2021 Bix Beiderbecke Jazz Festival (Bix Beiderbecke Jazz Society, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday afternoon I ran my husband Charles and I the DVD documentary of the 2021 Bix Beiderbecke Jazz Festival from Davenport, Iowa in honor of the 91st anniversary of Bix’s death. The DVD was produced by the Bix Beiderbecke Jazz Society in his native town of Davenport, Iowa. They were hailing this as the 50th anniversary of the festival even though the usual way these things are reckoned would have made this year’s event the 50th anniversary, since the first one was in 1072/ The festival is always held in early August to coincide with the anniversary of Bix’s passing, and the first one in 1972 featured two musicians who had actually recorded with Bix, trombonist Bill Rank and drummer Chauncey Morehouse. I have a private-label LP of that first Bix festival from August 4, 5 and 6, 1972 and it features the Davenport Jazz Band (with Bill Rank, trumpeter Joe “Wingy” Manone – a Bix contemporary – and pianist Ed Krenz) playing “When You’re Smiling” and “St. Louis Blues,” Smokey Stover and His Dixie Firemen playing “The Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gave to Me,” the Salty Dogs playing Bix’s own composition “Davenport Blues,” the Samuel Dent Memorial Band playing “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” Detroit-based cornetist Paul “Doc” Evans playing “Bourbon Street Parade,” the Al Capone Memorial Jazz Band (why would anyone want to pay tribute to him?) doing “Nobody’s Sweetheart,” the Turkey River All-Stars on “I Found a New Baby,” and the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Band of New Jersey covering Bessie Smith’s classic blues “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” (perhaps a reference to the sad surroundings Bix was in when he died?). Though “Davenport Blues” is the only one of these songs Bix recorded, at least all but “Bourbon Street Parade” existed during his lifetime (1903-1931) – which somewhat surprisingly was not true of most of the repertoire at the 2021 Bix festival.

The disc opened with “I’ll Be a Friend ‘With Pleasure,’” recorded by Bix on his last session under his own name on September 8, 1930 and – though it doesn’t sound like it – actually written by a Black composer, Maceo Pinkard, best known for “Sweet Georgia Brown.” Then there was a clip of a blues number with a female singer by the NOLA Jazz Band (which, despite their name, are actually from Des Moines, Iowa, not New Orleans), and after that we got into the nitty-gritty of the concert with a youth band from Davenport. Alas, while they’re quite good for their ages (some ragged ensembles gave away their amateur status but they played with an infectious verve), the music they played had precious little to do with Bix. They opened with Woody Herman’s 1945 hit “Apple Honey,” segued into Glenn Miller’s 1939 “In the Mood” (itself adapted from Horace Henderson’s 1931 piece for his brother Fletcher’s band, “Hot and Anxious”) and finally punctuated it with a blues number. Then Jeff Kane and the NOLA Jazz Band did three numbers, Duke Ellington’s classic “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing” (first recorded in 1932, one year after Bix’s death) and two pieces, “The Black Swan Village” and “The Creeper Man’s Song,” which I assumed were original pieces by the band in an Ellingtonian style. Maybe Jeff Kane thought this sound was appropriate because the one Black musician Bix ever recorded with was ex-Ellington trumpeter James “Bubber” Miley, who co-composed three of Ellington’s biggest early “jungle music” hits – “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” “Black and Tan Fantasy,” and “The Mooche” – but the sound had almost nothing to do with Bix’s music. (To me the real tragedy of the one record Bix and Miley made together, “Rockin’ Chair” and “Barnacle Bill, the Sailor” with Hoagy Carmichael on May 21, 1930, is that both Bix and Miley were chronic alcoholics who had drunk themselves out of major bands – Bix with Paul Whiteman and Miley with Ellington – and a little more than two years after they recorded together, both men were dead.)

The next band up was the Cakewalkin’ Jass Band (they use that earlier spelling of the word, with its sexual connotations) from Toledo, Ohio, whose Web site boasts that they’ve existed for over 50 years. They are led by clarinetist Ray Heitger and his wife Nicole Heitger sings blues with the band – and she’s damned good. They did two numbers on the 2021 Bix Festival DVD, a tune called “Viper Mad” with Ray Heitger singing and a great gospel-derived song called “On My Way Blues” with Nicole doing a superb vocal. “Viper Mad” was an ironic song choice for a Bix festival not only because it post-dates Bix (the most famous recording, by Sidney Bechet with Noble Sissle’s Swingsters, dates from 1937) but because Bix absolutely hated marijuana – though, as I’ve pointed out more than once on the Bixography Forum (https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/bixography/), maybe if pot instead of booze had been Bix’s drug of choice, he’d have lived as long as Louis Armstrong. Next up were the Chicago Cellar Boys – one of whose videos I stumbled across on YouTube when I turned it on thinking it was the original Cellar Boys, a 1930 Chicago studio band featuring Wingy Manone and legendary clarinetist Frank Teschemacher (in his last recording before his death in a car crash in early 1932). They began their set by announcing that they were going to play songs Bix recorded, and at first joked they were going to do “Orange Blossom Time” (a song from an early musical film called Hollywood Revue of 1929) or “Grand Fantasia from Wagneriana” (a ghastly mash-up of Wagner themes written by Herman Hand and performed by Whiteman’s band with Bix an anonymous drone in his trumpet section).

