Customer Reviews

Remembering Bix: A Memoir Of The Jazz Age

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book is essentially everything you wanted to know about the career, family and sex life of Ralph Berton -- oh, and then there's that guy Beiderbecke who keeps hanging around him.

Actually, it's not a bad evocation of a frantic era and how it ended. Berton paints some great word pictures of what it must have been like to travel with the Wolverines and party with a still young-and-healthy Bix. The skeptical or more serious reader, however, may speculate on exactly where the facts end and the fiction begins.

For a more even-handed bio, a better bet is Sudhalter/Evans' BIX: MAN AND LEGEND, which treats its subject with respect without turning into a dry listing of facts and dates.

Still, REMEMBERING BIX is a fun read for anyone in love with Bix, his music, and his times.

I simply could not put this book down, and when forced to, only thought of when I might be able to pick it back up again. Ralph Berton is an amazing writer. He combines colorful prose, great humor and rare insights into the soul of jazz, life, love and lest we forget, the tragic life of Bix Beiderbecke.

If you are a musicologist looking for studious research on this period of jazz, you will be frustrated by this book. If you treasure rich imagery that brings history to life, step into this wonderful time machine - and enjoy a guided tour of jazz culture in the 1920's.

i haven't read this in a while. i came across it in a little bookstore in san francisco, bought it and didn't put it down for a week. it is such an unbelievably rich experience. it does bear mentioning that the book doesn't wholly focus on bix. you end up not really caring. the portions dealing with bix are very profound and highly memorable.
ralph berton is a very sensitive writer. his ability to draw in the reader is formidable.
i loaned my copy to my mom, so i came to amazon to buy another copy.

As author Ralph Berton points out at the beginning of this nicely written memoir, the name Bix Beiderbecke has, over the years, drawn irritating and overblown rhetoric. Truth is, I expected no different from this volume on the great jazz cornetist of the 1920s, so I was pleasantly surprised.

Berton's older brother played drums with Beiderbecke, giving the author a fascinating inside glimpse on the self-taught, self-destructive musical genius. Beiderbecke is a household name is his birthplace of Davenport, Iowa, and has a cult following among jazz enthusiasts around the world, but his life story is still worth pulling out of the shadows of legend. Beiderbecke's talent was evident early on and disturbed his strict German parents enough that they sent him away to school in Chicago--a big mistake. There he met songwriter Hoagy Carmichael ("Georgia on My Mind") and began to initiate himself in the Chicago jazz scene. Over the years, he fronted his own Dixieland band, played with sax player Frankie Trumbauer and sat in with Paul Whiteman's orchestra, one of the most popular ensembles of his day. He composed brilliant, Debussy-inspired piano pieces ("In a Mist") and standard Dixieland fare ("Davenport Blues"). He improvised breathtaking solos that are copied note for note even today ("Singin' the Blues")--all without reading a note of music. He also slowly drank himself to death, falling victim to his own bad habits in a New York hotel room well before he was even 30.

And while it's certainly true that Berton succumbs to his share of sentimentality (a Jesus and Van Gogh comparison kicks off the second paragraph of the preface), it's also true that his memories are colored by the passions of childhood. Berton is convincingly honest, often funny and regularly insightful, however, in his portrait of Beiderbecke and of his own more free-wheeling upbringing, musical and otherwise.

"Remembering Bix" is a memoir that, remarkably, satisfies a lot of different appetites: literary, musical, historical. It's also an often quick and fun read. In an age when memoirs are churned out as quickly as their marketing proposals, it's refreshing to find a 25-year-old gem like this--a book written out of admiration rather than self-absorption.

I read this book a long time ago, and consider it one of the best I've ever read. Maybe it's not absolutely historically accurate (it's not supposed to be), but it evokes for me an era long before I existed, and the spirit of what those times must have been like. There are at least two other books out there that are historically researched and accurate, but leave the emotion out. You need to read them together to get the true picture.

Does anyone know anything more about Ralph Berton, who, without intending it, is really the most interesting character in the book?

I, too, read it a long time ago. I would have been crazy about this book even if I'd never heard of Bix. Every paragraph is a gem. Berton bubbles over with cleverness. I use expressions & phrases that I picked up from the book, every day! And like another reviewer, I would love to know what happened to Ralph Berton.

What a great portrait of a great age in AMerica. Ralph Berton was a fabulous aurthur. I read this book in four days, couldn't put it down, I dreamt about Bix's music for weeks on end.

An earlier reviewer said "Berton bubbles over with cleverness." True - clever writing based on inaccuracies and half truths by all Bix's other contemporaries and the scholarly research done by others.
You'd be far better off reading Sudhalter and Evans' "BIX: MAN AND LEGEND".

The section on Bix's supposed Bisexuality comes across as Berton's fantasy /projection on Bix. Berton seems more fascinated with himself and his family than the subject of the book.

I think Bix, who was an easy going guy by all accounts, would have punched out Berton if he had lived to see this piece of tripe published.

Makes good kindling....

Bad pictures. Not enough about his death. Nat Hentoff continues to prove that he can't write. Boring. Greatly exaggerates Bix's influence on the world of jazz. Don't pay for this, pull an Abbie Hoffman.

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.