The Lone Wolf and his Instrument

"Bechet was an individualist, a lone wolf, the sharp who blows into town, cleans out the locals, and disappears again." -- J.L. Collier.

One of the great traditional New Orleans jazz artists, Bechet's style was nevertheless wholly his own, as singular in some ways as his nomadic, solitary career. Born on this day in 1897 to African-American Creole parents (although his mother was light-skinned enough to occasionally passeblanc), Bechet learned to play clarinet by practicing on his older brother's instrument when no one was looking. At 13, he was already playing professionally, and the following year, he began his life of wandering.

In 1918 he was in Chicago, then in New York, and in 1919 he was in Paris with Will Marion Cook's band, where he caught the attention of conductor Ernest Ansermet, who gushed: "There is in the Southern Syncopated Orchestra an extraordinary clarinet virtuoso who is, so it seems, the first of his race to have composed perfectly formed blues on the clarinet . . . I wish to set down the name of this artist of genius, as for myself, I shall never forget it -- it is Sidney Bechet . . . who is glad one likes what he does, but who can say nothing of his art save that he follows 'his own way' . . . perhaps the highway the whole world will swing along tomorrow."

Ansermet proved perceptive at least about Bechet's personality: he was a loner who went his own way, symbolized neatly by his 1941 overdubbed novelty recording of "The Sheik of Araby" in which he played all of the instruments by himself, including bass, drums and piano. Bechet became the most important jazz artist in Europe, playing with astonishing inventiveness, verve and his signature shimmering vibrato style in various groups in Paris and London, where he also took up the soprano saxophone, still a novelty in 1920. He was the first saxophonist of any consequence in the history of jazz.

At the same time, he was demanding and hot-headed, making him difficult to work with, and he occasionally ran afoul of the law: he was deported from London following a fight with a prostitute and imprisoned in France for 11 months following a gunfight with another musician outside a Paris cabaret. Back in the U.S., Bechet began his recording career, soloing with Clarence Williams Blue Five and the Red Onion Jazz Babies (featuring Louis Armstrong). Despite Armstrong's own virtuosity, Bechet dominated their recording of "Cake Walkin' Babies" (1924), showing a mature command of the still-developing rhythmic "swing" of jazz.

After spending the early 1920s back in the U.S. (where he also worked stints with Duke Ellington and James P. Johnson, had a brief affair with Bessie Smith and launched the career of Johnny Hodges), Bechet sneaked back into Paris with La Revue Negre (with Josephine Baker) in 1925. He promptly left the show, however, to tour Russia and Germany, and slowly slipped into obscurity, buried in Noble Sissle's orchestra.

During the late 1930s, as small-band jazz was in collapse, Bechet enjoyed a comeback with a hit recording of Gershwin's "Summertime" (1938), followed by "Wild Man Blues" (1940), a traditional New Orleans piece which he elevated with his own timeless invention; a transcendent masterpiece of slow jazz variations, "Blue Horizon" (1944); and "Les Oignons" (1949), a million-seller in Europe. Bechet had by this time returned to Paris (with some trepidation, given his history there), but he was welcomed as a hero, and lived there until his death, on this same day in 1959. He posthumously published a frank autobiography, Treat it Gentle, in 1960.

Warlop

Violinist Michel Warlop was born on this day in 1911 in Douai, France.

Trained as a classical soloist, Warlop took up jazz instead, influenced by the black music served up in Montmartre clubs. In 1930, he joined the Gregorians, a French big band featuring Stephane Grappelli (who gave up his violin spot when Warlop arrived to play piano with the band) and played with them on and off during the early 1930s. By 1936, he had more or less forsaken big bands to front small combos, playing with Django Reinhardt, among others.

Warlop was taken prisoner by the Germans in 1940, but his mental and physical health was seen as fragile and he was soon released. Shortly thereafter he formed his String Septuor, considered along with Reinhardt's Hot Club of France Quintet as one of the most original French groups of the time, playing Warlop's hybrid, Debussy-esque symphonic jazz compositions such as "Harmoniques" and "Nandette." As for Warlop's playing style, some say his nervous, edgy playing reflected his tragically skittish psyche. For a good sample of his work, try Modernistic, a selection of tunes from 1933 to 1943 on the Epm Musique label.

