Finding Bix: The Life and Afterlife of a Jazz Legend

The story of a brilliant, self-destructive jazz musician Lindinva Finding Bix is not a conventional biography. It does not evolve chronologically. The book is reminiscent of jazz. It starts a story, riffs on it until you forget the original melody and eventually circles back to the beginning. Bix Beiderbecke is one of those brilliant artists who appeared on the scene, changed the genre and self-destructed at a young age. He played with Louis Armstrong and Hoagy Carmichae. "This is not a traditional biography of a musician." according to Paul Morris. This is not a traditional biography of a musician. Instead this is a meditative essay about the writer's journey through the music and relics of a jazz musician's life. Wolfe examines at the complex legends and myths that have surrounded Beiderbecke over the years since his death. The real story here is about celebrity and how it works as a window and a mirror as we look at cultural figures. For some Bix i. "What a totally self-indulgent waste of time" according to Walloo. What a totally self-indulgent waste of time. Reads like a final project submitted for the MFA degree at the University of Iowa writers' program. Adds nothing to the work on Beiderbecke but sure takes time to knock the work of all the prominent writers/researchers who have provided valuable work on Beiderbecke. It resides on the same shelf as the woeful recent volume on Mingus by Krin Gabbard.

Among the most innovative cornet soloists of the 1920s and the first important white player, he invented the jazz ballad and pointed the way to “cool” jazz. But his recording career lasted just six years; he drank himself to death in 1931—at the age of twenty-eight. This is where Finding Bix begins: in Wolfe's good-faith attempt to get the facts right. A native of Beiderbecke’s hometown of Davenport, Iowa, Wolfe grew up seeing Bix’s iconic portrait on everything from posters to parking garages. What follows, though, is anything but straightforward, as Wolfe discovers Bix Beiderbecke to be at the heart of furio

“This book has the potential to spread Bix’s reputation and share his work with a wider audience. Similar to Peter Guralnick’s Searching for Robert Johnson, Brendan Wolfe’s book delves beyond the bio and music and into the often conflicting details of Bix’s personal life, an approach that sheds light on the facts of the subject’s life and the fleeting nature of truth.”