Bix Beiderbecke
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The death certificate , No. A-25901, Department of Health, City of New York, said his name was Leon Bix Beiderbecke, male, white, musician; last known address 43-30 Forty-sixth Street, Sunnyside Queens; permanent or usual address, none; cause of death, lobar pneumonia, duration 3 days. (Berton, 1974, p. 6).
For more than a week Bix had lain alone in the dusty furnished flat like an ownerless dog, his life ebbing away, drinking up what was left in a few bottles of bootleg rum and bathtub gin. It didnt occur to him to let anyone know. Possibly he didnt really know himself; almost certainly, he didnt care. Essentially he had been dying a long time.
At 43-30 Forty-sixth Street, few of Bixs neighbors knew that the quiet young fellow in 2-C had been taken away in a city ambulance and would not be coming back. The old man who lived over him in 3-C had met him sometimes in the elevator and had asked him once if that was him playing on a trumpet all by himself at four-oclock in the morning. Bix was afraid he was disturbing him but the old man begged him not to stop; it was the sweetest sound hed ever heard.
The landlady thought he must be home because the lights were burning all night but the old man said he hadnt heard him practicing even though he had heard the water running in the bathroom which was right under his. The landlady decided to knock on Bixs door.
She was shocked at the way he looked and the condition of the flat. Dust everywhere, empty bottles and full ashtrays, in the refrigerator a half bottle of milk blue with mold, half a can of dried-up sardines. Bix lying there in a suit of dirty BVDs, half covered by a dirty sheet, dirty socks under the bed and on the chair, a general look to the place as if no one was living there. The air was hot and stale. Bix had fixed up an electric fan on a chair next to the bed to blow directly under his pillow, which was soaked in sweat; that worried the landlady as much as anything; she said he would “catch his death,” but Bix just gazed at her with swollen eyes half glued shut. She asked whether she should call a doctor for him, whether she could get him anything. Bix managed a ghastly grin and mumbled no, he had everything he needed–indicating a half-full bottle of what she took to be gin, and the electric fan going back and forth with a low hum. With some misgivings she left. But on thinking it over she realized she was scared, and decided to call the ambulance.
There was no obituary in The New York Times, then or subsequently. In 1931 that respectable plot of information didnt regard a jazz musicians drinking himself obscurely to death as particularly newsworthy. As a fading figure of the already faded Jazz Age, Bix didnt even rate one line of 6-point type.
There was no shortage of news fit to print that year of 1931. At Yankee Stadium, Babe Ruth drove in his 29th homer of the season; Charles Lindbergh and Mrs. Lindbergh took off on a flight to the Pole; Rudy Vallee chalked up a new box office record at the Paramount; Jack Benny and George Jessel headed an all-start vaudeville bill at the Palace. Down the block at Loews State, the new Joan Crawford film, Laughing Sinners, featuring a new male “find,” Clark Gable, entered its fifth smash week. In the Bronx, a ten-year-old boy, caught in the crossfire between rival bootlegger mobs, died in the hospital. In Washington, Senator Andrew Volstead called Prohibition “98% effective” and ” a blessing of God on our nation.” Had there been an imaginative journalist who knew the full magnitude of Bixs influence in the world there may have been an obituary with a lead paragraph stating something such as, “No jazz was heard Thursday night at Queens General Hospital as Bix Beiderbecke quietly died. But in a certain sense what was dying, that muggy night, was a significant bit of the Jazz Age itself………”
Bix was born in Davenport, Iowa, March 10, 1903. At that time Teddy Roosevelt was president. A schooner of beer, with a free lunch, cost five cents. Seventy-three percent of the American population lived on farms or in towns of under 50,000, in homes lit by gas or oil lamps. Telephones were a novelty. The horseless carriage was still a toy for rich eccentrics. Solid citizens owned horses; young whipper-snappers rode bicycles, but most people who had to go anywhere nearby, meaning less than five miles, usually walked. In Detroit that year an ex-farm boy bought an old machine shop and started his own factory, The Ford Motor Company. Later that year, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a couple of bicycle mechanics, Wilbur and Orville Wright, flew an airplane for 59 seconds.
A big evening consisted of gathering around the parlor to sing hymns or, in “peppy” households, ragtime songs. The men of the households were brave and strong, girls were weak and often fainted, children were seen and not heard or they got a licking when Pa got home; a burglar was a burly fellow in a cap carrying a dark lantern; a tramp had a rum-blossom nose and a four-day beard and stole Moms pies off the windowsill, where she put them to cool; a “radical” or “anarchist” was a wild-haired bearded foreigner carrying a lighted, spherical bomb; a Negro (pronounced nigger) was a happy-go-lucky, childlike chap strumming a banjo, who stole chickens and fainted at the mention of ghosts. A ladys ankle was a daring spectacle, and the word sophisticated was no compliment; in 1903 it still meant “tricky,” two big hit songs of the day were Come Josephine (In My Flying Machine) and If the Man in the Moon Was a Coon(What Would ja Do?).
Bixs family lived in the small, typical, mid-western town of Davenport, Iowa. His family was a solid middle-class German-American family and, of course, “musical.” His Great-Grandfather Beiderbecke had been a professional organist. His Grandpa had led the Deutsche-Amerikaische choral society there in the 1890s. Bixs mother won prizes at the age of ten for playing the piano. Uncle Al, leader of the town band, was a professional cornetist and his big sister, Alice, was a semiprofessional pianist at age twelve. As for Bix, in 1910 the Davenport Chronicle carried an item about “Little Leon Beiderbecke, this prodigy who at seven can play any selection he hears, on the piano, entirely by ear.” (Berton, 1974, p. 13).
Bix was fifteen when he began teaching himself the cornet–playing along with the recordings of the frenetic Original Dixieland Jazz Band. By eighteen, he began his professional life in jazz and his love affair with John Barleycorn. He was nineteen when he helped organize the Wolverines and it was Bixs already defined style