1929 [Hardcover]

Frederick W. Turner (Author), Frederick Turner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 13, 2003

In a briefly affluent and deeply disenchanted post-war America, the Jazz Age erupts in gaudy glory. It and one of its most colorful icons, Bix Beiderbecke, are celebrated in this fine first novel by an acclaimed nonfiction writer.

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.

Colored by some of the age's most popular characters--Bing Crosby, Maurice Ravel, Al Capone, Louis Armstrong, and Clara Bow--1929 brilliantly illuminates a period in history, personified in the gifted, compelling, and melancholy figure of Bix Beiderbecke.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bix Beiderbecke was one of the great jazz musicians of the 1920s. A brilliant cornet player with an amazing ear, he drank himself to death at the age of 28 with illegal Prohibition liquor. Although Beiderbecke isn't as well known as some of his contemporaries, much has been written about the enigmatic Iowan. Literary journalist Turner offers a fictional take on Beiderbecke's life, giving readers an invigorating picture of what life was like for jazz musicians in the years leading up to the Great Depression. The story is hardly linear; it darts from one scene to the next, beginning with one of Bix's friends leaning on the musician's grave, reminiscing about his old pal, then flashing back to when Bix was alive, tearing through the streets of Chicago with Al Capone's gang. Though there's no plot per se, Turner does present a sequence of events that add up to a portrait of Beiderbecke's life and musical contributions. Despite its brevity, Beiderbecke's career took him across the country, bringing him in touch with such legends as Bing Crosby, Duke Ellington and Maurice Ravel. Turner's style is dense, although his pace varies from balladlike to racing. His descriptions of Beiderbecke's music are evocative (the notes from his cornet fall "like stardust over all of us" and listening to the music feels like "waiting for something terrifically important that is already happening, that will keep on happening, only you couldn't predict or anticipate exactly how it will happen next"). Long-winded and at times frustratingly circuitous, this is nonetheless a rich tribute to a Jazz Age icon.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker

The hard-drinking, sweet-tempered cornettist and composer Bix Beiderbecke has held a fascination for jazz fans ever since his death, in 1931, at the age of twenty-eight. (There was a popular novel based on his life as early as 1938.) Turner's novel weaves this mystique into its own fabric, framing the events leading to Bix's downfall with the story of two characters—a brother and sister, both associated with Al Capone's Chicago racket—who become entangled in the jazzman's messy life. Written in a period-appropriate overheated, romantic prose, and incorporating memorable appearances by Capone, Bing Crosby, Maurice Ravel, Paul Whiteman, and Clara Bow, the book is by turns corny, intoxicating, and ineffably sad, like the "hot" music it is designed to evoke.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint Press (May 13, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582432651
• ISBN-13: 978-1582432656
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,680,432 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An ambitious undertaking..., June 26, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: 1929 (Hardcover)

Turner's writings on jazz certainly qualify him to write such a book. Like others in this genre of historical fiction, he endeavors to blend historical figures with fictional ones through whose eyes we witness events that are part of the lore of the Bix Beiderbecke and Capone sagas.

I'm not sure what level of interest the narrative will hold for readers unfamiliar with Beiderbecke. I raise the question; I'm not making a judgment so don't let an absence of knowledge about Bix Beiderbecke make you retreat. However, I would characterize things this way: The conventional plot associated with the fictional historical witnesses seems to me to be secondary to the larger character study that tries to get us inside Bix's skin. General readers may find the book "compelling" rather than a "I-couldn't-put-it-down." To the extent that this book may have the most appeal for those who know at least something of the Bix Beiderbecke's story, this is also, ironically, the community that may most bristle at it. They may also embrace it for raising the profile of one of their most closely-held heroes. I hope so; I think Turner has set out to do what he has artfully.

Although I'm sure it wasn't feasible, one might wish that such a book could be accompanied by a CD that would allow general readers to hear for themselves that the claims made so eloquently for Bix's horn in Turner's book are, in fact, no fiction at all.

So, let me urge any of you who decide to read this book and have no prior introduction to Bix Beiderbecke, that you order at least one Bix collection to make your reading of the book a more complete experience.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Bees Knees: Bix Beiderbecke & the Roaring 20's!, June 12, 2003

By 

Walter Five (13th Floor Elevator, Enron Hubbard Bldg. Houston Texxas) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: 1929 (Hardcover)

One really doesn't know where to begin. 1929 starts in modern times, as the fictional graveside recollections of a former Al Capone Mob driver and mechanic of his late friend, the legendary Bix Beiderbecke. It then careens through the "Roaring 20's", following Bix's descent into alcoholism, illness, and eventual death in a wildly scattershot pattern.

In reading this book one wonders just how many of the stories related are apochryphal, and how many ended up in letters, diaries, memoirs, and biographies. The recollections of Charlie Chaplain, Buster Keaton, Paul Whiteman, Bing Crosby, Frankie Trumbauer, Hoagy Carmichle, Louis Armstrong, Clara Bow and many others are here.

The richness of the material excuses the sometimes roundabout storytelling, and details about needle beer, "smoke" (a denatured alchol drink that killed thousands), and a hundred other matters that haven't mattered since the end of prohibition show the writer to be very knowlegable about the details that were then concerns for the alligators and flappers of the speakeasy era. Bix Beiderbecke is at BEST a very enigmatic figure, and whose most legendary performances were never recorded. Bix's reputation and ability far exceed most any of the 78 r.p.m. records he ever cut with any group, and the author does a good job conveying the magic that so many of his fellow musicians recall. "Ain't none of them play like Bix", Louis Armstrong once recalled, and this book, although it can't show why, certainly tells many stories why so many Jazz enthusiasts still listen to every note the young man ever put down on shellac.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As magical as the music it describes, June 1, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: 1929 (Hardcover)

Someone once told me that it is impossible to adequately describe jazz music. He obviously hadn't read Fred Turner's book on Bix Beiderbecke. Part culture history, part semi-fictional biography of Bix, and always an artful celebration of that most-American of musical forms, this book is a masterpiece waiting to be discovered.

Why isn't this book a New York Times best seller?

Perhaps if you read this book you can explain this mystery to me. And if you read it, I guarantee that you are in for one of the best reads of your life.