1929
Books / Hardcover
Books › Fiction › Historical
ISBN: 1582432651 / Publisher: Counterpoint, June 2003
A novelization of jazz artist Bix Beiderbecke's early jams at a Capone-controlled casino, grueling cross-country tours, disastrous cinematic efforts, experiences during the stock market crash, and his final musical efforts.
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By 1929, the brief, brilliant career of Bix Beiderbecke - self-taught cornetist, pianist, and composer - had already become legend. From the summer of '26 at Hudson Lake, Indiana, when his genius blazed forth with a strange, doomed incandescence, Bix's career tragically reflected the chaotic impulses of a country suddenly awash in wealth, power, and a profound cynicism. Shy, elusive, inarticulate, Bix was beloved by both the raccoon-coated campus crowd and the men who nightly played alongside him. He is still celebrated in a yearly festival in his hometown of Davenport, Iowa. And that is where the novel begins, in Davenport, at the Bix Fest. It then travels back in time to focus on the highlights of a meteoric career: the early jams at the Blue Lantern Casino, a Capone-controlled nightclub; the grueling cross-country tours with Paul Whiteman's "Symphonic Jazz" orchestra; the disastrous Whiteman trip to California to make the first all-color talkie musical; the stock-market crash of 1929, which finds Bix in an asylum, victim of the era's signature product, bootleg gin; and finally, Bix's dying efforts to combine his piano compositions into a suite that would be the pinnacle of his life's work and his evocation of his time and place.
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