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Remembering Bix: A Memoir Of The Jazz Age Paperback – June 1, 2000

by Ralph Berton (Author), Nat Hentoff (Author)

3.8 23 ratings

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As Nat Hentoff says, "Hearing Bix for the first time was like waking up to the first day of spring." Bix has always inspired such acclaim, for he was an unmatched master of the cornet. Ralph Berton was privileged enough to have been a fan -- and younger brother of Bix's drummer -- just as Beiderbecke's genius was flowering, before he died in 1931 at age twenty-eight. Listening from behind the piano, tagging along to honky-tonks and jam sessions, Berton heard some of the most extraordinary music of the century, and he brings Bix and his era alive with a remarkable combination of the excitement of youth and the perspective of the five decades that followed -- decades that confirmed Bix's place in the pantheon of jazz.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ralph Berton (1910-1993) wrote extensively on jazz, serving as an editor at Metronome and Down Beat magazines and as editor-in-chief of Sound and Fury. He was also a professor of jazz history at Cooper Union, Middlesex County College, and Bloomfield College.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Da Capo Press (June 1, 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 472 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0306809370
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0306809378
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.37 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.06 x 6.04 x 1.15 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,410,214 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #557 in Jazz Musician Biographies
- #2,305 in Music Encyclopedias
- #2,311 in Music Reference (Books)

Customer Reviews:
3.8 23 ratings

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Tony Steve

Great book

Reviewed in the United States on July 20, 2019

Verified Purchase

Good info on Bix.
He was an artist that crossed a lot of boundaries.

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Boneyard Slim

A Fascinating, Unique Perspective on Bix

Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2023

While there are jazz biographies of Bix that contain more information on his life, none of them present a better or more realistic portrait of the real Bix Beiderbecke and his times than Berton's "Remembering Bix" .

Berton spend an intensive period of time with the jazz legend himself in the 1920's, as a hero worshipping but extremely precocious and musically knowledgeable adolescent. Bix as a human being as well as a genius musician is stunningly brought to life in these memoirs as well as the jazz age and night life of the 1920's.

The reader feels they are right in the room peering in on history as Bix and the Wolverines make music and live the life of musicians of the era.

While the book encompasses only a short period of time spent with Beiderbecke, and is as much a personal memoir of the author's coming of age, the empathy with which he treats the jazz legend is astounding.

This book is as close to the real Bix, his fragility and humanity as we could ever get.

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Laura D

Ralphie's Delusional Fiction

Reviewed in the United States on September 11, 2021

There's no question about the excitement and readability of this book. A fiction writer of some compelling semi-style Ralph Berton certainly was. But as for telling the truth -- no one should ever think of this book as being anywhere remotely near a biography of Bix Beiderbecke, and in all probability the (unwanted) bio information about the Berton family was a pack of lies too, or at least shameless exaggeration. But Bix was done no favors in this tome, as he was presented as something not much above a talking ear of corn, and an inarticulate, laconic one at that. Ralph brashly portrays himself as a preternaturally intellectually developed adolescent, leading around a mumbling drunken slob who had to be told EVERYTHING about books, culture, and music by a thirteen year old, and no reader in their right mind should buy that ridiculous portrayal of some snotty kid informing a backwards bumpkin who'd just fallen off of the turnip truck. It's really appalling to read nonsense that Ralph was the one introducing Bix to the new modernist music and Bix couldn't even pronounce Debussy (let alone the name of the author of Bix's favorite humor books, the British P.G. Wodehouse "Wooster and Jeeves" series of which Bix was particularly fond.)

I can't imagine that in real life Bix said much more than "Hi, kid," to Ralph Berton, the tag-along little brother to Vic Berton of the Wolverine band where Bix played cornet during 1923-1924, mostly college dates and summer dance venues, as well as recording for the Gennet company in Indiana and becoming, to no small degree, midwestern white jazz idols. Yet Ralph has twenty-one year old Bix spending the majority of his time (when not performing or rehearsing with the band) in the company of a boy not yet fourteen, being lead around town and beguilingly being introduced into a fast-paced underworld life of speakeasies, brothels, transvestite gay parties, and apparently meeting black musicians for the very first time, at entertainment venues, the way Ralph tells it. Bix was much more enlightened and sophisticated than that and a number of biographies attest to it with the verbatim quotes of his friends and colleagues. He was not some provincial yokel, gaping openmouthed in astonished wonder at a precociously clever little boy who spouted French phrases and played, according to Ralph, never-before-heard-by-Bix records of Ravel and Satie on the Victrola. There's braggadocio and then there's lying, and this long-outdated 1974 book boasts a distinctly unsavory blend of both to a nearly nauseating degree.

We get what amounts to a lurid film strip of overwrought pubescent fantasy in Ralph's recounting of taking as his mistress the cast-off, cheated-upon girlfriend of brother Vic, replete with sexy description. Bix himself fumbles and grunts the most limited non-conversation at the girls he meets on the bandstand or at the beach, takes to bed, and promptly forgets -- not forgets about, FORGETS -- the very next day, leaving to go swimming or on a picnic and then rearing back in startled surprise when he realizes there is still a girl in his bed. There's being dumb, and there's being drunk, but this defies all description. Bix is also instructed on the writings of Menken, agnostic religious beliefs, current 1920's cultural events, and apparently the History of Everything In The World by encyclopediac Ralph. After awhile the reader feels as if they are watching a cartoon and Bix is playing the part of Paw Hillbilly Bear. I don't think Bix was that easily impressed, especially by a band member's mouthy kid brother always barging in.

