57 Facts About Bix Beiderbecke

Leon Bismark "Bix" Beiderbecke was an American jazz cornetist, pianist and composer.

Bix Beiderbecke first recorded with Midwestern jazz ensemble The Wolverines in 1924, after which he played briefly for the Detroit-based Jean Goldkette Orchestra before joining Frankie "Tram" Trumbauer for an extended engagement at the Arcadia Ballroom in St Louis, under the auspices of Goldkette's organisation.

The Goldkette band folded in September 1927 and, after briefly joining bass saxophone player Adrian Rollini's band in New York, Trumbauer and Bix Beiderbecke joined America's most popular dance band: Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra.

Treatment for alcoholism in rehabilitation centers, with the support of Whiteman and the Bix Beiderbecke family, failed to stop his decline.

Bix Beiderbecke left the Whiteman band in 1929 and in the summer of 1931 died aged 28 in his Sunnyside, Queens, New York apartment.

In magazine articles, musicians' memoirs, novels, and Hollywood films, Bix Beiderbecke has been envisaged as a Romantic hero, the "Young Man with a Horn".

Bix Beiderbecke's life has often been portrayed as that of a jazz musician who had to compromise his art for the sake of commercialism.

Bix Beiderbecke remains the subject of scholarly controversy regarding his full name, the cause of his death and the importance of his contributions to jazz.

The son of Bismark Herman Beiderbecke and Agatha Jane Hilton, Bix Beiderbecke was born on March 10,1903, in Davenport, Iowa.

Bix Beiderbecke's father was nicknamed "Bix", as was his older brother, Charles Burnette "Burnie" Beiderbecke.

Regardless, his parents called him Bix Beiderbecke, which seems to have been his preference.

The son of German immigrants, Bix Beiderbecke's father was a well-to-do coal and lumber merchant named after Otto von Bismarck of his native Germany.

Bix Beiderbecke's mother was the daughter of a Mississippi riverboat captain.

Bix Beiderbecke played the organ at Davenport's First Presbyterian Church and encouraged young Beiderbecke's interest in the piano.

Bix Beiderbecke's brother, Burnie, was born in 1895, and his sister, Mary Louise, in 1898.

Bix Beiderbecke began playing piano at age two or three.

Bix Beiderbecke's sister recalls that he stood on the floor and played it with his hands over his head.

Bix Beiderbecke listened to jazz from the riverboats that docked in downtown Davenport.

In September 1921, Bix Beiderbecke enrolled at the Lake Forest Academy, a boarding school north of Chicago in Lake Forest, Illinois.

Regardless, Mr and Mrs Beiderbecke apparently felt that a boarding school would provide their son with both the faculty attention and discipline required to improve his academic performance, necessitated by the fact that Bix had failed most courses in high school, remaining a junior in 1921 despite turning 18 in March of that year.

Bix Beiderbecke's interests remained limited to music and sports.

In pursuit of the former, Bix Beiderbecke often visited Chicago to listen to jazz bands at night clubs and speakeasies, including the infamous Friar's Inn, where he sometimes sat in with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings.

Bix Beiderbecke traveled to the predominantly African-American South Side to listen to classic black jazz bands such as King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, which featured Louis Armstrong on second cornet.

Bix Beiderbecke often failed to return to his dormitory before curfew, and sometimes stayed off-campus the next day.

Bix Beiderbecke returned to Davenport briefly in the summer of 1922, then moved to Chicago to join the Cascades Band, working that summer on Lake Michigan excursion boats.

Bix Beiderbecke gigged around Chicago until the fall of 1923, at times returning to Davenport to work for his father.

Bix Beiderbecke joined the Wolverine Orchestra late in 1923, and the seven-man group first played a speakeasy called the Stockton Club near Hamilton, Ohio.

Bix Beiderbecke's lip had strengthened from earlier, more tentative years; on nine of the Wolverines' recorded titles he proceeds commandingly from lead to opening solo without any need for a respite from playing.

In some respects, Bix Beiderbecke's playing was sui generis, but he nevertheless listened to, and learned from, the music around him: from the Dixieland jazz as exemplified by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band; to the hotter Chicago style of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and the south-side bands of King Oliver and other black artists; to the classical compositions of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.