Warlop died on March 6, 1947.

Violin Jazz

"In discarding all pretense of solemnity Venuti and his contemporaries perpetuated the emphasis of the ragtime their own specialty [i.e. jazz] replaced, which was the first American musical idiom to make significant (if not deliberate) inroads upon the pomposity, melodrama, sentimentality and even seriousness of pop music." -- S. Calt.

Jazz violinist Joe Venuti was born on this day in 1903 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Venuti played violin in grade school with fellow violinist Eddie Lang. Lang switched to banjo and guitar for their after-school jam sessions, goofing with mazurkas and polkas in jazzed up 4/4 time. While Lang stayed in Philadelphia, Venuti became a widely traveled freelance dance band musician. Eventually, Venuti and Lang moved to New York City and became an influential dance-jazz partnership.

Venuti himself was the first great jazz violin soloist, exhibiting a confident, playful inventiveness in their legendary recordings together, as well as those with saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer, trombonist Jack Teagarden, clarinetist Benny Goodman and coronetist Bix Beiderbecke. The bouncy Lang and Venuti sides, recorded between 1926 and 1933, were particularly influential in the development of jazz in Europe, the violin-guitar duo becoming one of the most popular European jazz combinations.

After Lang's untimely death, Venuti drifted in Europe, suffered from alcoholism, and made a brief comeback in the 1950s with Bing Crosby's radio show before attaining stardom once again in the late 1960s, recording as a violin-jazz elder statesman in his later years with Stephane Grappelli, Earl Hines and Marian McPartland. He died on August 14, 1978 in Seattle, Washington.

Known as a practical joker, Venuti once pushed a piano out of a hotel room window, poured jello into Bix Beiderbecke's bathtub, and even put flour in a tuba on the set of Paul Whiteman's movie King of Jazz (1930).

Bird

One night in 1939, Charlie Parker stood up in an after-hours chili house in Harlem during a pick-up gig and began to blow his sax along with some guys playing "Cherokee," a tune recently made popular by a Count Basie recording. To analyze what was different about his playing that evening is "inside baseball" -- he improvised on the upper intervals of the chords instead of the lower, whistling a line which required harmonic resolutions which mystified the folks sitting in with him that evening. When the smoke cleared, however, jazz music had begun to enter a new era. The change was so radical, in fact, that it completely alienated older jazz musicians, who derided his style by referring to it as "that Chinese music." Up was down, black was white in Parker's deliberately contrarian world, but nonetheless his approach was exciting to younger players and enthusiasts for its departure from mainstream swing.

It should be no surprise, then, that it took a self-absorbed sociopath to blaze the trail for players like Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke and Thelonious Monk. Born on this day in 1920 in Kansas City, Kansas and dotingly raised by his mother after his song-and-dance man father abandoned them, Parker's mother bought him an alto saxophone, which in his bristling antipathy against any kind of authority he insisted on teaching himself to play. He dropped out of school at 15 and clumsily tried to sit in with Kansas City bands, but was howled off the stage. He practiced in isolation until he could move with ease from any one key to any other of the remaining 11 keys, not understanding perhaps that most jazz was played in just 4 keys and that all he really needed to know was a few chords to play in a band. He played a summer-long gig at an Ozarks resort and honed his technique, spending his free time copying Lester Young solos.

Back in Kansas City and later in Chicago and New York by the end of 1940, Parker showed he had enough talent to play, but he bounced around from band to band as he alienated musicians with his perverse, sometimes abusive behavior. For the prime-time gigs (with the bands of Earl Hines, Noble Sissle or Billy Eckstine), he stuck largely to the old forms; but jamming in the after-hours clubs, he began to show his amazing improvisational powers, drawing his slow, thin vibrato through harmonic explorations, breaking up rhythms, experimenting with pitch and liberally quoting non sequitir musical quotations from old jazz or traditional tunes -- often at a machine gun tempo with which most sax players of the period could scarcely dream of keeping up. More so than many of the bop players who followed, Parker's playing was his snickering way of telling the world that he was right and they were wrong; it was his private rebellion against everyone.

