"I'll tell you a cute little story," began Ray Voss, president of the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Society. "There used to be an author in town, who passed away a few years ago. His name was David Collins. And he's written about 75 books - mostly for children - and he was also a teacher. Rich Johnson [the Bix society's music director] had been trying to get him to write a book about Bix, and he never wanted to do it.
"But one day in [Collins'] class, he said, 'Does anybody know who Bix Beiderbecke is?' So one kid got up and said, 'Yeah. He's the guy that's named after a run.'"
Voss then laughs, and says, in reference to 1998's Bix Beiderbecke: Jazz Age Genius, "So Dave got busy and wrote this really nice little book."
That is a cute little story.
So ...
... how many of your kids think Bix is named after a run?
"Oh, Bix."
Every summer brings with it a proliferation of events named in honor of Davenport native Bix Beiderbecke, among them the seven-mile foot race, the Bix 7. Yet despite the attachment of his name to the event, Bix, of course, wasn't a famous runner at all. He was, rather, a noted performer of 1920s-era jazz, a fact that, Voss believes, most Quad Citians know.
"I think the majority of people know he played," opines Voss, who is serving his fifth year as president of the 35-year-old Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Society. "They probably think it was a trumpet, but it's a cornet," he says, adding, "very few people know that he was a gifted piano player as well."
Yet what is probably less well-known is just how inadequate that adjective "gifted" is. For Bix wasn't merely a jazz artist of the '20s. He was, alongside Louis Armstrong, widely considered the jazz artist of the '20s, a musician whose prodigious performance skills and improvisational technique still amaze and inspire listeners some 75 years after his death. On a local level, Bix may be famous because he's from Davenport; on national, and even global, levels, Davenport is famous because of him.
In his book The Art of Jazz, musical historian George Avakian described the continued effect of Bix's horn. "Once heard," he wrote, "it's a sound you'll never forget: the warm, mellow cornet tone, sometimes with almost no vibrato at all; the attack that was sure, with every note brought out as clearly as a padded mallet striking a chime; the flow of ideas, sometimes bursting with spontaneous energy and yet always sounding coolly calculated, as neatly arranged as though a composer had carefully organized each phrase and then plotted all the little inflections and dynamics. It's something that will never quite fade away, as long as there's a record around."
Avakian's sentiments are echoed by Bruce Boyd Raeburn, the director of the Hogan Jazz Archive at Louisiana's Toulane University, who says, "Everyone's going for their own style, but comparing Bix's to others' is like comparing apples to oranges. He was one of the first white musicians to really get people's attention."
And the praise of professional musicians who cite Bix as an influence - both on their own work and on jazz itself - is similarly effusive.
Songwriter/performer Hoagy Carmichael was quoted as saying of Bix, "He showed me that jazz could be musical and beautiful, as well as hot."
Noted clarinetist Pee Wee Russell said, "The thing about Bix's music is that he drove a band - if you had any talent at all he made you play better."
Bandleader Russ Morgan said, "Bix would fill out his part with some of the most beautiful notes you ever heard."
And Louis Armstrong himself once stated, "Lots of cats tried to play like Bix; ain't none of them play like him yet."
Ain't None of Them Play Like Him Yet, in fact, is the title of a 1994 documentary on Bix, just one of the dozens upon dozens of films, books, and articles devoted to the artist whose name recognition spans the planet. (The Italian Avati brothers, who will soon be filming a new project in the Quad Cities area, released their own film of his life - simply titled Bix - in 1991.)
"It's just worldwide," says local bandleader Josh Duffee of Bix's fame. "I mean, he is more popular today that he was back in the '20s."
And with awareness of Bix's music, Voss reveals, comes awareness of his hometown. "It certainly works overseas," he says. "If you tell people you're from Davenport, it's not at all surprising to have 'em say, 'Oh, Bix.'"
Duffee, whose Josh Duffee Orchestra is one of the dozen groups scheduled to play the 35th annual Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Festival this weekend, adds, "If you listen to any videos or recordings of people who've been interviewed about Bix - who possibly knew him or knew of him - they said, 'Yeah, he was this kid that came out of Davenport, Iowa.' So they're like, 'This kid came out of Davenport, Iowa, of all places, and just blew everybody away.'"
Playing It from the Heart
Leon Bix Beiderbecke was born in Davenport on March 10, 1903 - his mother, Voss reveals, "was the organist at First Presbyterian" - and, by all accounts, spent more time as a youth listening to music than attending to his studies. Given the time period, though, this could hardly be surprising for a young man with dreams of becoming a musician.
