The History of Jazz (19 page)

Bix and Tram were far from the only famous jazz buddies recruited into the Goldkette band. Two innovative string soloists, guitarist Eddie Lang and violinist Joe Venuti, were added for recording sessions, and stand out as the premier players on their instruments from the early days of jazz. They had met during their childhood in Philadelphia, even sharing a music stand while performing in the local school orchestra. Both Venuti and Lang, who was born as Salvatore Massaro, began studies on the violin—it was a favored instrument of European immigrants, some have suggested, since it could be easily carried along as families migrated to a new homeland—but Lang later switched to banjo and guitar. The duo played together in Philadelphia and Atlantic City in the early 1920s when both were in their late teens. In 1926, they reunited in New York and embarked on a series of important recordings. Their 1926 duet, “Stringing the Blues,” not only showcases their deep rapport and the ease of their playing, but is also a landmark in defining the role of guitar and violin in the jazz idiom (anticipating the celebrated later work of the Quintette of the Hot Club of France). Later collaborations, such as “Running Ragged” from October 1929 and “The Wild Dog” from October 1930, document the pair’s progress in expanding the jazz vocabulary on their instruments. These seminal recordings went a long way toward forging a chamber music style of jazz combo playing.

Eventually the core of jazz soloists on the Goldkette roster—Bix, Tram, Lang, Venuti—made the move to the more successful Paul Whiteman orchestra, a group that, if anything, presents later listeners with an enigma even more puzzling than Goldkette’s. Whiteman’s knack for public relations, which led to his being dubbed the “King of Jazz,” may have helped boost his fame in the 1920s but caused an intense backlash in later years. Robert Goffin, whose 1931 work
Aux Frontieres du Jazz
was the first major book on the music, reflected the view of many jazz lovers when, in a pointed jab at Whiteman, he dedicated the work to “Louis Armstrong, the real King of Jazz.” Whiteman’s music, in his opinion, reflected “a compromise between real jazz and the prejudices of the bourgeois public.”
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Although he had not yet visited America, Goffin was extraordinarily prescient in his early evaluations of Armstrong, Beiderbecke, Ellington, Hawkins, and others. For that matter, his irritation at Whiteman’s spurious title was hardly unjustified. Yet Whiteman, like Goldkette, is a far too complex and problematic figure to dismiss with a cursory judgment.

To a great degree, this is because the accepted discourses relating to twentieth-century music are poorly equipped to cope with figures who straddle different idioms. For example, most chronicles of musical activity in the 1920s will draw an implicit delineation between popular music, jazz, and classical composition. Hence, accounts of the evolution of jazz tend to present a polarized landscape in which hot bands (Henderson, Ellington, Goodman, Basie) thrive, develop, and change in complete isolation from other musical currents. Such categorizations may make the narrative structure of a music history book flow more smoothly, but much is lost in the process. This approach is especially maladroit when dealing with an artist such as Whiteman, who operated primarily in the interstices between different types of music. Perhaps this would not be so much of a problem if genres rarely crossed paths, but—for better or worse—the modern age is marked by the tendency for distinct styles to coalesce and cross-fertilize. In music, purity is a myth, albeit a resilient one. The historian who hopes to come to grips with the powerful currents of creativity in modern times must learn to deal with these composite art forms on their own terms or not at all. There is no high road on the postmodern map, just a myriad of intersecting and diverging paths.

