“Bix?” Jack Teagarden remarked many years ago. “He didn’t give a damn.” This was part of the legend that surrounded Bix Beiderbecke almost from the moment he began playing his cornet. When he died on August 7, 1931, at age 28—a victim of too much gin and not giving a damn—the legend had outrun the man. But it could not outrun his music. The jazzmen who played with him, the critics who wrote about him, and the listeners who worshipped at his feet all attest to his genius. The beauty and warmth of his comet tone, the endless variety of his musical invention, the drive with which he could pick up a brass section or a whole band— these were integral to his greatness.
But it is the tone that stands out as you play the old recordings—pure yet hot in the jazz sense. With the tone went the cascading of notes, the clean legato passages, the stabbing thrusts. And he could lay aside the cornet and improvise hauntingly at the piano in music that was part jazz and part modernist. Having learnt the piano as the child of musically trained and well- to-do parents in Davenport, Iowa, he played the cornet as if it were tuned to the key of C, rather than B-flat, and this may have accounted for his wonderful modulations off scale and his fondness for the whole-tone scale.
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