"[In the] early 1900s," says Duffee, "composers really started changing things up from your late-1800s composers. 'Cause you're used to listening to Mozart and Beethoven, how things have a structure. All of a sudden, music started breaking that structure. That why the '20s are so interesting. You listen to, like, any American classical music from 1900 to 1930, it's very out there for the time period. It was a movement of progression and all kinds of new inventions and ideas coming out."
Bix's musical interests, from the beginning, were steeped in jazz; as a teenager, on the banks of the Mississippi, he would steal away to listen to Southern bands playing as they traveled on riverboats heading north. Yet he wanted to do much more than listen, and despite not knowing how to read music - he played solely by ear - Bix began his musical training on the piano, the instrument that would first hint at his greatness.
"He would just listen to his mother play," says Duffee, "and he would get right back up and play exactly what she played on the piano. That's the total-recall memory he had. So when he would start going to piano lessons when he was just a little kid, the teacher would give him an assignment and [Bix] would come back the next week and play it with improvement. He'd play it better than the teacher."
Voss, referring to the same tales of Bix's youth, adds, "He'd memorize it and ... - the following week - even play back his mistakes. So finally the teacher ... went to his mother and said, 'I can't teach him anything. He knows it all.'"
Bix quickly moved on to the cornet - which has a more conical shape than the trumpet, and produces a gentler, more mellow sound - and his abilities on the instrument were clearly innovative. "He was a self-taught cornet player," Voss says, "and he had some unusual fingering. He'd play with the third valve down on occasions where it wasn't considered the right thing to do. It wound up giving him some unique tones ... that nobody else has really been able to duplicate. Even people that have tried to imitate him, note for note, can't seem to produce the same effect he got."
Bix's parents, while aware of his gifts, still wanted their son to get an education, and sent him to the Lake Forest Academy in Lake Forest, Illinois. But with the Chicago jazz scene beckoning, Bix's interest in school continued to wane, and he was eventually asked to leave the institution; Bix began performing professionally with the Wolverine Orchestra in 1924, and was soon in much musical demand in Chicago and New York City.
By that point, it was clear that the musician's gifts were far out of the ordinary, as described by Gunther Schuller in his book Early Jazz, Its Roots & Musical Development. "His ideas and techniques combined into a perfect equation," he wrote, "in that the demands of the former never exceeded the potential of the latter. Bix had a quality extremely rare in early jazz: lyricism."
Duffee describes this lyric quality by equating it with the work of singers of the period. "If you listen to how vocalists phrase - as far as, like, Ella Fitzgerald, and how Hoagy Carmichael sang in that era, too - Bix was kind of basing his solos off how a vocalist would [perform] it. Like, 'How would this be interpreted by a vocalist?'"
When playing cornet, Voss adds, "he could almost compose a separate tune while he was soloing in another one. And yet it always fit musically. It was in the right chord, and the right key, and it just seemed to belong there. I think you can almost feel it when you listen to it."
Part of what made Bix's playing style unique lay in the subtley of his vibrato, which, in Hot Jazz, the Guide to Swing Music, author Hugues Panassie described as "restrained but passionate ... a vibrato no one has been able to imitate."
"You think of it as a wave pattern," Duffee explains. "If you have a straight line, [a vibrato] is a wave pattern going above and below the line. ... Lawrence Welk, it would probably have gone two feet above the line and two feet below. There's so much vibrato there.
"But Bix's was probably just a couple inches above and below the line. Just enough to add a style to his playing. He's just doing these little glisses up the horn," Duffee says, referring to a rapid series of ascending notes that forms a gliss, or glissando. "Like, brr-rrr-rr-rr-up! And it's very articulated ... and no one was really doing that back then."
However, Bix's technical skill was matched by the feeling he put behind his music. In The Jazz Tradition, Martin Williams wrote, "Bix's personal melodic intervals, his warm tone, his handling of sound, his plaintive bent notes, and his easy phrasing are a part of his contribution. But they are all only manifestations of the real import of his playing, which was emotional."
"That's what I've always liked about traditional jazz," says Voss, "regardless of who plays it. Because you're playing it from the heart, you know? You're not just reading it."
Archivist Raeburn explains the revolutionary emotionalism of Bix's playing simply. "He had a vulnerability in his music," Raeburn says. "At the time, a lot of people were going for power in jazz. Bix was more introspective. I think his music truly is a window into his soul."
"You'd hear quotes by, like, Hoagy Carmichael and other musicians who are, like, 'I heard three notes and I about passed out,'" Duffee says, adding that technical acumen means little without emotional involvement. "It's partly the tone, but it's also the musician. It's whatever they're putting behind that note as far as their feeling, their emotion, and however they're playing that horn projects out through music. That's why you always hear people saying, 'Express yourself through music.'"