Where do we start in assessing Whiteman across his broad spectrum of musical activism? It is Whiteman’s equivocal position as a footnote to the history of classical music that most accounts stress: namely, his role in commissioning (although coercing might be a better term for what actually happened) George Gershwin to write his famous
Rhapsody in Blue
. But the jazz credentials of the Whiteman band were also considerable. Borrowing the best of the Goldkette orchestra—Beiderbecke, Trumbauer, Challis, Venuti, Lang, Brown—Whiteman brought them together with a host of other rising young talents, ranging from Bing Crosby to Ferde Grofé. But these artists were often required to perform material with minimal jazz content. The sweet popular music of Whiteman’s band was its weakest side—which is all the more unfortunate, given how much Whiteman has come to be evaluated on these pieces. Recordings such as “Whispering” and “Japanese Sandman” sold well at the time, but sound dated to ears weaned on more declamatory musical styles. The same is true of the Victor Herbert works that Whiteman promoted, as well as the pseudo-classical arrangements of pieces such as Lehar’s “Merry Widow Waltz” and Liszt’s “Liebestraum.” There is a reserved daintiness about them that recalls, not without a certain charm, the naiveté of the Jazz Age; but, in the final analysis, they lack the robustness that would have allowed them to weather the passing decades.

But another, jazzier side of Whiteman deserves to be celebrated, one that is too often forgotten or dismissed out of hand these days. Whiteman may not have lived up to his claim to be the King of Jazz, but neither was he a mere commoner in the kingdom of hot music. Even before Beiderbecke joined his band, Whiteman had fine hot players on hand—check out the trumpet solos from Tommy Gott on “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” (1922), or Henry Busse on “Hard Hearted Hannah” (1924). By the same token, Bing Crosby’s singing from his Whiteman period is often obscured by his later fame as a Hollywood entertainer, yet his early jazz work exerted a powerful and lasting influence. More than any other white singer of his day, Crosby created an intimate style of delivery, perfectly suited for an age in which microphones and recordings had replaced unamplified concert hall performances. Heard alongside Beiderbecke on Whiteman’s 1927 recording of “Mary,” Crosby clearly demonstrates his allegiance to the same cool jazz aesthetic that Bix and Tram were advocating. Whiteman’s chief “composer in residence,” Ferde Grofé, for his part, is a major talent who has somehow been forced into a cameo role in music history, as the arranger who scored Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue
; yet even before joining Whiteman, in his charts for Art Hickman’s band, Grofé played a key role in defining the potential for a sax section in dance music, and his later compositions for Whiteman such as “Mississippi Suite” and “Metropolis” are important contributions to the concert jazz tradition.

The main failing of these latter works is not in what they included—the arrangements themselves are smartly done—but in what they left out. Grofé’s focus on emulating Gershwin’s
Rhapsody
led him to downplay the role of improvisation; even Beiderbecke’s “solo” on “Metropolis” shows up on the surviving chart spelled out note-for-note. If Grofé had left room in these otherwise impressive pieces for hot solos, they would probably be acknowledged today as jazz classics. As it stands, they have simply fallen through the cracks, not jazzy enough for jazz fans and insufficently highbrow for the symphony halls. And Grofé was far from the only star arranger in Whiteman’s corner. Bill Challis’s arrangements represent some of the band’s most advanced and jazziest material, while Eddie Sharpe, Matty Malneck, and Tom Satterfield were also capable of sophisticated, jazz-oriented writing. One hears, for example, on Challis’s “Changes,” another unfairly neglected masterpiece of the era, a subtle command of voice leading, one which invites comparisons to Beiderbecke’s hypermodern piano piece “In a Mist.”

Direct influence is quite likely. Beiderbecke, realizing his poor skills with musical notation, relied on Challis to write down his piano compositions—a painful process since Bix was a perfectionist, and it took six months before Challis could notate “In a Mist” in a way that met with the approval of the composer. Numerous memoirs from the period stress that Beiderbecke’s piano music was almost as striking as his cornet work, yet little substantive evidence survives beyond a single recording of Bix at the piano, and Challis’s transcriptions. Even the now-famous recording of “In a Mist” has been dismissed by friend Ralph Berton as “feeble, stiff, self-conscious” in comparison to what he had heard the artist do at the keyboard.
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Nonetheless, this performance stands out for its radical reconfiguration of the jazz piano tradition, and provides a tantalizing hint of the direction Beiderbecke’s artistry might have taken had he lived beyond his twenties.

