As in many of the most sophisticated fiction films, the prime action in the 1981 documentary “Bix: Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet” takes place in the interstices and beneath the surfaces. Bix Beiderbecke, the innovative jazz cornetist, pianist, and composer, died, in 1931, at the age of twenty-eight, leaving behind a few hundred 78s, a legend of a self-destructive artist, and a cache of stories guarded by those who knew him. When the director Brigitte Berman filmed “Bix,” between 1978 and 1981, many of Beiderbecke’s associates were still alive—musicians, in their seventies and eighties, who’d worked and played with him, along with friends and family from his home town of Davenport, Iowa. Their deeply moving accounts of Beiderbecke’s artistry and personality, their anecdotes about his professional and private life, their view of his wondrous talent and the obstacles that he faced in developing and deploying it—it all makes for a fascinating, even essential film, albeit one that leaves its most significant matters unexplored.
“Bix,” which opens at Metrograph on Wednesday for online viewing and on Friday in person, is a literal biography, not a critical or an analytical one; it lays out the major chronological framework of Beiderbecke’s life and adorns it with the colorful, detailed, and poignant recollections of interview subjects. The bare-bones story is nonetheless itself a kind of art, one that reverberates far beyond its named subject. A largely self-taught piano prodigy in a white, solidly middle-class family, Bix (whose full name was Leon Bismark Beiderbecke) picked up the cornet as a teen-ager and was, in a few months, an admired soloist—yet he couldn’t read music, and never learned to do so with professional proficiency. His first girlfriend, Vera Korn, says that he played at high-school assemblies and that his music “left everyone, well, just kind of aghast—nobody really understood what he was trying to say with his music. . . . It was so different, and no one knew anything like it, nobody had ever heard anything like it.”
He was won over to jazz by bands he heard—including Fate Marable’s, featuring Louis Armstrong—on riverboats coming up from New Orleans. (Davenport is on the Mississippi River; geography is destiny.) He learned to play along with the family’s one jazz record, by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a white group from New Orleans. (His sister, Mary Louise Shoemaker, offers a touching description of his autodidactic posture: ear to the Victrola horn, cornet tilted down “so that he wouldn’t bump the Victrola.”) He became a professional musician at twenty, when he joined a regional dance band called the Wolverines, and he made his first recordings with them, in 1924. Later that year, he joined Jean Goldkette’s prosperous and celebrated Detroit-based band and stayed with the group on and off through 1927.
Beiderbecke’s fortunes with Goldkette were limited, the film says, by Edward King, the head of the band’s label, who had a negative view of his advanced style. As Goldkette’s then-pianist, Paul Mertz, tells it, King found Beiderbecke’s solos out of keeping with the tone of a popular band, and Goldkette was forced to cut them back. (Beiderbecke, with little formal training, hardly read music, but was obsessed with listening to and learning from the works of Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky.) In 1927, when Goldkette was having financial trouble and let Beiderbecke and other band members go, Beiderbecke was hired by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. Whiteman’s nickname was the “king of jazz,” and the group was the most famous “jazz” band of the time—both absurdities, when in fact the band was more of a symphonic ensemble. (It’s the group that premièred George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which Whiteman commissioned.) Beiderbecke had few solo spots with Whiteman’s group, though he went on the road with them under very demanding conditions.
Beiderbecke was an alcoholic, and touring exacerbated his drinking. When his health broke down, he returned to Davenport to recuperate, then moved to New York—which, with radio on the rise, had become the new center of jazz. But he soon started to drink again, and even more heavily. He collapsed in a recording studio; he suffered from delirium tremens. (Interviewed on camera, the musician Roy Maier does a terrifying impersonation of the condition he found Beiderbecke in.) Then the Depression struck, diminishing night life, the recording industry, and Beiderbecke himself, who worked only scantly. He moved to Sunnyside, Queens; he had a girlfriend named Alice, whom he planned to marry. (She’s unfortunately not a participant in the film.) Beiderbecke died, of pneumonia, on August 6, 1931.