By 1942, he was playing with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who had begun similar experiments, in the Eckstine big band, but the popularity of their after-hours gigs inspired them to go to Hollywood for a successful series of concerts. Fed up with Parker's erratic behavior and drug abuse, Gillespie soon afterwards left Parker in L.A.

"Bird" (as he was known) was by this time deeply addicted to heroin and alcohol, indulging all of his appetites (for food, drugs, drink and women) like a wild man-child, and though he continued to play well, the excesses stopped him cold as he suffered a physical and mental breakdown in 1946. Perhaps fortuitously, he was arrested on a minor charge and confined to the Camarillo State Hospital, where his health began to improve.

He returned to New York in 1947 and had a tremendous year, touring with his own band comprised of drummer Max Roach and trumpeter Miles Davis; but he was back on drugs and booze, and if anything his obstinate personality turned nastier and more arrogant, leading Roach and Davis to quit in 1948.

He had become a larger-than-life figure by then, however, and was worshipped by younger players as he continued to play clubs (including Birdland, named for Parker himself) and concerts. Narcotics officials succeeded in getting his cabaret license revoked in 1951, limiting his regular playing as ulcers consumed his insides. He enjoyed a few more triumphant performances and recordings, notably a 1953 Massey Hall concert which reunited him with Gillespie and Roach alongside bassist Charles Mingus and pianist Bud Powell, but following a suicide attempt after he threw a public temper tantrum during a gig at Birdland, Parker checked into Bellevue for a couple of weeks to recover.

It was not enough; he wandered around Greenwich Village in an aimless haze for almost a year before he showed up on jazz salonist Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter's doorstep, dying there within a few days, on March 12, 1955. He was in such poor condition that the medical examiner estimated his age at 53; he was 34.

Tributes from other musicians flowed, including Mingus' "Gunslinging Bird," the full title of which was "If Charlie Parker were a gunslinger, there'd be a whole lot of dead copycats." Clint Eastwood's biopic, Bird (1988, with Forest Whitaker) attempted in its way to rehabilitate Parker the human being, but at least it reintroduced Parker's music to a 1980s audience.

Satchmo

"Virtually every jazz musician able to hold his instrument properly has at one time or another been described as a genius; patently, the description is usually unwarranted. But if the term means anything at all, it describes Armstrong." -- J.L. Collier.

The grandson of slaves, Louis Armstrong -- born on this day (not July 4) in 1901 in New Orleans --grew up in the squalor of New Orleans' Storyville section, in which prostitution, booze and violence -- as well as ragtime, "hot" music and brass band marches -- were plentiful. On New Year's Day, 1913, Armstrong was arrested for shooting a pistol in the air and sent to the Colored Waifs' Home. There, at the age of 13, he began to play the cornet for the school band without knowing how to read music, sounding out the alto harmonies by ear -- he later learned to read music while working on Mississippi showboats.

Within four years he was playing cornet in the Kid Ory band (replacing the acclaimed King Oliver, who moved to Chicago), then considered to be one of the best jazz bands in New Orleans. Oliver invited Armstrong to accompany him in Chicago in 1922, and he immediately established himself as the most accomplished and inventive jazz cornetist in the city. In 1924, Armstrong married Oliver's pianist, Lil Hardin (his second of three marriages), who convinced him to leave Oliver's band for the Fletcher Henderson orchestra.

After a year, Armstrong switched to the trumpet (considered to be solely a classical instrument at the time), formed a band with Lil as leader and marched into Okeh Studios to begin recording the sides which became landmarks in the history of jazz, known as Armstrong's "Hot Fives" and "Hot Sevens" recordings. With a warm, full tone, clean attack and astonishing control of the high register of the trumpet, Armstrong's playing was immediately recognizable, his melodies conversational yet enclosed within a meticulously composed structure. He was also one of the earliest jazz musicians (both as trumpeter and vocalist) to take drastic liberties with the time signatures of his pieces, not only extending his phrases and depositing the melody in odd gaps between the beats as others had done before him, but setting whole phrases of melody in a time signature comfortably and richly irrelevant to the beat.

