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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Monday Surprise: Seeing Bix

June 18, 2018 by Doug Ramsey

For many aficionados of Bix Beiderbecke the surprise is not that there is so little film of the great cornetist, but that there is any. To the left, we see a frame of film shot in 1928 for Fox Movietone News of the Whiteman orchestra recording or rehearsing a piece called “My Ohio Home.” When Beiderbecke died in 1931 at the age of 28, he had earned the admiration of his contemporary and friend Louis Armstrong and become an inspiration for generations of cornetists and trumpet players. The official cause of his death was pneumonia, his lifestyle strongly suggests that advanced alcoholism was a contributing factor. Beiderbecke was a primary model for Rex Stewart, Jimmy McPartland, Benny Carter and Bobby Hackett, among dozens of others. The influence of his tone, lyricism and phrasing continued well into the new century in players including Warren Vache, Ed Polcer and Richard Sudhalter. Sudhalter was also Beiderbecke’s biographer.

The clip opens with Whiteman symbolically tearing up his RCA Victor contract as he was about to sign with Columbia Records. Beiderbecke is shown standing and playing beginning at 1:12. Erwig Films, which posted this on YouTube, shows us the clip twice.

So much for the novelty of a glimpse into history. For a complete and more satisfying Beiderbecke performance, let’s listen to Beiderbecke on cornet in “I’m Coming Virginia” from 1927. The tag ending with which Bix follows his glorious solo is one of the most quoted phrases in jazz.

The other players were Bill Rank, trombone; Don Murray, tenor saxophone and arranger; Frankie Trumbauer, C-melody saxophone; Irving “Itzy” Riskin, piano; Howdy Quicksell, banjo; Chauncey Morehouse, drums. The performance is included in this album.

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Comments

  1. mel says

    June 19, 2018 at 12:27 am

    Thank you for the link and info, Doug. A gem, not to be missed.

  2. Jeffrey Sultanof says

    June 19, 2018 at 7:01 am

    Hopefully the complete clip will be found one day. This is only an excerpt, but invaluable just the same.

  3. Orsolya S. says

    June 19, 2018 at 10:07 am

    Thanks for the videos. Paul Whiteman tearing up his contract, I guess not too happy with RCA. Where did he get the name “Bix” from?

    • Doug Ramsey says

      June 19, 2018 at 10:58 am

      His full name was Leon Bismarck Beiderbecke. Bismarck: Hence, Bix for short

  4. Anonymous says

    June 20, 2018 at 1:59 pm

    If I’m not mistaken, the “Erwig” of Erwin films is Bob Erwig, a Dutch-born cornetist who spent many years in Toronto before relocating to the west coast of Canada.

    Bob was always a collector of jazz stuff, and over the years has made it available on YouTube. To hear Bob speak for himself, click here.

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

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Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

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Doug’s Picks

Monday Recommendation: Thelonious Monk’s Works In Full

Kimbrough, Robinson, Reid, Drummond: Monk’s Dreams(Sunnyside) The subtitle of this invaluable 6-CD set is The Complete Compositions Of Thelonious Sphere Monk. By complete, Sunnyside means that the box contains six CDs with 70 tunes that Monk wrote beginning in the early years when his music was generally assumed to be an eccentric offshoot of bebop, […]

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Recent Listening: Harry Vetro’s Northern Ranger

Recent Listening: Harry Vetro’s Northern Ranger A generation of Canadian musicians is coming to prominence in their youth and making substantial impressions. One is drummer Harry Vetro. After he was graduated from the University of Toronto Jazz Program, the 23-year-old spent much of last year exploring his country as it celebrated its 150th year of […]

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Weekend Listening Tip: Maria Schneider & The SRJO

Jim Wilke tells us that his Jazz Northwest broadcast on Sunday will present Maria Schneider conducting the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra. The program comes from his recording of the second of Ms. Schneider’s two concerts with the SRJO early this month. Her work has brought her five Grammy Awards, victories in many readers and critics […]

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Monday Recommendation, A Day Late: Atlantis Quartet

Atlantis Quartet, Hello Human (Shifting Paradigm Records) If you visit the Shifting Paradigm Records website in search of Hello Human, you may be startled to see the legend, “Name Your Price,” near a box with a dollar sign and an empty space waiting to be filled. In fairness, the offer has a notation that reads, […]

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Monday Recommendation: Bing Crosby, Continued

Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby Swinging On A Star: The War Years 1940-1946 (Little, Brown) Seventeen years following his initial installment, Gary Giddins continues the story of the man who absorbed and internalized early jazz values in the 1920s and became the most important popular singer in the world. Crosby retained that distinction until the expanding dominance […]

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Monday Recommendation (Unavoidably Delayed)

Wayne Shorter, Emanon (Blue Note) Although Wayne Shorter’s saxophone artistry and that of his quartet need no enhancement, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra shares the first disc of this three-CD collection. As always, the Orpheus is impressive for the precision of its musicianship, but the combination plods compared with the exhilaration of the second and third […]

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More Doug's Picks

Blogroll

All About Jazz
JerryJazzMusician
Carol Sloane: SloaneView
Jazz Beyond Jazz: Howard Mandel
The Gig: Nate Chinen
Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong
Don Heckman: The International Review Of Music
Ted Panken: Today is The Question
George Colligan: jazztruth
Brilliant Corners
Jazz Music Blog: Tom Reney
Brubeck Institute
Darcy James Argue
Jazz Profiles: Steve Cerra
Notes On Jazz: Ralph Miriello
Bob Porter: Jazz Etc.
be.jazz
Marc Myers: Jazz Wax
Night Lights
Jason Crane:The Jazz Session
JazzCorner
I Witness
ArtistShare
Jazzportraits
John Robert Brown
Night After Night
Do The Math/The Bad Plus
Prague Jazz
Russian Jazz
Jazz Quotes
Jazz History Online
Lubricity

Personal Jazz Sites
Chris Albertson: Stomp Off
Armin Buettner: Crownpropeller’s Blog
Cyber Jazz Today, John Birchard
Dick Carr’s Big Bands, Ballads & Blues
Donald Clarke’s Music Box
Noal Cohen’s Jazz History
Bill Crow
Easy Does It: Fernando Ortiz de Urbana
Bill Evans Web Pages
Dave Frishberg
Ronan Guilfoyle: Mostly Music
Bill Kirchner
Mike Longo
Jan Lundgren (Friends of)
Willard Jenkins/The Independent Ear
Ken Joslin: Jazz Paintings
Bruno Leicht
Earl MacDonald
Books and CDs: Bill Reed
Marvin Stamm

Tarik Townsend: It’s A Raggy Waltz
Steve Wallace: Jazz, Baseball, Life and Other Ephemera
Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest
Jessica Williams

Other Culture Blogs
Terry Teachout
DevraDoWrite
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
On An Overgrown Path

Journalism
PressThink: Jay Rosen
Second Draft, Tim Porter
Poynter Online

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