The Bix Beiderbecke Story - Vol. II - Bix and Tram

 

Mississippi Mud

The Bix Beiderbecke Story

Vol. II

Bix and Tram

Columbia CL 845

1956

From the back cover: The association of Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauser, begun in the fall of 1925 at the Arcadia Ballroom in St. Louis, is an unusual meeting of two musicians who were unlike in many ways, and yet collaborated successfully with mutual benefit to both. They were an odd combination even in appearance: Bix was husky, well-built, and blessed with a round, externally youthful, country-face, while Tram was the wiry type, a few inches shorter than the sturdy Beiderbecke, and with long, almost Mephistophelian features.

Trumbauer generally played C-melody saxophone, an instrument with the high pitch of E-flat alto sax. (It's virtually extinct today; even more than the bass sax which appears on many recording in this group.) The instrument as a whimsical tone, and Trumbauer played it that way. It suited the times, and it often suited Bix, who frequently served as Tram's foil. The many juxtapositions of Box's cornet and Tram's sax been well together, although oddly enough Bix always sounds dead serious and Tram always keeps the light touch.

Tram, a well-trained musician with a deaf on his shoulders appreciated and encouraged Bix in every way he none. He helps Box with the technical side of music, but still more important he helps steer the impractical Bix (who was such a "gone" guy that he often went for days without taking off his clothes, shoes and sock included) into the two best-paying and most famous bands of their time: Gene Goldkette's and Paul Whiteman's.

Second-gussers have also claimed that this was the ruin of Bix. His death from Physical frailty, brought on by alcoholism caused by musical and psychological frustration bears them out in some degree. But the point is still highly debatable, and the opinion here is that Bix was doomed never to find his shadowy goal in life, and that the end might even have been hurried without the money that enabled Bix to pay half a buck extra for a better grade of the inevitable bootleg.

Bix still couldn't read worth a hang, although he'd managed to hold down a chair with Charlie Straight's eleven-piece band in Chicago for a while before joining Tram. But during the season in St. Louis he enlarged his musical development in two ways: in the loneliness of being in a strange city, Bix found time to indulge his interest in classical music, and he used his ability to play piano by ear to delve more deeply into improvisation based on expansions of conventional harmony.

Contemporary European composers for orchestra fascinated him, particularly Debussy, Ravel, Holst and Stravinsky. In addition to going to concerts (usually with Bud Hassler of the Trumbauer band) Bix spent long hours at the piano in deserted bars, working out his own improvisation and teaching himself pieces by the Americans Griffes, MacDowell and Eastwood Lane. Bix always played with a consciousness for whole-tone scale (which also appears frequently in Debussy), and in this period he began exploring the non-jazz facets with were to incline more and more his improvisational thinking.

With Bix able to read a little better, Tram got him into Gene Goldkette's orchestra in the spring of 1926, along with some of the other Arcadia bandsmen. Goldkette, a rare combination of musician and business man, owned the Greystone Ballroom in Detroit, where he would build spa band's reputation and then send it out to cash in elsewhere in the Middle West. He was primarily responsible for the success of McKinney's Cotton Pickers, the best Negro dance orchestra in the midwest in the twenties, and later emulated Chicago's Husk O'Hare in booking two or three bands at once under his own name (which has been more highly developed by such society bandleaders a Meyer Davis).

Goldkett's basic band was the finest white orchestra of its time and consisted of musicians who could play both sweet and hot. It was the first white band to play jazz arrangements with real force, and it packed more of a wallop tham most large negro orchestras of that time. That summer Goldkette sent out a unit from the band to play a dime-a-dance joint called the Blue Lantern Inn at Hudson Lake, Indiana. The management frequently spilt the band so the music could be continuous, Bix double in both platoons, playing cornet in one and piano in the other.