Armstrong toured tirelessly beginning in the 1930s, and for a time continued to make cutting-edge jazz records. By the 1950s, Armstrong was a popular star of stage, screen and radio, appearing in such films as Cabin in the Sky (1943; with Ethel Waters), High Society (1956; with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra) and Hello Dolly! (1969; with Barbra Streisand). While his new audience loved his clowning and googly-eyed mugging as he sang pop songs, his early fans were saddened to find him shamelessly appealing to white markets and abandoning his jazz mastery. While Armstrong's oft-played, sentimental vocal rendition of "Wonderful World" (1958) has become something of an American classic, Armstrong the revolutionary musician can still be found in early trumpet triumphs such as "Hotter than Hot" (1927), "Potato Head Blues" (1927) and "Stardust" (1931). Perhaps the most profound legacy he left to jazz was on the outline of the art form itself: after Armstrong, jazz would also be a soloist's saga, not a tale of heroic groups. Armstrong died on July 6, 1971 in New York City.

Valaida Snow

Jazz trumpeter, singer and dancer Valaida Snow was born on this day in 1905 in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

She began performing in New York during her teens, setting the audience on fire in a cabaret show, Holiday in Dixieland, when she stepped out of the chorus line to play the trumpet and do a tap dance. At 21, she traveled to China as a trumpeter with Jack Clark's orchestra, wearing short hair and a tuxedo in order to blend in with the boys -- although the affectations had the opposite effect, making her a star attraction. Shortly thereafter she began a world tour as a headliner in top hotels throughout Europe and Asia, a tour that would last for years, with brief intervals in New York revues.

Noted for her exuberance, charm and vocal versatility onstage, she had many admirers within the male-dominated jazz world. "Boy," commented Louis Armstrong, for one, "I never saw anything that great." In 1941, however, she was captured by the Nazis while performing in Denmark, and sent to a concentration camp, where she was severely beaten. When she finally returned to the U.S., she was in poor health; she died on May 30, 1956 at the age of 50, doing her best to maintain a full touring schedule right up to the end.

King Oliver

Jazz legend King Oliver was born Joseph Oliver on this day in 1885 in New Orleans.

Beginning as a trombonist, Oliver learned some cornet from Bunk Johnson and began playing in dance bands (including some led by Kid Ory, who gave him his nickname "King") around New Orleans around 1907. He began to lead his own bands in 1912; somewhere in passing he encountered the teenaged Louis Armstrong, an up-and-coming cornetist, took a liking to him and showed him some tricks of the trade.

By the end of the teens, big, confident King Oliver was thought of as one of the three great New Orleans "jazz" cornetists, the other two being Bunk Johnson and Buddy Bolden. He played warmly, with an effect which suggested a human voice, and was a master at using a mute to achieve even more vocalistic effects.

Oliver left New Orleans in 1919 as the impact of jazz began to spread westward, and eventually ended up leading his Creole Jazz Band at Lincoln Gardens in Chicago in 1922. After a month, Oliver sent for Armstrong to join him as the band's second cornetist -- some say as a defensive move, since he knew Armstrong would surpass him in reputation. While the two-man cornet lineup was memorable in and of itself, Armstrong quickly established himself as the dominant talent on the jazz scene, eclipsing Oliver's gifts. Armstrong's pals (principally his future wife, Oliver's pianist Lil Hardin) attempted to talk him into going out on his own, but Armstrong felt he owed his debt to Oliver, and Oliver drew him into the famous 1923 recording sessions which would influence countless jazz players. Armstrong played his heart out, as Oliver's discipline kept the rest of the talented group (which included Hardin, Johnny and Baby Dodds) in line, keeping the balance between solo expressions and tight ensemble playing.

Convinced by Lil Hardin that Oliver was keeping him down musically and financially, Armstrong finally left the band in 1924, leaving Oliver to reorganize his remaining players as the Dixie Syncopators. He toured the country and continued to make superior recordings with such stars as Jelly Roll Morton, Clarence Williams and Red Allen. In 1931, however, Oliver's severe pyorrhea resulted in his teeth being removed; and since as a brass player he used his teeth to support his lip on his instrument, his playing days were officially over.