After crawling through half-baked crap that Bix flunked out of military school (Lake Forest Academy was college prep, for smart but lazy students), that Bix's despairing family could do nothing with him and dreaded his visits home, and that little or no correspondence was exchanged (Bix was an enthusiastic if rushed letter-writer who nattered hilariously on for pages describing boarding school life, and then later, penned more careful, reserved missives of his musical doings and successes, of which his parents were very proud), we get a ghastly, boring, and glaringly untrue --- how could it be anything else? -- recounting of Bix taking an entire afternoon off to play a baseball game with Ralph and his schoolboy pals, and of course Bix (who in this case really was quite a sports jock, but surely would have spent athletic leisure in the company of his own peers) and Ralph single (double?) handedly winning the game. No doubt Ralph magnified some never-to-be-forgotten 10 minutes where Bix amiably condescended to toss catch with Vic's pesty little brother with a baseball and mitt one afternoon.

But wait, there's more -- if a reader can stand it, and we can only pray they don't believe a word of it. After Bix pours his guts out of his musical frustration to Jazz Expert Ralph several years later, trapped in a horror pit of Muzak, 1929 style, in the Paul Whiteman Band (and Paul is utterly and cruelly vilified by Ralph here, when Bix always spoke to family and friends of Paul's affable kindliness and Whiteman said that Bix was one of the nicest gentlemen he'd ever known, not to mention the brilliance and genius of Bix's musical talent, however lost it was in the Whiteman Band miasma -- but Ralph's Paul Whiteman is a cruel, anti-Semitic loudmouth who beats up musicians in public restrooms and pees on their shoes. It's hideous to read. We're spared, at least in part, Bix's drunken plunge into despair as Ralph didn't dare put himself as a fly in the wall in that room, but he comes close, and the liberties Berton takes with the Beiderbecke family and their supposed motives are shameful. (by the way, Bix's elder brother Charles Burnette is always referred to as Charlie instead of Burnie in this book. It's right up there with Bix's supposed stint at military school.) The book ends, after the Bertons learn secondhand of Bix's tragic death (with much embellishment), with Ralph's other, gay brother confiding to Ralph -- or rather bragging -- that he'd had an affair with Bix. Now, in the less enlightened and tolerant era of the early 1970's the elderly gentlemen who'd read or been told of the book and had been friends and fellow musicians of Bix's back in the day 50 years previously were incensed by this reportage which was intended to be taken by readers as actual biographical fact, and saw it as a libelous scandal. Even if they had been more open-minded, especially for their generation, it upset them, and they were further infuriated when Ralph Berton admitted that he'd "only thrown that in to spice things up," knowing the anecdote was not true, whatever other sexual experiences of either persuasion Bix possibly could or might have had. It just seemed to Bix's old bandmates and pals that this was the topping on a wobbly cake of manufactured incidents purportedly covering the summer of 1924 touring with the Wolverines, a later addendum at the end of the 1920s when a miserable, frustrated and inebriated Bix supposedly struggled under the yoke of Whiteman's bland radio performances, and then the morbid finale of Bix's 1931 death, slathered with plenty of description of post-teen Ralph's bedroom prowess with an Englishwomen, as if that had anything to do with. . . . anything. Nowhere in the book do we see the Bix his actual friends knew, amid their jaw-dropping admiration of his musical talent, the Bix who was, while quiet and soft-spoken and before the final descent into alcohol poisoning able to present himself fairly soberly or give the impression thereof, but also witty, sarcastically humorous, very well read, and to a man
(and former girlfriends) the colleagues all said Bix had the fine manners and speech of a well bred family, not the twangy yahoo muttering around a mouthful of hay which Ralph Berton portrayed and expected readers to believe, an untutored (and Bix was self-taught) idiot savant mysteriously gifted with musical genius which only he, Ralph, alone, could coax forth and present to the world.

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Richard Hinton

Find a better book on

Reviewed in the United States on November 22, 2016

Verified Purchase

Threw it away. Find a better book on Bix

One person found this helpful

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Leigh

Out to Lunch

Reviewed in the United States on June 30, 2000

Eric Dolphy said it best. This book really misses the point. It exaggerates Bix's influence on modern jazz and doesn't provide enough dirty details to create an interesting human portrait. Comparing him to Van Gogh? Please! He couldn't read music. Bad pictures, too. Don't waste your time.

3 people found this helpful

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Jeff Stookey

Nostalgic and Enchanting Memoir

Reviewed in the United States on August 26, 2019

Ralph Berton’s Remembering Bix, A memoir of the Jazz Age, is told from the perspective of a precocious 13-year-old Ralph who unabashedly tells about his oldest brother Vic, a brilliant jazz percussionist, and his other brother Gene, a classical pianist and a homosexual. The book is a tribute of high praise to Bix, who Ralph idolizes, but Ralph is also a keen observer who has a fine ear for the music that is the milieux in which Bix lives. Sweet, nostalgic, and enchanting.

One person found this helpful

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D. Reilly

Read it years ago, bought it again and read it again.

Reviewed in the United States on July 19, 2018

It is a trip through the jazz age of the 20's. Love this book

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Fred D. Myres-McMillan

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on August 6, 2014