Bix Beiderbecke

Leon "Bix" Beiderbecke was born in 1903 in Davenport, Iowa to a middle-class merchant family. He began playing the piano at age 3, the cornet at 14. His first exposure to jazz was hearing his older brother's 1917 records of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. During his high-school days, he began gigging and sitting in with local bands. In September, 1921, his parents enrolled him at the Lake Forest Academy near Chicago, hoping to instill in him some discipline and interest in his studies, but the proximity to Chicago and its nascent jazz scene had just the opposite effect. He formed a small band and began playing for campus dances.

In 1922, after being expelled from Lake Forest and a brief period at home, Bix began his professional career, working around Chicago and on Lake Michigan excursion boats. In October of 1923 he joined the Wolverines and toured Indiana and Ohio with them. The band made its recording debut on the Gennett label. In 1924, Bix and the Wolverines moved to New York where they played briefly at the Cinderella Ballroom. Bix left the Wolverines later that year.

Saxophone pioneer Frank Trumbauer hired Bix in 1925 for his band in Detroit. Then, Bix and "Tram" worked together in Jean Goldkette's band until 1927. After a short stay with Adrian Rollini's big band in New York, Bix joined Paul Whiteman and worked and toured nationally with him on and off until 1930, when his deteriorating health forced him to quit. He died in New York in 1931 and is buried in Davenport. In that city, 25,000 people attended the festival that commemorated the 50th anniversary of his death.

The music Bix left behind consists of his brilliant recorded work on cornet with the bands mentioned above, plus his solo piano compositions In A Mist, In The Dark, Candle Light, and Flashes, known collectively as the Modern Suite. In Bix's work, one clearly hears the influence of Impressionist composers Debussy, Ravel, Satie, and others as well as the great jazz masters. It is acknowledged that Bix had a wide musical influence on his contemporaries and beyond, especially on the young Hoagy Carmichael, whose composition Skylark originally bore the title Bix Licks.

Don Ingle says, "Bix was not only influenced by the Impressionists, but also by the post Romantics, including the transitional American McDowell, American impressionist Eastwood Lane, and to some extent by Russians like Rimsky-Korsakov. Dad [Red Ingle] recalled Bix playing Sheherezade on an old windup player while they were killing daytime before the gig at Castle Farms near Cincinnati in 1927. Bix was especially interested in how the orchestration made use of various combinations of instruments to achieve color. That, dad told me, suggested that his interest was shifting to the manner in which the music evolved, not just the playing of it."

The list of trumpeters/cornetists directly influenced by Bix's playing is a long one and includes such diverse figures as: Jimmy McPartland, Bobby Hackett, Red Nichols, Rex Stewart, Tom Pletcher, Jim Cullum Jr., and Miles Davis. A biography, Bix: Man and Legend by Richard M. Sudhalter and Phillip R. Evans, was first published in 1974. The Italian film Bix was produced in 1993 with music by Bob Wilber.

Bix Beiderbecke Resources on the Web: