Volume 50, Number 13 · August 14, 2003
'In a Mist'
By Whitney Balliett
The Complete Okeh and Brunswick Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer and Jack Teagarden Sessions, 1924–36
Mosaic, 7 CDs, $112.00
Louis Armstrong: The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings
Columbia/Legacy, 4 CDs, $54.98
1929
by Frederick Turner
Counterpoint, 390 pp., $25.00
The elusive and altogether brilliant jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke was born March 10, 1903, in Davenport, Iowa, of a comfortable middle-class German family, and died during an attack of delirium tremens on August 6, 1931, in an airless one-room apartment in Sunnyside, Queens. He made the first of his scant 250 recordings in February of 1924 and the last in September of 1930, ten months before his death. He was admired by, and played with, such other rising white musicians and singers as Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Pee Wee Russell, Benny Goodman, Bing Crosby, Bud Freeman, Hoagy Carmichael, and Joe Venuti, as well as by such black musicians as Louis Armstrong, Benny Carter, Rex Stewart, and Lester Young, the last of whom particularly cherished Bix's longtime partner, the coolly skilled, non-improvising C-melody saxophonist Frank Trumbauer.
Review, 2274 words
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