Bix played the Blue Lantern. I was astonished to discover that the club is still standing, hard by the railroad tracks of the South Shore Line. It now serves its longtime owner, Jack Weber, as a boathouse and storage shed. When he escorted me inside the building, Weber gestured toward the front. "That's what you want to see," he said. And there in the gloom of that decaying old structure was the original bandstand. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as I stared at the little set with its painted backdrop of a moon shining on lake waters, its splintered flooring, its little step that had felt the weight of the young players 70 years earlier.

In Davenport, I was taken to various Bix sites by Jim Arpy and Rich Johnson, both longtime officers of the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Society. Founded in 1971, the organization has more than 700 members and sponsors the annual jazz festival.

The old Beiderbecke place on Grand Avenue, a big two-story house with a roomy front porch and a turret in one corner, looks just as it did when Bix was a boy. When we stood in the living room, Johnson said, "I don't think Bix's parents ever understood how great Bix really was. I'm not sure they even wanted to. When [jazz historian] Marshall Stearns came out here to talk with them years after Bix's death, they said something like, `We never knew our Bix was famous.'" He shook his head in wonderment. Next to us, the ghostly outline of the family piano was still visible on the floor, and as Johnson spoke I was visualizing little Bickie standing on tiptoe there to pick out "Pop! Goes the Weasel."

With a population of 95,000, Davenport is much bigger than it was when Bix grew up there, but it wasn't difficult for me to put together a picture of the town he knew, with the main streets running down to the great river, the hill where the prosperous German families like the Beiderbeckes built their substantial homes and, beyond the town, miles on miles of cornfields. The levee where the boats and their bands once docked has been shored up and paved, and there is a bust of Bix and a plaque there where they hold the main events of the festival. The high school Bix attended still stands. So do some of the places where he played, though many have new names now.

Finally, Arpy and Johnson took me out to Oakdale cemetery, where Bix lies surrounded by his family. The Beiderbecke marker is as conventional as they come, and there is absolutely nothing to indicate that "Leon Bix" had been anything other than a solid son and citizen. Before I left Davenport, I went back there. Parking on the road near the plot, I found "Royal Garden Blues" on one of my Bix tapes and turned it up loud so I could hear it while I stood in front of his grave. Here was Bix at the height of his fame and in the fullness of his singular genius.

Looking at the family marker under the big oaks and listening to Bix's horn light up the gray afternoon, I was seized with a sense that in the end the artist has had the last word. After his parents' disapproval, after the brief fame, after the ghastly death and all the posthumous adulation, here is the beautiful sound he made and left behind. His solo on "Royal Garden Blues" sticks close to the melody, as always. But with improvements.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Bix was 18 when he sat for his portrait (opposite) in the summer of 1921. Four years later (above), he was relaxed but totally absorbed while recording his composition "Davenport Blues" with a band that included Tommy Dorsey on the trombone

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Don Murray, Bix and Howdy Quicksell found time to horse around backstage between gigs for Goldkette

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Bix's friend Hoagy Carmichael, left, appeared with Kirk Douglas in the 1950 movie Young Man With a Horn, loosely based on the cornetist's life

PHOTO (COLOR): A poster created by Beiderbecke fans commemorates Bix's 1927 B-flat cornet, now owned by a Davenport museum

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By Fred Turner

Fred Turner is the author of Remembering Song (Da Capo), a history of New Orleans jazz. He resides in New Mexico.