He continued to take bands around the South but the New Orleans style was beginning to fall out of favor, and he was marginalized by his own reputation as a pioneer -- just as the filmmaker D.W. Griffith was in Hollywood around the same time. Oliver eventually ended up working as a janitor in a pool hall in Savannah. Some poignant letters written by Oliver to his sister in New York near the end of his life survive, expressing his hope that he might be able to save enough money in his dime bank to buy a ticket to New York City. He only made it back posthumously; he died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 8, 1938 in Savannah, Georgia, and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Ella

"The Fitzgerald persona communicates as pure and humble, and most of her peers rate her as their favorite singer." -- Linda Dahl.

Die-hard pure jazz aficionados tend to place Billie Holiday on a higher plane than Ella Fitzgerald: while Billie’s singing was raw, intense and rhythmically sophisticated, Ella possessed qualities which are sometimes undervalued in the jazz world -- superb diction, a bell-like tone, and a jaunty, youthful, light touch. Pure jazz fans aside, Fitzgerald emerged by the end of the 20th century as one of the definitive jazz singers (or pop singers, if you prefer), charming and immediately accessible, and was surely the queen of be-bop, entrancing audiences by revitalizing the old form of "scatting" used so well by Louis Armstrong in the 1920s within the idiom of bop.

Born on this day in 1917 in Newport News, Virginia and orphaned at 15, Fitzgerald moved in with an aunt in New York City and cultivated dreams of some kind of stardom. Though shy and somewhat hulking and awkward, while still a teenager she entered a talent show hoping to dance her way to the prize, but she changed her mind at the last minute and tried singing. The episode was not a success, but she continue to pursue singing, and in 1934 she won an amateur contest at the Apollo Theater in Harlem singing "Judy" in the style of her idol, Connee Boswell. Friends finally convinced drummer/bandleader Chick Webb to take her on as his protégé ("Listen to the voice, don’t look at her," was how he convinced his own manager of the project), becoming her legal guardian (she was living in an orphanage at the time) and her professional mentor, honing her craft and even taking charge of her wardrobe.

Within a short period of time, Fitzgerald became a hit at the Savoy Hotel and began recording with Webb on Decca, making such sides as "I’ll Chase the Blues Away" and "Sing Me a Swing Song and Let Me Dance," principally for the dance audience. In 1938 she recorded the swinging "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" (on which she co-wrote the lyrics) which became a huge smash hit. Webb died in 1939, and Fitzgerald became the nominal bandleader until 1941, when she decided to go solo.

Although she could have rested on her laurels as a dance band vocalist with a string of commercial hits, with the advent of bop she stretched herself artistically, honing her improvisational skills on tour with Dizzy Gillespie, and by the 1950s she was an accomplished scat-singer ("her scatting was . . . a revelation" -- according to Dahl), with mesmerizing renditions of "Lady Be Good," "Flying Home" and "How High the Moon."

In 1955, she appeared in a Hollywood movie, Pete Kelly’s Blues (directed by and starring Jack Webb) and then signed on with Verve Records to begin recording her most memorable works, a series of "Songbook" albums featuring top-shelf popular songs by such songwriters as Cole Porter (1956), Duke Ellington (1956-57), Rodgers and Hart (1957), Irving Berlin (1958) and George and Ira Gershwin (1958-59). Other remarkable recordings during the 1950s and 1960s included her live, improvised rendition of "Mack the Knife" and the classic live album, Ella in Berlin (1960).

In the 1970s, she had eye surgery, which slowed her down, but with the initiation of Pablo Records in 1971, she turned it up again, recording splendid jazz albums with Joe Pass, Oscar Peterson and Count Basie. She also lent her voice and image to an oft-imitated TV commercial for Memorex audio tape, scatting to a high-note climax which shattered a wine glass before the off-screen announcer asked, "Is it live, or is it Memorex?" She died on June 15, 1996 in Beverly Hills, California at the age of 78, having all but retired during the 1980s due to eye and heart problems associated with diabetes.

