Bix Porn (II)

My enjoyment of such exquisitely bad writing would be less conflicted were it not for the knowledge that on April 22, 1921, an 18-year-old Bix was actually arrested for a “lewd and lascivious act with child”—a 5-year-old. According to a new biography by Jean Pierre Lion, “Bix had supposedly asked the girl to lift her skirt.” Said the girl’s father in the police report: “[M]y little girl came home, told me that a man took her in the garage, said some awful things to her . . . She said he asked to show herself.” (For the record, charges were dropped when the girl’s father said he did not want her to have to testify in court.)

Satchmo-Inspired Thought #1

Marcus’s writing reminds me that there is a whole tradition within jazz writing that could fairly be called ecstatic. Louis Armstrong admitted to once having wept openly at a jam session because he “could never play as good as Bix (Beiderbecke),” while the normally measured critic Gary Giddins recalled, in Weather Bird, how he wept at hearing Louis for the first time: “I lifted the platter and noticed a wet spot, a drop of water on the vinyl, and I realized I was crying.”

I have a weakness for thinking of the jazz greats in mythic terms. So I turn to Edith Hamilton’s classic Mythology and read: “The world of Greek mythology was not a place of terror for the human spirit. It is true that the gods were disconcertingly incalculable. One could never tell where Zeus’s thunderbolt would strike. Nevertheless, the whole divine company, with a very few and for the most part not important exceptions, were entrancingly beautiful with a human beauty, and nothing humanly beautiful is really terrifying.”

If they were anything, Bix & Louis were beautiful. Explain, then, Hoagy Carmichael’s reaction to hearing Bix for the first time (included in his unpublished manuscript, Jazz Banders: A Rhapsody in Mud):

The notes weren’t blown—they were hit, like a mallet hits a chime, and his tone had a richness that can only come from the heart. I rose violently from the piano bench and fell, exhausted, on to a davenport.* He had completely ruined me. That sounds idiotic, but it is the truth.

Like Marcus, I find Louis’s exuberance irresistible; strong emotions, though, are often complicated. Joy can mingle (all due respect to Hamilton) with terror, violence, exhaustion, and ruin.

Finally: “There is a kind of anguish in listening to certain pieces of music, which is unlike any other sensation,” wrote Ralph Berton in Remembering Bix. “It acts upon some inner sense with a force intangible and penetrating . . . awaken[ing] in us a yearning, profound, inexpressible, for we know not what: it is a question without an answer, leaving us with a subtle sense of mystery and loss.”

One can’t help but wonder if Hoagy was intentionally alluding to Bix’s birthplace, Davenport, Iowa.

[January 18, 2006]

First Bix, Then Whiskey and Wine

When you leap from the womb, we'll teach you how to play croquet, and how to clean bookcases, and how to write your name, and how to make mudcakes and who Bix Beiderbecke was, and all about whiskey and wine and all about Eve and Adam and where to mail your letters.

— Donald Barthelme in a 1981 letter to his unborn daughter

A Cranky Bix Fan Speaks the Truth

Mr. R. Lee of Underworld Rag bemoans some "over-ripe adulation" in a post that otherwise praises the biographical work of Jean Pierre Lion:

If you’ve ever spent time with a devotee of Bix Beiderbecke you’ve probably already been treated to more of that kind of tripe than any human could reasonably be expected to bear. These deluded souls maintain all sorts of ridiculous notions concerning the artistic divinity of their dead-boy hero. They speak of the depth and beauty of his playing in such exaggerated terms that it's difficult not to develop a prejudice against him out of sheer spite. They study and document every move he ever made. They worry the details of his messy existence as if each trivial stumble were a clue to some deeper meaning in the music that sang from his Vincent Bach Cornet No. 620 (which he purchased in New York City on February 17, 1927 from a music store on West 48th Street).

[January 9, 2006]

'And always there is a piercing sadness to it'

Clive James on Bix Beiderbecke:

I listened to most of Beiderbecke’s Jean Goldkette and Paul Whiteman sides before I left Sydney, but it wasn’t until I was down and out in London in the early 1960s that I first heard “I’m Coming, Virginia.” An Australian homosexual ballet buff persuaded me to sit down and listen to a piece of music that he held to be the most beautiful thing in his life: better even than Swan Lake.

For a while “I’m Coming, Virginia” became the most beautiful thing in my life too. The coherence of its long Bix solo still provides me with a measure of what popular art should be like: a generosity of effects on a simple frame. The melodic line is particularly ravishing at its points of transition: there are moments when even a silent pause is a perfect note, and always there is a piercing sadness to it, as if the natural tone of the cornet, the instrument of reveille, were the first sob before weeping.

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (2008)