It’s one of the iconic images of the Jazz Age, a scrubbed-up kid a few months shy of his 21st birthday, gazing just past the camera lens with a sweet, slightly sappy half-smile. He had twins by the thousands, back in the Roaring Twenties when pomaded and tuxedoed boy bands roamed the country, oozing hot tunes and sex appeal, spiffy gents enjoying one last frolic before settling into their preordained adult roles as husbands and fathers, as businessmen and lawyers and doctors and stockbrokers.
But the photo was actually just a desultory promotional shot taken in January 1924 for a working-class Cincinnati dance hall. And that pretty boy with the sparkling horn was usually scruffy and unkempt; he would be dead seven years later—a booze-soaked wreck at 28. The Twenties—flappers and bootleggers and speakeasies and jazz, Al Capone and Charles Lindbergh and George Gershwin and Charlie Chaplin, Model Ts and radios and airplanes and talkies—had a dark side. Perhaps nobody illustrates the beauty and tragedy of the 1920s better than Leon Bismark "Bix" Beiderbecke, the boy with a horn. He spent his short career in the dead center of the Jazz Age, and the era eventually consumed him.
Bix’s seedy end stands in harsh contrast to the happy glow of his middle-class upbringing in Davenport, Iowa. Nothing could be more normal or more respectable than the world of Bismark Hermann and Jane Agatha Beiderbecke and their three children. The Beiderbecke clan epitomizes the American Dream in all its mythic allure, three generations of prosperity and civic virtue spread along the upper Mississippi Valley. Bix must have been a shock to the system, with his deepset and willful musical talent that resisted formal training, his irresponsibility, his indifference to schooling, and his muddled sexuality, witnessed by an arrest at age 18 for fondling a five-year-old girl and later hints of bisexuality.
He was a type familiar to those of us who inhabit conservatories—the kid whose head is so wrapped up in music that the outer world makes little impression, the bubblehead who floats about, never quite connecting with responsibility, occasionally flunking out as a result but usually keeping it together just barely enough to avoid disaster. Most of those kids eventually strike a compromise with their talent and go on to live happy and productive lives as musicians. Some don’t; Bix was one of those.
I remember an undeniably gifted and good-hearted guitarist who was amongst my students at SFCM, but tragically his naughty-boy interest in drugs blossomed malevolently into full-scale addiction. He made a few half-hearted attempts to clean up, but it was no go and the Conservatory not only dismissed him but barred him access to the campus. The last time I saw him he was in sad shape, and I can’t find any evidence of him now. I still mourn for him, whether he’s alive or dead…if only he had enough time to reconcile the adolescent rebellion that was powering his behavior, but the drugs got there first.
Bix was also a lost child. His letters reveal a nice fellow, none too bright, with a good heart and good intentions, but they tell us very little about what he really thought or felt, what made him tick, or who he really was behind his friendly but detached persona. Perhaps he never gave his emotional development much thought; his time was spent gigging all night, sleeping for most of the day, hanging out with other musicians and boozing himself blotto. Unlike his drinking buddy Hoagy Carmichael who developed into a wise and perceptive elder statesman of American popular music, Bix didn’t survive his Crazy Eddie youth, so we’ll never know what he might have been.
What remains is a legend, assembled from reminiscences, pictures, newspapers, letters, rumors, and hints. And then there are Bix’s recordings, his most enduring legacy. Many of them are trifles from Paul Whiteman’s and Jean Goldkette’s dance bands, entertaining enough but hardly the stuff of dreams. But there’s magic as well, such as Singin’ the Blues with his frequent partner Frankie Trumbauer on C saxophone, as Bix makes it clear that jazz improvisation could be simultaneously elegant and hot, or in the kicky joy of At the Jazz Band Ball, or as his limber cornet trips the light fantastic on the slick linoleum of a Whiteman chart, such as 1927’s Changes with its smarmy Bing Crosby-led vocal trio.
So as I listen to Bix romp his way through Since My Best Girl Turned Me Down, I keep before me that photo of the radiant Jazz Age chevalier sans pur et sans raproche, and wonder if perhaps Bix is winking at me over our 86-year separation—I’ll always look like this to you, he says, and I’ll always sound like this to you. I’ll always be whatever you want me to be, sinner or saint, winner or loser, hero or schmuck. Not bad for a scrawny German kid from Davenport, eh?