Lady Day

"Her melody is rich with dissonance, and when Billie sings, ‘My man don’t love me’ on those dissonant notes, she can chill the blood. This ability to tell us something real made her not merely the finest of all jazz singers, but one of the finest jazz musicians American has produced." -- J.L. Collier.

Indisputably one of the great singers of the 20th century (Frank Sinatra called her "the most important influence on popular singing" of her time), Holiday’s voice was raw and round and tiny -- like that of a husky alley kitten -- but in every line she sang, she invited her listeners into her sometimes horrifying inner world, with its genuine appetites, pain and fleeting hopes. She said she was aiming at capturing the big sound of Bessie Smith, with the feeling of Louis Armstrong’s behind-the-beat cornet playing; but in addition, she had uncanny instincts about dramatic balance, knowing when to minimize the form to make the sometimes outlandishly overwrought content of the songs which were written for her seem simple, elegant and authentic.

Born Eleanora Fagan on this day in 1915 in Baltimore, Holiday’s early life is mysterious, obscured by the fanciful cocktail served up in her ghost-written autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues (1956), but it is surmised that she lived with relatives in Maryland while her mother went to New York to look for work; that her natural father, Clarence Holiday, was a guitarist in Fletcher Henderson’s band; and that Billie came to New York in 1927, worked in a brothel, and spent a little time in jail.

Legend has it that her singing career started when she was 15: as she and her mother were about to be evicted from their apartment for not paying their rent, Billie pushed her way into a dancing audition at a New York club, Pod and Jerry’s. A moment into the audition, it became very clear that Billie was no dancer, but the pianist took pity on her and asked her if she could sing. She tried "Trav’lin’ All Alone" and "Body and Soul," after which the customers sat in stunned silence, some of them moved to tears, and the owner sent her home with a couple of chickens and enough money to pay the rent.

By 1933, she was a regular in clubs around 133rd Street, when talent scout John Hammond arranged to have her record a few sides with Benny Goodman. Later with small bands led by Teddy Wilson, featuring such giants as Lester Young, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge and Johnny Hodges, Holiday recorded some of the quintessential classics of jazz, including "These Foolish Things," "I’ll Get By" and "Gettin’ Some Fun Out of Life." In 1937, she sang with the Count Basie Band, but did not mix well with Basie personally; and joined Artie Shaw in 1938 as Shaw boldly attempted to break the color line.

The strain of race relations while on the road led her to split with Shaw, after which she landed a steady headlining gig at Barney Josephson’s Cafe Society in Greenwich Village, an early attempt to mix upscale black and white audiences and present top-flight black and white entertainment. The engagement took Holiday from being an admired singer within the narrow circle of jazz musicians and enthusiasts to a national crooning phenomenon. Pressed by popular tastes, she pulled away from classic bluesy and light jazz-pop to sing torch songs -- slow tempo tales of love gone awry. In addition to "Strange Fruit" (an anti-lynching song which became her anthem, sending chills down the spines of Cafe Society patrons in 1939), "Fine and Mellow" and "God Bless the Child," she had hits with "Lover Man," "Good Morning Heartache" and "Gloomy Sunday."

Beginning in 1942, however, Holiday had a string of four failed marriages to drug addicts, and in the course of being physically and mentally abused by these men (who preyed on her leviathan lack of self-esteem), she became a heroin addict herself, and spent most of 1947 in prison following a drug arrest. While this resulted in her cabaret card being revoked (New York City law prohibited felons from working in places where alcohol was served), she made a triumphant return to Carnegie Hall in 1948. In 1949, she was arrested in a narcotics frame-up on the West coast (third husband John Levy was the likely stoolie), but released on testimony that she was clean at the time. Years of alcohol (to which she turned when attempting to stay clear of heroin), fitful drug use and temperamental behavior were making her persona non grata at clubs, and were taking their toll on her health and voice by the early 1950s.