Louis Armstrong provided a source of inspiration, though Bix Beiderbecke's style was very different from that of Armstrong, according to The Oxford Companion to Jazz:.

Where Armstrong's playing was bravura, regularly optimistic, and openly emotional, Bix Beiderbecke's conveyed a range of intellectual alternatives.

Armstrong tended to accentuate showmanship and virtuosity, whereas Bix Beiderbecke emphasized melody, even when improvising, and rarely strayed into the upper reaches of the register.

Indeed, Bix Beiderbecke had met Hardy and the clarinetist Leon Roppolo in Davenport in 1921 when the two joined a local band and played in town for three months.

Bix Beiderbecke certainly found a kindred musical spirit in Hoagy Carmichael, whose amusingly unconventional personality he appreciated.

Some six weeks after leaving the band, Bix Beiderbecke arranged a Gennett recording session back in Richmond with some of the Goldkette band members, under the name Bix Beiderbecke and His Rhythm Jugglers.

In February 1925, Bix Beiderbecke enrolled at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

James complains that, after Bix Beiderbecke joined the band, "Whiteman moved farther and farther away from the easy-going, rhythmically inclined style of his earlier days", becoming "more subservient to his business sense".

Bix Beiderbecke goes on to suggest that this artistically compromised Beiderbecke, in part causing his death.

Colleagues have testified that, far from feeling bound or stifled by the Whiteman orchestra, as Green and others have suggested, Bix Beiderbecke often felt a sense of exhilaration.

In February 1929, Bix Beiderbecke returned home to Davenport to convalesce and was hailed by the local press as "the world's hottest cornetist".

Bix Beiderbecke then spent the summer with Whiteman's band in Hollywood in preparation for the shooting of a new talking picture, The King of Jazz.

However, when he returned to New York at the end of January 1930, Bix Beiderbecke did not rejoin Whiteman and performed only sparingly.

On his last recording session, in New York, on September 15,1930, Bix Beiderbecke played on the original recording of Hoagy Carmichael's new song, "Georgia on My Mind", with Carmichael doing the vocals, Eddie Lang on guitar, Joe Venuti on violin, Jimmy Dorsey on clarinet and alto saxophone, Jack Teagarden on trombone, and Bud Freeman on tenor saxophone.

Bix Beiderbecke's playing had an influence on Carmichael as a composer.

Bix Beiderbecke pulled me in and pointed to the bed.

Bix Beiderbecke was screaming there were two Mexicans hiding under his bed with long daggers.

Bix Beiderbecke was buried there on August 11,1931, in the family plot at Oakdale Cemetery.

Bix Beiderbecke's innovative playing initially received greater attention and appreciation among European critics than those in the country of his birth.

At the time of his death, Bix Beiderbecke was still little known by the public at large, though his appreciation among fellow musicians and the collegiate set is indicated by contemporary news reports:.

Bix Beiderbecke was portrayed as a tragic genius along the lines of Ludwig van Beethoven.

In Blackboard Jungle, a 1955 film starring Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier, Bix Beiderbecke's music is briefly featured, but as a symbol of cultural conservatism in a nation on the cusp of the rock and roll revolution.

Bix Beiderbecke was largely, although not completely, self-taught, and the constraints imposed by that fact were evident in his music.

Armstrong often emphasized the performance aspect of his playing, while Bix Beiderbecke tended to stare at his feet while playing, uninterested in personally engaging his listeners.

Armstrong was deeply influenced by the blues, while Bix Beiderbecke was influenced as much by modernist composers such as Debussy and Ravel as by his fellow jazzmen.

Bix Beiderbecke knows that this player is endowed with the rarest jazz gift of all, a sense of form which lends to an improvised performance a coherence which no amount of teaching can produce.

Bix Beiderbecke played mostly open horn, every note full, big, rich and round, standing out like a pearl, loud but never irritating or jangling, with a powerful drive that few white musicians had in those days.

Bix Beiderbecke wrote or co-wrote six instrumental compositions during his career:.