At Hudson Lake Bix shared a broken-down cottage with Pee Wee Russell, the colorful clarinetist from St. Louis, who was closer spiritually to Bix than the more business-like Trumbauer. Bix and Pee Wee didn't care about anything by playing and not letting their liquor supply get below a 24-hour reserve. (They got their stuff for two bucks a gallon from a pair of bare-footed hags who protected themselves from Prohibition agents with a dozen ravenous dogs and a brace of shovels. They also used the latter to dig up crocks secreted behind the converted henhouse in which they lived.)

Aside from empty jugs, Bix and Pee Wee had an outstanding collection of sardine and baked bean cans – the only food they bothered with. The back porch sagged under thirty or forty quart bottles of milk. (They always meant to leave a note for the milkman but never found a pencil and paper together at the same time). They bought a Buick that didn't run and used it all the way out to the shack; all they used it for was to shave in front of a mirror propped against the hood, but as they explained to friends, if you live in the country you've got to have a car. Says Mezz Mezzrow, whom we can thank for preserving these textile in his autobiography, Really The Blues, "I couldn't tell you if there were any rugs under the dirt, but the room did have an upright piano with a bad list to the keyboard."

That piano helped Bix explore more and more the intricacies of harmony. He was beginning to split his musical personality – European form and discipline were begging to encroach on the freedom of the New Orleans music which had been his first great influence. Soon after Bix was to record his piano solo, In A Mist (which is in Vol. 3), wherein the influence of Edwin MacDowell wins out over jazz, though the latter is still in there pitching.

In A Mist, which grows in its importance in understanding Bix as one probes deeper and deeper into both the man and musician, could not have been more appropriately named. Bix never got out of the musical mist in his striving and searching for something that always eluded him (but, as his admirers point out, what wonderful things he played as he stove!) Further embattled as he was by the commercial music world, on which he as never able to turn his back, Bit's personal life became a mist in which he depended on Alcohol to carry him through each disappointment.

The high points he found sometimes in his own playing, sometimes in the company of friends. Whenever Bix was in New York, he had a standing invitation to play at Princeton dances. Frank Noris and Squirrel Ashcraft, independently of one another and in almost the same words, made clear to the writer that when Bix was around the talk was seldom about  music. "Bix had some unusual things in common with us," says Ashcraft, "we discovered that he could quote long passages from P. G. Wodehouse as well as we could, and we could spot the approximate page and the exact character who said any chosen line from his books – he had written 48."

The jazz brotherhood has never had much to do with women on most levels, and Bix usually steered clear ion them, although he was all man the girls went for him as a rule. The only one who seems to have meant anything to him was a cheerleader at Indiana U. during the spring the Wolverines were on the campus every week-end. She played a fair piano, and it was Bit's music that got her more than his boyish good looks. Her home was in Hammond, not far from Indiana Harbor, where Bix played that summer, and things got to be pretty serious for a while. Sixteen years later, Eddie Nichols found her singing in a sleazy tavern, but she was in a bad way by then and wouldn't talk about Bix or anything else.

The Goldkette days were the last in which Bix was to have any real degree of musical freedom, though even with this band there were plenty of times when he was playing under wraps half the night. The band travels as far East as New York, where it played the Roseland Ballroom opposite Fletcher Henderson. Bix was the man the local boys pointed out on the bandstand; the word had already spread through the country among musicians. But it was the more practical Trumbauser who wangled a recording contract with Okeh (with the assistance of Red McKenzie and Tommy Rockwell). He used Bix and his friends on the dates, and later got Bix a contract, too.

But by the summer of 1927 it was apparent that Goldkette couldn't keep the band going at all-star prices. The break came in October, and Adrian Rollini, who had worked a couple of record dates with Bix and Tram, booked them (along with most of the other hot musicians) into a new club. In two weeks the joint folded, and it was with Paul Whiteman's orchestra that the nucleus of the Goldkette band finally landed, Bix and Tram among them.