At the age of 43 she was sounding 70, croaking her way through recordings for Verve which nonetheless still captured her bold interpretative touch. She was still moving live audiences, perhaps displaying her real-life torments so close to the surface that one could not help but be moved by the reality behind the artifice, when in 1959 she collapsed from liver trouble, went into a coma for a time, rallied but was set back by a kidney infection. As a final insult, although she was probably clean, she was arrested yet again for drug possession and fingerprinted on her deathbed at the age of 46. She passed away on July 17, 1959 in New York City.

Bix

Bix Biederbecke was born on this day in 1903 in Davenport, Iowa.

The "first great white jazz musician," as described by James Lincoln Collier, Leon Bismarck Beiderbecke learned piano by ear as a child, and though he received nominal encouragement from his parents, they certainly never envisioned for him a career in music. At 15, Beiderbecke fell in love with records by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a white jazz band from New Orleans, and began to copy the cornet lines from the records, developing his embouchure and fingering through trial and error.

His parents, concerned about his flagging scholastic performance and obsession with this odd music, sent him to a boarding school in Chicago. There he had an entire city full of nightclubs to choose from, and received an ample education in the latest jazz currents as well as in drinking heavily. Before one year was over, he was expelled from the academy, and at 19 he plunged headlong into a musical career.

He began to play in a traveling jazz group called the Wolverines, mostly at school dances and in clubs in Ohio and Indiana, and recorded with them in 1924. The records were mildly successful, mainly due to Beiderbecke's handsome playing -- with a warm, seductive, bell-like tone and perfectly controlled vibrato. At 21 Beiderbecke was recognized as an important jazz cornetist, his solos feeling their influence among budding white jazz musicians and commanding the respect of African-American musicians as well.

Late in 1924, he teamed up with Frankie Trumbauer, a first-rate C-melody saxophonist; "Bix and Tram," first with Jean Goldkette's band and later with Paul Whiteman, became a sensation on college campuses and recordings. Influenced by classical music, especially Edward MacDowell, Frederick Delius, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy, Beiderbecke evidenced a natural feel for harmonic approaches, and could effectively solo over 32 bars without sticking closely to the melody. He departed from the ground beat far less than other major jazz artists of the period, but he made up for his rhythmic conservatism with his dazzingly original sense of structure and expressiveness -- evidenced in such masterworks as "I'm Comin' Virginia" and "Singin' the Blues." Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman and Hoagy Carmichael, among others, were admirers of his playing.

By 1929, however, his drinking began to take its toll on his health, and Whiteman sent him home to Davenport (to his unappreciative family) to rest in a sanitarium. Returning to New York, he began to drink again, and died in a boarding house, suffering from pneumonia and delirium tremens. Beiderbecke's life story was distorted in Dorothy Baker's novel Young Man with a Horn (1938; made into a film in 1950 with Kirk Douglas) -- his downfall was simply alcohol, not a lack of appreciation by fellow musicians or the listening public.

Cocktail Rules

I recently became aware of a terrific book on cocktails, originally published in 1948, entitled The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks by David A. Embury. It is encyclopedic, witty and well-written, and it is an anthropological treasure chest of forgotten concoctions, neglected ingredients, rituals that now seem downright exotic to us, and impeccable standards.

The author, David Augustus Embury, was a partner and one of the senior tax attorneys of the venerable old Manhattan law firm of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt and Mosle, known for its public international law expertise. The firm exists today, but unfortunately it cannot bring itself to acknowledge Embury’s formidable contribution to American culture. A spokesman for the firm simply laughed at me and declined to provide any pertinent information about Embury.(1)

Like all good lawyers, though, Embury begins by defining his terms. A cocktail, for Embury, is an “aperitif cocktail – i.e., one to be taken before a meal as a stimulant to the appetite and an aid to digestion.” This quaint definition opens a window onto a lost world, in which on any given evening men and women “dressed for dinner,” donning formalwear and gathering together “at the club” for a couple of drinks before casually assembling a party for dining. Breezy conversation, and the slow, deliberate savoring of an evening’s available tastes, were the primary practices of such outings.