Berman elicits extraordinary stories, and their essence highlights the social and material circumstances of jazz musicians, even privileged white ones such as Beiderbecke, in the twenties and early thirties. “Bix” offers a portrait of a painfully racialized jazz milieu, in which bands were segregated, although musicians fraternized and played together across racial lines, both privately and in speakeasy jam sessions. (Armstrong and Beiderbecke met in Davenport around 1920, and, years later, played together privately in Chicago. The film features audio recordings of Armstrong, who died in 1971, speaking about Beiderbecke—the film’s subtitle comes from one of his remarks.) Interviews with members of Whiteman’s busy and prosperous band portray the physical and emotional exhaustion of musicians on tour—even white ones who faced none of the restrictions and terrors that awaited Black musicians in their travels. As the voice-over commentary says, the band travelled from town to town, usually by overnight train, to perform seven days a week, often two shows a day; it was a challenge to find time to eat and sleep, and there was hardly any privacy. Most of the musicians drank a lot. “Work was so hard that you almost had to drink,” the violinist Matty Malneck says. What’s more, he adds, the work was musically ungratifying: the same pieces night after night punctuated by a few brief solos. The combination of alcohol and Beiderbecke’s physical debilitation took its toll: he’d sleep on the bandstand between solos, according to the drummer Herb Weil. A handwritten score of a Whiteman arrangement features, at a particular bar line, the scrawled instruction “Wake up Bix.”
Beiderbecke had a lustrous, enticing, yet reserved tone and a piquant chromaticism, worlds apart from the excitement and kaleidoscopic expressivity of Armstrong’s playing; rather, Beiderbecke’s laconic precision anticipated the introspective tension of Miles Davis’s work, two-plus decades ahead. But he was active at a time that offered little professional opportunity for the sophisticated jazz soloist. In New York, the commercial demands of radio proved as restrictive as those of dance bands and symphonic ones. He managed to make dozens of records with small groups that offered more room for his ideas and his improvisations, albeit within the confines of the ten-inch 78-r.p.m. record’s three-minute running time. In his most notable recordings (such as the celebrated and influential “Singin’ the Blues”), he partnered with the innovative saxophonist Frank Trumbauer. But these weren’t working bands—they were pickup groups of musicians assembled for the recording studio. In the nineteen-thirties, the balance in jazz began to shift, even in big bands, toward the art of the heroic soloist. That shift came too late for Beiderbecke.
In telling the story, Berman finds an uneasy balance between authoritatively impersonal voice-overs, which are accompanied mostly by stills and oddly generic archival footage, and bracingly intimate interviews, which are nonetheless cut down to tightly relevant, illustrative snips. There’s a moment when the camera rolls at length, for a miracle: the pianist Charlie Davis, a friend and colleague of Beiderbecke’s, remembers an unpublished and unrecorded piano work that Beiderbecke had played for him—Davis says, “I recorded it myself, in my own mind”—and then plays it himself. But the soundtrack of his graceful and moving performance is interrupted by spoken commentary. In a sense, the movie’s cluttered arrangements get in the way of its soloists—namely, its interview subjects. The extraordinary reminiscences of Beiderbecke’s associates, friends, and family have little sense of exploration, of conversation, of give-and-take with Berman.
Nonetheless, the images conjured by words and music, of history incarnated by the on-camera presence of those who were a part of it, lends the movie, despite its lapses of form and taste, an overwhelming power. I found myself thinking of other movies, of ones that didn’t exist at the time and weren’t being made. John Coltrane died in 1967, Charlie Parker died in 1955, Billie Holiday and Lester Young died in 1959, and many other greats died even less heralded (such as Eric Dolphy, in 1964, and Bud Powell, in 1966). Many of their musical and personal associates were still around when Berman was making her film. Warning lights might have flashed at the intersection of jazz and cinema, calling for the need to create an archive of eye-and-ear witnesses while they were still around and to seek cinematic forms to match the music and the musicians. Now jazz documentaries are plentiful; few display such multilevel conceptualizations of the genre. And now it’s very late.
No comments:
Post a Comment