The selections in this volume of The Bix Beiderbecke Story were recorded under Frank Trumbauer's leadership during the period of the Goldkette band's Eastern swings and the first year of Bit's association with Paul Whiteman. They contain the most celebrated solos Bix ever recorded. I'm Comin' Virginia and Way Down Yonder In New Orleans are considered Nos. 2 and 3 in the collector's books, with the top spot emphatically reserved for Singin' The Blues.

In fact, this is usually considered one father three most celebrated solos in jazz history (the other two being King Oliver's cornet choruses on Dippermoth Blues and Johnny Dodds' rendition of the original Alphonse Picou clarinet solo in High Society). It is a solo of intense, brooding beauty, carefully built up to a typical tumbling break in the middle, with a surprise explosion after it. There was hardly a contemporary white musician of jazz pretensions who didn't learn it by heart. Fletcher Henderson paid the ultimate tribute by recording it twice in a version for his whole brass section, and in the thirties Will Osborne and Adrian Rollini both waxed similar arrangements for full orchestra. (The Trumbauer solo preceding Bix's was accorded the same honors, but with the passing years it has taken a back seat to Bix's solo.)

Wingin' And Twisting' and For No Reason At All In C find Bix at the piano with Eddie Lang on guitar and Tram on sax. His piano work on these numbers is not exceptional ; the style is typical of the period (Lennie Hayton's and Frank Signorelli's solos elsewhere in these volumes are example), but there is also an occasional flash of the quality Bix shows in the famous In A Mist – particularly in the fine intro he plays for No Reason, which is actually a variation on I'd Climb The Highest Mountain as arranged by Bill Challis for the Goldkette band. Each of these trio cuttings ends with Bix picking up his horn to play a few golden notes in the coda.

Ostrich Walk and Clarinet Marmalade are dixieland favorites; the former contains as exceptional solo which twice uses the descending phrase typical of Bix's concept of the blues. (He bases his opening on Way Down Yonder In New Orleans on this same phrase.) Mississippi Mud includes some minstrel-type clowning by Bing Crosby and Frank Trumbauer, and Carrying All Day is obviously a follow-up on Singin' The Blues; a good enough record on its own merits, but a far cry from the original. (Kindly note pun.)

Dates and Personnels 

February 4, 1927: Singin' The Blue. Bix Beiderbecke (cornet); Miff Mole (trombone); Jimmy Dorsey (clarinet); Doc Ryker (alto sax); Frank Trmbauer (C-melody sax); Morehouse (drums). Clarinet Marmalade was made the same day, with Bill Rank replacing Mole, and Howdy Quicksell (banjo) replacing Lang.

May 9, 1927: Ostrich Walk, Riverboat Shuffle. May 13, 1927: I'm Comin' Virginia, Way Down Yonder In New Orleans. Same personnel as for Singin' The Blues, except that Bill Rank and Don Murray replace Mole and Dorsey.

The Tram, Bix and Lang selections were recorded May 13 (For No Reason At All In C) and September 17 (Wringin' And Twisting'), 1927.

October 25, 1927: Crying All Day, A Good Man Is Hard To Find. Beiderbecke; Rank; Don Murray and Pee Wee Russel (clarinet and tenor sax); Trumbauser; Ryker; Adrian Rollino (bass sax); Joe Venuti (violin); Arthur Schutt (piano); Lang; Morehouse.

January 9, 1928: There'll Come A Time, Beiderbecke; Harry Goldfield (trumpet); Rank; Dorsey; Trumbauer; Harold Stickfadden (alto and baritone sax); Min Leibrook (bass sax); Matty Matneck (violin); Hayton Lang: George Marsh (drums).

January 20, 1928: Mississippi Mud. Beiderbecke: Rank: Izzy Friedman (clarinet); Trumbauer; Leibrook; Malneck; Hayton; Carl Press (guitar); Marsh. Bing Crosby and Frank Trumbauer are the vocalist.