Instead they played “Tia Juana” (that’s how it was spelled on the original record, and it’s possible it referred not to the Mexican city but to someone’s aunt Juana, since “Tía” is simply the Spanish word for “aunt”). Bix recorded this in 1924 with his original band, the Wolverines, and according to the leader of the Cellar Boys it was the only song recorded by both Bix and Jelly Roll Morton – even though it was written not by Morton but by white bandleader Gene Rodemich. Then they played an old Chicago favorite called “San,” which Bix had recorded with Whiteman (quite well, too; though Whiteman was infamous for making pretentiously overarranged records, during the years Bix played with him – 1927 to 1929 – he actually led a first-rate jazz band when he let it be), but the Cellar Boys’ version was based on a record Black New Orleans clarinetist Jimmie Noone made of it in 1930. Noone’s band was unusual for the time in that he used his clarinet as the lead instrument, with alto saxophonist Joe Poston taking the ornamental role usually filled by the clarinet in the classic trumpet-clarinet-trombone “front line” of most early New Orleans bands. The next band on the DVD was Joe Smith and the Spicy Pickles, and like the NOLA band they reached for the Duke Ellington sound. The first song they played was “St. Louis Blues,” which existed during Bix’s lifetime – W. C. Handy wrote it in 1914 – but the version they played was based on a galvanic 1946 Ellingfton recording from the 78 rpm album Duke Ellington Plays the Blues. The other piece this band played was “The Jeep Is Jumpin’,” written by Ellington and his star alto saxophonist, Johnny Hodges, for a date made by a small group from the Ellington band under Hodges’ name in 1938.

Afterwards the next band up was The Mortonia Sextet, playing a piece called “Milenberg Joys” co-written by Morton and New Orleans Rhythm Kings trumpeter Paul Mares (a white man from New Orleans’ Sicilian community) for a July 18, 1923 session that has gone down in history as the first interracial jazz recording date in history – though Morton, a mixed-race New Orleans Creole whose real name was Ferdinand Le Menthe and did not self-identify as Black, wouldn’t have considered it so. The next band up was Josh Duffee and the Greystone Monarchs (named after the Greystone Ballroom in Detroit, where Jean Goldkette’s band was in residence when Bix played with it in 1926-27), and he actually played two songs bix had recorded, “I’m Gonna Meet My Sweetie Now” and the classic “Singin’ the Blues.” The festival organizers arranged things so that Duffee’s band would be the one on stage at the exact minute of the anniversary of Bix’s passing – 8:30 p.m. Davenport time (9:30 p.m. in New York, where Bix actually died – the announcer made a big deal out of the fact that Bix’s mother had received word that he was seriously ill and had taken a train to see him, but Bix died while the train was still on route and there was no way to notify her). They called for a minute of silence at the moment of Bix’s death, but instead of holding on to the main stage the makers of this DVD chose to cut to an outdoor performance of one of Bix’s greatest songs, “I’m Coming, Virginia,” by an unidentified band at Bix’s gravesite.

Then the film cut back to Josh Duffee leading his band in what most fans consider Bix’s best record, ”Singin’ the Blues,” and the person I felt sorriest for was Duffee’s cornet player, Andy Schumm, who was obliged to reproduce Bix’s classic solo from the record. Schumm didn’t bring Bix’s awesome purity of tone to it, but he still phrased it eloquently. The next band up was Miss Jubilee and The Yas-Yas Boys, led by a woman singer who calls herself “Miss Jubilee” but her real name was Valerie Kirchhoff, and though her band’s sound had little to do with Bix’s (though she’s white, her style is more a throwback to Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Mamie Smith and the other great Black blues queens of the 1920’s), but her songs – a ribald blues called “Don’t Tear My Clothes” and a novelty song called “Murder in the Moonlight” (in which the singer confesses to “love in the first degree”) – were great and she rivaled Nicole Kreitens for power and authority. The final band on the DVD was the South Side Boys, playing King Oliver’s “Deep Henderson” and Jelly Roll Morton’s infectious “New Orleans Bump” before the disc cut to a series of still photos from the festival under which we heard a repeat of a bit of the Chicago Cellar Boys’ version of “San.” I was disappointed that the program didn’t feature more of Bix’s own music – none of his five known compositions (the early “Davenport Blues” and the great haunting piano works he and arranger Bill Challis crafted just before he died, “In a Mist,””Flashes,” “Candlelights” and “In the Dark”) were performed – but the show was still quite lively and worth seeing, and a number of the bandleaders said they feel a sense of mission in keeping traditional jazz alive not only as a recorded legacy but as live music.