Summary:

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.

Book Details:

Physical Description: 416 pages
Edition Info: Hardcover; 2003-05

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