Occasional Jazz Conjectures

February 4, 1927: Stumbling out into the evening we nearly tripped over a drunken Hart Crane (acting conspicuously like Bix Beiderbecke) looking for his shadow, wildly asserting, “I am Baudelaire, I am Whitman, I am Christopher Marlowe, I am Christ.” Crane divined, “Let us invent an idiom for the proper transposition of jazz into words! Something clean, sparkling, elusive!”

We whirl forward into this new year, collide with the key of Eb (strolling at a leisurely, serene 138 beats-per-minute) and discover something clean, sparkling, and elusive: today Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer recorded “Singin’ the Blues.”

1927 was all about daring new aesthetic conventions—art that was agin to middle-America’s hard working, often joyless Protestant pillars (or pointed out some of “respectable” life’s more subterranean darkness and hypocrisy, as Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry did that same year) or art that affirmed, like jazz and the movies, that nightlife, the big city and the quest for pleasure were worthwhile pursuits.

Jumpstarting all of this was the cool remove of Bix and Tram’s “Singin’ the Blues,” a reverberant echo of the moody, gotham silences of paintings like Edward Hopper’s “Manhattan Bridge.” Just consider some other related subversive revolutions of the moment: Buster Keaton’s The General, a biting parody of Griffith’s boorish, overly operatic Birth of a Nation that solidified Keaton’s sneakily modernist genius for deadpan irony; FW Murnau’s stunning Sunrise, a pioneering piece of cinema that wedded European expressionism with American technical innovations (moving cameras and bold editing) to produce an unparalleled, radiant masterwork of epic proportions; and then there was Clara Bow’s It (a film that was so charged with never-before-seen, modern sexual energy that Dorothy Parker remarked, “IT, hell, she had Those”).

“Singin’ the Blues” (featuring Eddie Lang’s buoyant single-stringcopating accompaniment), is an astonishing landmark in recorded jazz history. Like Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” titles are not always what they seem—“Singin’ the Blues” is everything but a blues. Arguably the first jazz ballad, Bix’s “Singin’ the Blues” was a statement, as AB Spellman remarked, “loaded with soul.” This was what Mina Loy meant when she wrote of jazz that,”The white flesh quakes.” The excessively maudlin, albeit highly engaging writer Malcolm Lowry once commented that he, “learnt to write while listening to Bix Beiderbecke,” and wanted to write in a way like a certain break on “Singin’ the Blues” that, “seemed to express a moment of the most pure spontaneous happiness. . . that makes an odd but splendid din, like Bix Beiderbecke.”

The recombinant energy of Beiderbeck’s pure bell tone and a fully conceptualized solo that burst forth from the chords of the song (as rich in the distilled spirit of Debussy as it was in the ready-made gin of the moment) has an effect like eavesdropping on a for-your-ears-only confession or a freshly ravished moment of intimacy. It truly is, as Eddie Condon asserted that Beiderbecke’s playing was, like the “sound of a girl saying ‘yes.’”

Michael Ventura noted that “Singin’ the Blues” set “the template for much of the jazz that followed: a loose, free rhythm. . . nuanced in a kind of blue, gentle way. It was Bix who first understood the full implications of what we now take to be obvious: that jazz lost no power when played softly.” Bix’s cool restraint and understated delivery suggested the patient Am I Blue-isms of Ethel Waters and a measured Conrad Nagel suavity. Subtle, soft, plaintive and largely in the middle-register (diametrically opposed to the existing standard set by Louis Armstrong’s fierce, libidinal, hot-brass epiphanies)—you can hear the footprint that was established for later architects of hip and jazz sang-froid like Lester Young, Jimmy Giuffre, and Miles Davis.

Seems like only yesterday, or 1926, when Gertrude Stein pointed out that “the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic, there is hardly a moment in between and it is really too bad very much too bad naturally for the creator but also very much too bad for the enjoyer, they all really would enjoy the created so much better just after it has been made than when it is already a classic.”

Maybe Hoagy Carmichael summed up the tonnage of cultural TNT that 1927 delivered when he said, “It just happened, like a thunder cloud. It may sound sentimental to say that young men caught fire in a quest for beauty, that they dedicated themselves to its realization, starving and striving, laughing, dreaming, and dying. So it’s sentimental, but I think it’s true.”

This was the original Birth of the Cool and it was attended by apostles who had names like Miff Mole, Jimmy Dorsey, Chauncey Morehouse, Fud Livingstone, and of course, Eddie, Bix and Tram.