This is a difficult piece to place in Bix’s oeuvre. Many commentators have described it as an outgrowth of Beiderbecke’s fascination with impressionism and other modern styles of composition (reflected elsewhere, for example, in his use of altered dominants and whole-tone scales). Others have viewed it as an expression of the romantic, plaintive side of his music and personality. Yet there is a cold, diamond-edged hardness to this piano piece, neither impressionist nor romantic in origin. Only probing underneath its steely surface do we see the core emotion, not the warm suggestiveness evoked by Beiderbecke’s cornet playing, but a poignant sense of isolation and anomie, perhaps even despair. Those who celebrate Bix, the carefree player of pretty melodies, must struggle to reconcile such a view with this work, a remote, harsh musical landscape out of character with the mythic Beiderbecke persona.

Throughout 1928, Bix’s drinking excesses began to take an increasing toll, eventually contributing to a December hospitalization for pneumonia. By the beginning of 1929, Beiderbecke had returned to the Whiteman band, but sporadic problems continued to plague him throughout the year, apparently worsening in the fall. He was a young man in his mid-twenties, yet his walk showed a marked limp, and eventually he needed a cane; he suffered from cramps, shortness of breath, memory lapses, and looked pale and unhealthy. On September 15, 1929, Bix came back to Davenport, to recuperate at the family home. A month later, only a few days before the stock market crash, he entered the Keely Institute in Dwight, Illinois, a well-known rehab facility for the medical treatment of alcoholism. On his release, in November, Bix appeared relatively healthy and ready to return to performing. After a series of local gigs, Beiderbecke began pursuing more far-flung employment opportunities in Chicago, St. Louis, and New York.

This period found Beiderbecke increasingly focused on composing at the piano. Friends and colleagues, hoping for the best, envisioned Beiderbecke embarking on a new stage of his career, in which the inspired spontaneity of his cornet work and the disciplined structure of the classical music he loved would merge in a totally new sound, capturing the best of both worlds. Such hopes proved illusory. Beiderbecke’s return to music was soon accompanied by a resumption of the problems that had led to his departure from the Whiteman band. Consumed in a downward spiral of drinking, fatigue, and frailty, Bix seemed intent on pursuing a slow, prolonged process of self-destruction. Few recordings were made during this final period, and his performing opportunities were now mostly at house parties and college dates—a far cry from the theaters, auditoriums, and concert halls of his Whiteman days. The end came in New York on August 6, 1931, when Beiderbecke succumbed to lobar pneumonia, perhaps accompanied by a fit of delirium tremens. He was twenty-eight years old. Five days later, Bix Beiderbecke was buried at Oakdale Cemetery in his native Davenport, Iowa.

4 Harlem

Harlem in the late 1920s was a society precariously balanced between two extremes. The Harlem Renaissance—the name given to the broad-based flowering of black cultural and intellectual life during these years—crystallized the first of these possibilities, reflecting a forward-looking optimism and deeply felt community pride. It was tempting to reach for scriptural imagery in describing this vision of Harlem. Here was a promised land for a downtrodden race, delivered from slavery as in the Old Testament, now answerable to its own needs, and finally free to pursue its own vision of civil society. As such, Harlem in this era symbolized a coming of age for all African Americans—whether living in the North or South, East or West—who participated vicariously, if not in fact, in the formation of a community where they could exist not as a minority culture, dependent on the tolerance or philanthropy of others, but as a self-sufficient body. More than any other aspect of Harlem in the late 1920s, its intellectual currents showed how far things had progressed. Certainly there had been African American intellectuals before, but too often they had labored in isolation, if not in the face of overt oppression. In this new setting, however, an entire cultural elite had come together, drawing confidently on the full range of human expression—in poetry, fiction, visual arts, music, history, sociology, and various other disciplines in which creative thought could flourish.