All That Jazz

1929
A Novel of the Jazz Age
by Frederick Turner
Counterpoint, 416 pp., $25 DOES THE WORLD really need another story about a brilliant, self-destructive jazz musician? As it happens, yes. Bix Beiderbecke, born a hundred years ago, had a preternatural talent for melodic shaping and elegant ornamentation. The sophisticated, exotic, and moody chordal progressions of his piano compositions sound like Ravel moonlighting at a speakeasy. (Check out "In a Mist.")

The acclaimed nonfiction writer Frederick Turner, in a dazzling fiction debut, tells Beiderbecke's story in a deceptively straightforward, relaxed manner, like Bix and the boys playing "I'm Coming Virginia" at an after-hours jam. With the characters Herman Weiss and his sister Helen as common elements of both strands, the novel braids Beiderbecke's career with the fortunes of Al Capone's inner circle, especially "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn, of Valentine's Day massacre fame. Jack courts Helen--known to the mobsters as Lulu--and rescues her from a dreary life working in a movie-theater box office. Eventually, he marries her, mostly to ensure that she can't testify against him.

In recounting Bix's brush with Hollywood as a member of Paul Whiteman's band in the early days of the talkies, Turner also pulls in for cameos such silver-screeners as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. A lusty and generous Clara Bow plays a wonderful supporting role. And zipping in and out of Beiderbecke's jazz cosmos are Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, the bickering Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Hoagy Carmichael, and dozens of other bandstand luminaries.

The historical grounding and interlocking plot lines owe a debt to E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime," an inspiration that the publisher, Counterpoint, has played up. But it's actually Doctorow's "Billy Bathgate" that comes to mind in Turner's portrayal of the gangster life with its own peculiar but often mundane politics. Turner's narrative spins around a largely passive and distracted Bix, who is chronically preoccupied with a tune or a bottle, often both. Gravely alcoholic since adolescence--swilling the moonshine that could leave drinkers blind or brain-melted--the boy from Davenport, Iowa, would sneak down to the Mississippi to sit in with the bands entertaining steamer passengers. His parents sent him to Lake Forest Academy outside Chicago, from which he was expelled into Packingtown's musical nightlife, where he got his real education in thrall to Armstrong, King Oliver, and Jimmy Noone.

Bix is a "natural" musician, meaning he is an astonishing improviser and a self-taught cornetist who uses unorthodox fingerings. But it's also something of a euphemism for the fact that he can't read music well, especially the complex charts for the Jean Goldkette or Whiteman bands. Unkempt and underbathed, with crooked bow tie and shirttails out, he is wont to crack his knuckles before a show and lose his false tooth on stage. But his mentor, saxophonist Frank "Tram" Trumbauer, finds a way for Bix to play his sunshiny solos sitting several chairs in among the Goldkette trumpets while sitting out some of the bumpy ensemble passages. It's in that role that Bix comes to fame, first with Goldkette, then with Whiteman's band, the country's reigning white-jazz orchestra of the late 1920s. Bix and the rest of the Whiteman group became superstars of sorts, mobbed by crowds at a station stop while crisscrossing the country in a custom rail car. Other horn players copied Bix's solos note for note, and he becomes the darling of the Ivy League club crowds.

Turner gives a marvelous feel for what a grueling team sport jazz was in those days, with its endless road trips, hucksterish promoting, and merciless performance and recording schedules. He recounts a momentous "battle of the bands," with Bix and the Goldkette players taking on Fletcher Henderson's group at Roseland. He suggests the competitive but appreciative interplay between the white and black jazzers again when Bix escorts the visiting Ravel to the Cotton Club in Harlem to hear Ellington and makes a Delta pilgrimage to hear an ill-fated black horn prodigy named Kid Casimir at a roadhouse.

For decades Turner has been writing about explorers, American Indians, geography, jazz, and literary biography and culture. In "1929," he brings his research and descriptive skills together commandingly to convey the country's vastness, the heavy light of the plains, the dingy particularities of slum back-alleys, and his characters' quirks and charisma. He describes, for instance, a lodge in Lansing during a tense moment when Bix and the band are getting off a bus before playing for a restless Capone and his gang. The players disembark "under a gunmetal sky with the clouds rumbling away toward Flint and a sickly smear of yellow underneath them like an old hematoma." Capone "wants a good party, sure, but these guys look like they might be too juiced to play. And Jack's pissed because Lulu's half in the bag herself and is arms-around with the cornet player whose eyes are like floating clams."

Turner frames his story with Herman Weiss's reminiscences decades later at the Davenport jazz festival held yearly in Bix's honor. Over the last years of Beiderbecke's short life, Weiss distanced himself from Bix as the horn player decayed into a gentlemanly but grotesque, fawning, clowning, fall-down, blackout drunk. Yet this is not the story of a troubled talent whose success corrupts him and takes him down. It's the story of a troubled talent plagued by alcoholism--a tiger he can't hold, Bix sometimes calls it--before his career even begins and whose success never corrupts him. That's why we need to read another book about a brilliant, self-destructive jazz musician--because like fireworks whose sublime light both peaks and pales on their melancholy descent, the timbre and path are always distinct.

Turner and his characters are too smart to try to deconstruct the mystery of Beiderbecke. You can't parse a life any more than you can parse a one-of-a-kind sound. And you can't quite get that life in words any more than you can record that sound on wax. "The Bix they knew played beautiful horn and strange piano and drank. That was all." But in Beiderbecke's short, desperate, twenty-eight-year life, that was a lot. A complementary marvel is a nonfiction writer in his sixties suddenly bursting forth with a dizzying, heart-rending work of imagination.

Alexander C. Kafka is an editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education and a contributing writer for Washington City Paper.