And, as with a feeling, Bix believed that a piece of music couldn't be perfectly replicated. So he didn't try. "He was noted for not playing the same tune twice in the same way," says Voss.
In a passage in his biography Bunny Berigan, Elusive Legend of Jazz, Robert Dupuis stated that "once Bix had played a jazz solo he frequently disowned it, eschewing requests to repeat it as recorded and looking for a new means of expression the next time around," a musical theology subsequently adopted by other artists.
"Louis Armstrong was the same way," says Duffee. "Armstrong was like, 'No, I don't write it down. Whatever you play and how you feel, that's what you play at that given time.' Every time [Bix] played it was different."
Bix's skill and improvisatory style brought a thrilling new spontaneity to jazz, and despite a professional career that only lasted from 1924 to 1931 - Bix met an early, alcohol-related death at age 28 - his legend among musicians and jaz z historians has only grown through the years; what appeared at first to be innovation was quickly perceived as something akin to genius; in The Art of Jazz, George Avakian seemed to sum up the feelings of many when he wrote, "He was one of the most exciting musicians who ever lived."
"People try to emulate him today," says Voss. "And not just play his solos, but try to imitate his style, and there's very few that even come close."
Everywhere But Davenport
Bix's legend, and adoration for the artist, currently extend to jazz aficionados across the globe. "It's everywhere," says Duffee. "You go over to Europe, and he's even bigger over in Europe. I mean, they worship traditional jazz over there. Even in Australia, too - I've been there - and they know all the songs, they know all the musicians, sometimes better than we know them here."
Voss might argue with that "sometimes" reference. "He's so popular all over the world," Voss says of Bix. "Everywhere but Davenport."
So Voss, Duffee, and performers and educators worldwide - many of them appearing at this weekend's Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Festival - have dedicated their energies toward spreading the word about this remarkable artist and his musical accomplishments.
Voss admits that, locally, "I only know of a couple schools that put any focus on him at all." This year, though, the society is taking it upon itself to educate, setting up a series of symposiums with renowned archivists, historians, and directors dedicated to analysis of Bix's life and music. (Among them will be Tulane University's Raeburn and Art of Jazz author Avakian.)
Through an application process, the society has also arranged for music students from eastern Iowa and western Illinois to attend the symposiums and LeClaire Park concerts free of charge, which Voss says "is a great opportunity for them, and it'll enhance our education program considerably."
Duffee, too, promotes Bix awareness, especially when performing for local school groups. "My big thing is always making sure that little kids know that he was a musician first," adding, in an echo of Voss' story, "because they, of course, think of him as a runner. I say, 'Yeah, he was a musician. He was a piano player first and then a cornet player from there.' I always do education ... because I feel that's as important as the music."
And the education is geared toward more than school-age children. "It's just getting them exposed to it," Duffee says regarding audiences in his age range. (Duffee will be 27 this year.) Audiences "will come out and hear us, and they're like, 'This is the first time we've heard this music, and we're blown away.' And they wanna learn more about it."
They may even be learning about it indirectly, as such jazz artists as Red Nichols, Harry James, and Miles Davis are all indebted to the Bix style. "You listen to Miles Davis riffs," Duffee says, "you listen to anybody who's in the modern era - Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Eldridge - they all took riffs from Bix. Bix was doing all this stuff that they did back in the '20s. Yeah, it doesn't sound like Miles does, of course, but if you really listen to Bix's playing, and catch his ideas ... 30, 40 years later, they were doing the same exact thing that he was doing. So he's pretty much the breakthrough artist with everything.
"And, yeah. This little kid from Davenport."
For more information on Bix Beiderbecke - including links to biographical and musical downloads - visit (http://www.bixography.com).
For information on the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Society, visit (http://www.bixsociety.org).
To listen to Josh Duffee extol Bix, visit (http://www.rcreader.com) or (http://www.qcspan.com).
Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Festival - Daily Schedule
Thursday, July 27
Col Ballroom:
7 p.m.: Bix Beiderbecke Youth Jazz Band
8 p.m.: Bill Allred's Classic Jazz Band
9 p.m.: Josh Duffee's Orchestra
10 p.m.: New Wolverine Jazz Orchestra
11 p.m.: Spats Langham & His Rhythm Boys
Friday, July 28
Clarion Hotel:
10:30 a.m.: Roundtable Discussion - "Bix and His Influence on American Music"
noon: New Wolverine Jazz Orchestra
1 p.m.: Side Street Strutters
2 p.m.: Josh Duffee's Orchestra
3 p.m.: Dick Hyman Concert
4 and 7 p.m.: Spats Langham & His Rhythm Boys
8 p.m.: Cakewalkin' Jass Band
9 p.m.: Side Street Strutters
10 p.m.: Bix Beiderbecke Youth Jazz Band
11 p.m.: Bill Allred's Classic Jazz Band
Col Ballroom:
7 p.m.: Statesmen of Jazz
8 p.m.: Randy Sandke's New York All Stars
9 p.m.: Josh Duffee's Orchestra
10 p.m.: Cakewalkin' Jass Band
11 p.m.: New Wolverine Jazz Orchestra
Danceland:
7 p.m.: Red Rose Ragtime Band
8 p.m.: Bill Allred's Classic Jazz Band
9 p.m.: Statesmen of Jazz
10 p.m.: Randy Sandke's New York All Stars
11 p.m.: Black Dogs
LeClaire Park:
noon: Bill Allred's Classic Jazz Band
1 p.m.: Black Dogs
2 p.m.: Cakewalkin' Jass Band
3 p.m.: Red Rose Ragtime Band
4 p.m.: Side Street Strutters
7 p.m.: Bix Beiderbecke Youth Jazz Band
8 p.m.: Black Dogs
9 p.m.: New Wolverine Jazz Orchestra
10 p.m.: Spats Langham & His Rhythm Boys
11 p.m.: Red Rose Ragtime Band
Saturday, July 29
Bettendorf Middle Park:
6 p.m.: Cakewalkin' Jass Band
7:15 p.m.: Bill Allred's Classic Jazz Band
Clarion Hotel:
10:30 a.m.: Roundtable Discussion - Michael Cogswell, Deborah Gillaspie, & Duncan Schiedt
noon: Cakewalkin' Jass Band
1 p.m.: Spats Langham & His Rhythm Boys
2 p.m.: Black Dogs
3 p.m.: Side Street Strutters
4 p.m. Josh Duffee's Orchestra
7 p.m.: Red Rose Ragtime Band
8 p.m.: New Wolverine Jazz Orchestra
9 p.m.: Black Dogs
10 p.m.: Randy Sandke's New York All Stars
11 p.m.: Statesmen of Jazz
Col Ballroom:
7 p.m. Black Dogs
8 p.m.: Spats Langham & His Rhythm Boys
9 p.m.: Side Street Strutters
10 p.m.: Bix Beiderbecke Youth Jazz Band
11 p.m.: Red Rose Ragtime Band
Danceland:
7 p.m.: Bix Beiderbecke Youth Jazz Band
8 p.m.: Cakewalkin' Jass Band
9 p.m.: Josh Duffee's Orchestra
10 p.m.: New Wolverine Jazz Orchestra
11 p.m.: Spats Langham & His Rhythm Boys
LeClaire Park:
noon: Josh Duffee's Orchestra
1 p.m.: Bix Beiderbecke Youth Jazz Band
2 p.m.: Red Rose Ragtime Band
3 p.m.: New Wolverine Jazz Orchestra
4 p.m.: Spats Langham & His Rhythm Boys
7 p.m.: Side Street Strutters
8 p.m.: Randy Sandke's New York All Stars
9 p.m.: Statesmen of Jazz
10 p.m.: Bill Allred's Classic Jazz Band
11 p.m.: Cakewalkin' Jass Band
Oakdale Cemetery:
10 a.m.: Randy Sandke's New York All Stars
Putnam Museum:
1 p.m.: Dick Hyman Concert
VanderVeer Park:
5 p.m.: Red Rose Ragtime Band
6 p.m.: New Wolverine Jazz Orchestra
West Music Davenport:
1 p.m.: Master Classes - Statesmen of Jazz members
Sunday, July 30
Capitol Theatre:
1 p.m.: Dick Hyman Concert
2 p.m.: Roundtable Discussions - "Bix: The Man and His Music"
7 p.m.: Bill Allred's Classic Jazz Band
8 p.m.: Statesmen of Jazz
9 p.m.: Randy Sandke's New York All Stars
Clarion Hotel:
1 p.m.: Master Classes - Randy Sandke's New York All Stars members
Figge Art Museum:
11 a.m.: Spats Langham & His Rhythm Boys
First Presbyterian Church:
8:30 & 10:30 a.m.: Side Street Strutters
LeClaire Park:
noon: Cakewalkin' Jass Band
1 p.m.: Black Dogs
2 p.m.: Red Rose Ragtime Band
3 p.m.: Josh Duffee's Orchestra
4 p.m.: Bill Allred's Classic Jazz Band
Radisson Hotel:
10 a.m.: Black Dogs
11:30 a.m.: Red Rose Ragtime Band
