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The Jazz Life— Bix Beiderbecke
Not all of the early jazz musicians were born in New Orleans, with one in particular born a bit further up river…
Richard M. Sudhalter was a fine trumpet player and excellent writer, whose contribution to jazz literature is relatively restricted in subject but massive in literary quality, detail and page count, with his Bix: Man & Legend — The Life of Bix Beiderbecke (co-written with Philip R. Evans) coming in at over five hundred pages, which, for the life of a young jazz cornet player is quite exceptional, yet necessary for the times in which Bix Beiderbecke lived and worked, and his huge talent which is the musical equivalent of the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the so called Jazz Age they left behind them.
Bix: Man & Legend — The Life of Bix Beiderbecke, was first published in the UK by Quartet Books in 1974, and is an almost day by day account of the life of Leon Bismark ‘Bix’ Beiderbecke, with Sudhalter’s and Evan’s laid back prose a perfect literary channel for the laid back playing of Bix, who inspired both Louis Armstrong (Louis and Bix met on the riverboats) and Miles Davis.
