Davenport was a good-sized city in Bix's youth, right on the Mississippi River. Others, like Grant Wood, stayed and placed Iowa at the center of their visions.Įither way, the point is that Iowa was less out of the way than you might think, and added up to more-in reality if not always in the imagination-than just a bunch of cornfields. Some of these folks, like Van Vechten, fled. In addition to producing Bix Beiderbecke, it was the birthplace of Herbert Hoover, Henry Wallace, Glenn Miller, Grant Wood, Donna Reed, the agronomist Norman Borlaug, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Susan Glaspell (also a Davenporter!), and one of the most important arts critics of the Jazz Age, Carl Van Vechten. Iowa is in my blood, and every time I gratuitously mention the place my friends in Virginia yell, "Drink!" Still, it strikes me that the state was unusually influential during the first half of the twentieth century. How did “a kid from the cornfields,” as you say, make it to the top of the jazz world? People think New Orleans or the Mississippi Delta or Chicago when they think about jazz, not Davenport, Iowa. A few years later, I wrote a piece about Bix for a weekly newspaper I edited, after which I received in the mail a letter to the editor-an angry letter to the editor, I think it's fair to say-that was signed "Bix Beiderbecke." That's really when the book began, but I'm going to leave that story for the book.Ģ. It's not a great movie, in my opinion, but it was a finalist for the Palme d'Or in 1991.Īnyway, I landed a bit part and fell completely head over heels for Bix's music. That's when two Italian brothers, a film director and producer, came to Davenport, purchased and renovated the Beiderbecke family home, and filmed a biopic. I never heard his music, though, until the summer after I graduated from high school. There's an annual Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Festival, and a Bix 7 road race with tens of thousands of runners, Bix T-shirts, bumper stickers, bobble-head dolls, the whole works. We're from the same hometown of Davenport, Iowa, and his name and face are still a huge part of the city's identity. I grew up with Bix-or at least it feels like I did. Bix Beiderbecke was once a world-famous jazz legend, but he is less well-known today. Wolfe talked with The National about his new Bix Beiderbecke biography.ġ. writer, was intrigued by all of these things - and by the fact that Bix was, like him, a child of Davenport, Iowa, where he is still a revered figure. Such recordings as “I’m Coming Virginia” and “Singin’ the Blues,” both recorded with Trumbauer’s group in 1927, remain jazz classics.Bix Beiderbecke is an iconic jazz figure, one of the greatest soloists of his era, and a figure of myth - a myth spread widely by the 1950 hit biopic "Young Man with a Horn." Bix has intrigued people for many reasons: being one of the few white jazz pioneers, rising from the Iowa cornfields to hit it big in a musical genre dominated by southerners, and - not least - for drinking himself to death by the age of 28.īrendan Wolfe, a Charlottesville, Va. ![]() If the simplicity of his materials made Beiderbecke’s playing seem delicate, the vitality of his lyric imagination-he had a rare ability to create melodies, embellishments, and melodic variations-demonstrated his strength. His attack was precise, and his tone, often described as “golden” and “bell-like,” was consistently pure. Severe alcoholism disrupted his career and led to his death.īeiderbecke emphasized the cornet’s middle register, using simple rhythms and diatonic harmonies. The two played in the Jean Goldkette band (1927) and in Paul Whiteman’s outstanding pop music orchestra 1928–30), in which Beiderbecke was a featured soloist. Louis, Missouri, in 1926, Beiderbecke joined Frank Trumbauer, with whom he maintained a close friendship for most of the rest of his life. In 1923 he joined the Wolverines, a youthful group with whom he first recorded and toured to New York City, and in 1925 he worked in Chicago, where he first heard and played with the great Black innovators Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Jimmy Noone. ![]() He was the first major white jazz soloist.Īs a boy Beiderbecke was expelled from Lake Forest Academy in suburban Chicago. Bix Beiderbecke, in full Leon Bismark Beiderbecke, (born Madied August 6, 1931), American jazz cornetist who was an outstanding improviser and composer of the 1920s and whose style is characterized by lyricism and purity of tone.
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