Last week, as I was driving through Richmond, Indiana, on my way home for the holidays, I was reminded of Hoagy and his musical cohort Bix Beiderbecke. Hoagy and Bix – together and separately - created several historic recordings at the Gennett Records studio in Richmond. The list of popular music pioneers who recorded at Gennett in the 1920s is a long one (Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Tommy Dorsey, et al.), earning Richmond the well-deserved title of “The Cradle of Recorded Jazz.”
Probably none of these names is as fabled as that of Beiderbecke – or, simply, Bix. The Iowa-born cornetist was known for a purity of tone and an innovative approach to soloing that helped mark the transition from Dixieland to modern jazz. His early death at age 28 also contributed to his legend as the embodiment of the convention-flouting, self-destructive musical prodigy.
As I reviewed some reference material on Bix, I ran across the following assessment from musician-critic Benny Green:
When a musician hears Bix's solo on 'Singing the Blues', he … knows … that this player is endowed with the rarest jazz gift of all, a sense of form which lends to an improvised performance a coherence which no amount of teaching can produce.I think this is another example of the experience of mastery, in which a person, playing (literally) from an innate talent, is able to transcend the rudiments of a craft and attain the ineffable excellence of an art. The steps of the craft can be taught, but the sense of the art cannot.
What is the gift with which you are endowed? What sense of form – such as the arrangement of objects in space, or the arrangement of words in an interpersonal interaction - do you possess? What results do you create that seem to emerge as a coherent whole, in a manner similar to Hoagy Carmichael’s experience of composing “Stardust”?
What is your improvisational art?
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