Iowa celebrates birthday of James Dean of jazz

Today is the 102nd birthday of my all-time favorite Iowan: Bix Beiderbecke.

Outside jazz circles, Bix doesn't hold the same name recognition as Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong. But in the few recordings this young cornetist made, he played a vibrant, pure tone that always transcended the mediocre tunes being worked with.

And for any musician of any genre, that's quite an accomplishment.

A short life cheated Bix of deep, lasting fame; he died at only 28. But the way he blew that horn and so badly behaved during those few brief years is what endears him so greatly to tens of thousands of jazz fans.

To put it in contemporary terms, Bix was the James Dean of jazz.

East of Eden

Born in Davenport, Bix irritated authority from the very beginning. At the age of two, he could pick out tunes with a single finger on the piano, his pitch perfect. Enrolled in music lessons, he played tunes from heart rather than reproduce them from a score; his instructor got so upset that he quit on Bix.

In 1919, Bix heard his first record by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, sort of the Bill Haley and the Comets of its day. Hooked, he borrowed a classmate's horn.

Without any formal training, he developed an un-orthodox of fingering, something that studied musicians of his time despised.

Then, in August of that year, Bix wandered down to the Davenport waterfront where steamboats from New Orleans docked. Hearing Armstrong perform, Bix realized what he wanted to do in life. He wanted to play jazz and bought his own horn.

This did not go over well. Most of white America considered jazz "jungle music," and Bix's middle class parents would have nothing of it. When he started doing poorly in school, they sent him east of the Iowa cornfields to a military-styled prep school in Lake Forest, Ill.

It was the best mistake his parents could make.

Rebel without a cause

Lake Forest is just 35 miles from Chicago, which in the 1920s was becoming the center of jazz. Bix spent his nights listening to Armstrong and King Oliver, and met a young songwriter named Hoagy Carmichael.

Bix soon was expelled.

With only his music, he traveled to New York then around the Midwest playing in orchestras and bands. Audiences reacted coolly at first to him; trouble reading the scores prevented him from learning numbers, but once he picked them up, he outshined his band mates.

Bix's break came in 1924 when he joined the Jean Goldkette Orchestra in Detroit. But the recording director disliked Bix's style, which was hot jazz, an ensemble improvisation with soloing and a fast pace that made it easy to dance to. Frustrated, Bix left the band after two months.

During spring semester of the 1924-1925 school year, Bix enrolled in the University of Iowa. He majored in music but wasn't interested in fulfilling various academic requirements. Then he got into a bar fight downtown with a football player.

Bix lasted a total of 18 days in Iowa City.

He drifted around, playing with such future big band greats as Red Nichols and the Dorsey brothers.

Eventually he rejoined the Jean Goldkette Orchestra. It was then that Bix's true brightness shined.

Giant

But it had little to do with Goldkette.

A contingency of the orchestra, including Bix and Jimmy Dorsey, often gathered to play jazz the way they liked, as a small ensemble with a lot of improvising and soloing. Those qualities virtually define jazz, which is why the formal big band sound isn't always considered good jazz; its akin to Pat Boone singing "Tutti Frutti."

In 1927, the small ensemble laid down several classic jazz tracks. Critics often list one of those tunes, "Singing' the Blues," as among the greatest jazz recordings of all time.

When Goldkette dissolved, Bix and band mate Frank Trumbauer joined the Paul Whiteman orchestra. The Beatles of its day, Whiteman popularized jazz for white audiences, particularly with a recording of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." Bix had reach-ed the pinnacle.

But Whiteman's high expectations and controlling personality clashed with Bix's schoolboy spirit and independent genius. Bix grew unhappy and quit.

During the last two years of Bix's life, his health deteriorated greatly thanks to bootleg gin. Suffering delirium tremens and a nervous breakdown, he spent a lot of time in hospitals trying to recover.

When out, he performed with such future jazz greats as Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Gene Krupa. Many wanted to play his 1926 masterpiece, "In a Mist," with him.

On Aug. 6, 1931, unable to shake a cold, Bix died during an alcoholic seizure. The official cause of death: edema of the brain.

How good was Bix? Carmichael, in his autobiography "Sometimes I Wonder," wrote how once after a gig he and Bix stopped on a cold night along a lonely country road. They took out their horns and played: "Clean, wonderful streams of melody filled the dawn, ruffled the countryside, stirred the still night. I bolted along to keep up a rhythmic lead while Bix laid it out. A wind drove autumn leaves around us. Bix finished in one amazing blast of pyrotechnic improvisation. He took his horn away from his mouth, as if a sleepwalker's dream."

Bix was poetry.

(originally published as "Iowa celebrates 100th birthday of James Dean of jazz" on March 9, 2003)