No doubt Embury became an enthusiast of the cocktail while coming of age in college around World War I, a time when some of the greatest of America’s 20th century homegrown entertainments were on the verge of maturing, asking more of their audiences rather than less: silent films were stretching beyond their novelty status, finally building a vocabulary and assuming a decorum to rival the “legitimate stage”; quadrilles had given way to the subtly playful rhythms of ragtime, which in New Orleans was fusing with blues to create jazz; and baseball was shaking off the rowdiness of its turn-of-the-century play and becoming an observational landscape for intellectuals.

All of these – silent films, jazz and baseball -- are now rarefied air, and like the cocktail itself, have each experienced a precipitous decline in their drawing power. The hallmarks of each were that they required a loyal aesthetic temperament, a sophisticated palate and an understanding of special rules. They created, in their respectively segregated fan bases, a fellowship of attentive, informed appreciation. Such are the disciplines that Embury brings to his rarified topic.

This was all well before the collegiate stage had adopted its current interest in beer pong, Jello shots and Everclear-and-Kool Aid. While these are strictly numbing rituals, Embury takes pains to explain that the experience of a cocktail is intended to be bracing and uplifting. It must whet the appetite as well as stimulate the mind, and it must be pleasing to the eye as well. The overall effect of a well-made cocktail, according to Embury, should be as follows: “Taut nerves relax; taut muscles relax; tired eyes brighten; tongues loosen; friendships deepen; the whole world becomes a better place in which to live.” It makes one wonder whether the UN might be more effective with some expert mixologists on staff.

In the service of such goals, however, Embury also advocated moderation. Embury’s careful and exacting advice on this matter is worth repeating. “But how, you may ask, is the average person to know exactly how many drinks he can stand? Should he go on just one binge and have a record kept of how much he consumes in order that thereafter he may know when to stop? My answer is 'No.' It is best that you never find out the limit of your capacity. There is just one safe and simple rule which, if rigidly adhered to, will afford you a maximum of pleasure in your drinking with a minimum of danger of ever becoming drunk. When you reach a point where you feel absolutely sure that you could stand one more but have some slight doubt as to what two more might do to you, STOP. If you resolutely refuse to take even the one extra that you are certain would be O.K., you will maintain your physical stability, your mental balance, and your moral aplomb.”

I could have used this advice once or twice in my own career, but I assure you that now I have committed it to memory almost as a shibboleth.

Embury is nothing if not opinionated. He prefers glass cocktail shakers with metal lids to all-metal shakers, arguing that glass is a better insulator from outside temperatures during the shaking process. Among American whiskeys, Pennsylvania ryes and Kentucky bourbons are the best, and all others are “vastly inferior.” All true Rickeys are made with limes, and never with lemons. Rules are rules.

Perhaps Embury’s most controversial opinion involves proportions. With all the mathematical discipline of an Internal Revenue Code expert, Embury argues, for example, that all “sours” can be made using the same proportions (8:2:1) and that many cocktails, indeed, may be viewed through an isomorphic model – hence his classic statement that “the Side Car is nothing but a Daiquiri with brandy in the place of rum and Cointreau in the place of sugar syrup or orgeat.” This “unified theory of mixing” led one recent reviewer to carp, “Well, all right. And Romeo and Juliet is the same as Two Gentlemen of Verona, if you delete the tragic ending and make Juliet a man.”

Despite Embury’s occasional excesses, his directory of drinks makes for some charming nostalgia. Try ordering a Millionaire, a Tennessee, a Colonel Lindbergh or a Seventh Heaven today, and I think you’ll see what I mean. And if you want to explain to your bartender that a particular drink is only properly made with Oloroso Sherry, Kümmel or Csaszar, you’ll probably experience a similar feeling of anachronism.

It isn’t enough, in most bars today, to say that David Embury knew what he was talking about, but a dip into his world in the pages of The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks is still a worthwhile diversion.

(1) Embury was also, for many years, the head of a national organization of college fraternities – which is probably more to the point, notwithstanding the Hollywood stereotype of the dipsomaniacal lawyer, ably essayed by such fellows as Reginald Denny (not the beating victim, but a British character actor) throughout the 1930s.

See also:



And: Ron Schuler's Parlour Tricks: Food and Drink, and My Baby and Me.