Blind Lemon Jefferson "Complete recorded works in chronological order 1925-26" (1994)

Blind Lemon Jefferson

(ca. 1893–1929). Blind Lemon Jefferson, a seminal blues guitarist and songster, was born on a farm in Couchman, near Wortham, Freestone County, Texas, in the mid-1890s. Sources differ as to the exact birthdate. Census records indicate that he was born on September 24, 1893, while apparently Jefferson himself wrote the date of October 26, 1894, on his World War I draft registration. He was the son of Alec and Clarissy Banks Jefferson. His parents were sharecroppers. There are numerous contradictory accounts of where Lemon lived, performed, and died, complicated further by the lack of photographic documentation; to date, only two photographs of him have been identified, and even these are misleading. The cause of his blindness isn't known, nor whether he had some sight.
Little is known about Jefferson's early life. He must have heard songsters and bluesmen, like Henry "Ragtime Texas" Thomas and "Texas" Alexander. Both Thomas and Alexander traveled around East Texas and performed a variety of blues and dance tunes. Clearly, Jefferson was an heir to the blues songster tradition, though the specifics of his musical training are vague. Legends of his prowess as a bluesman abound among the musicians who heard him, and sightings of Jefferson in different places around the country are plentiful.
By his teens, he began spending time in Dallas. About 1912 he started performing in the Deep Ellum and Central Track areas of Dallas, where he met Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, one of the most legendary musical figures to travel and live in Texas. In interviews he gave in the 1940s, Leadbelly gave various dates for his initial meeting with Jefferson, sometimes placing it as early as 1904. But he mentioned 1912 most consistently, and that seems plausible. Jefferson would then have been eighteen or nineteen years old. The two became musical partners in Dallas and the outlying areas of East Texas. Leadbelly learned much about the blues from Blind Lemon, and he had plenty to contribute as a musician and a showman.
Though Jefferson was known to perform almost daily at the corner of Elm Street and Central Avenue in Dallas, there is no evidence that he ever lived in the city. The 1920 census shows him living in Freestone County with an older half-brother, Nit C. Banks, and his family. Jefferson's occupation is listed as "musician" and his employer as "general public." Some time after 1920, Jefferson met Roberta Ransom, who was ten years his senior. They married in 1927, the year that Ransom's son by a previous marriage, Theaul Howard, died. Howard's son, also named Theaul, remained in the area and retired in nearby Ferris, Texas.
In 1925 Jefferson was discovered by a Paramount recording scout and taken to Chicago to make records. Though he was not the first folk (or "country") blues singer–guitarist, or the first to make commercial recordings, Jefferson was the first to attain a national audience. His extremely successful recording career began in 1926 and continued until 1929. He recorded 110 sides (including all alternate takes), of which seven were not issued and six are not yet available in any format. In addition to blues, he recorded two spiritual songs, "I Want to be Like Jesus in My Heart" and "All I Want is That Pure Religion," released under the pseudonym Deacon L. J. Bates. Overall, Jefferson's recordings display an extraordinary virtuosity. His compositions are rooted in tradition, but are innovative in his guitar solos, his two-octave vocal range, and the complexity of his lyrics, which are at once ironic, humorous, sad, and poignant.
Jefferson's approach to creating his blues varied. Some of his songs use essentially the same melodic and guitar parts. Others contain virtually no repetition. Some are highly rhythmic and related to different dances, the names of which he called out at times between or in the middle of stanzas. He made extensive use of single-note runs, often apparently picked with his thumb, and he played in a variety of keys and tunings.
Jefferson is widely recognized as a profound influence upon the development of the Texas blues tradition and the growth of American popular music. His significance has been acknowledged by blues, jazz, and rock musicians, from Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, and T-Bone Walker to Bessie Smith, Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, Carl Perkins, Jefferson Airplane, and the Beatles. In the 1970s, Jefferson was parodied as "Blind Mellow Jelly" by Redd Foxx in his popular Sanford and Son television series, and by the 1990s there was a popular alternative rock band called Blind Melon. A caricature of Blind Lemon appears on the inside of a Swedish blues magazine, called Jefferson. He appears in the same characteristic pose as his publicity photo, but instead of wearing a suit and tie, he is depicted in a Hawaiian-style shirt. In each issue, the editors put new words in the singer's mouth: "Can I change my shirt now? Is the world ready for me yet?" Alan Govenar and Akin Babatunde have composed a musical, Blind Lemon: Prince of Country Blues, staged at the Majestic Theatre, Dallas (1999), and the Addison WaterTower Theatre (2001), and have also developed a touring musical revue, entitled Blind Lemon Blues.
Jefferson died in Chicago on December 22, 1929, and was buried in the Wortham Negro Cemetery. His grave was unmarked until 1967, when a Texas Historical Marker was dedicated to him. He was inducted in the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame in 1980. In 1997 the town of Wortham began a blues festival named for the singer, and a new granite headstone was placed at his gravesite. The inscription included lyrics from one of the bluesman's songs: "Lord, it's one kind favor I'll ask of you. See that my grave is kept clean." In 2007 the name of the cemetery was changed to Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery. Among Jefferson's most well-known songs are "Matchbox Blues," "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," "That Black Snake Moan," "Mosquito Blues," "One Dime Blues," "Tin Cup Blues," "Hangman's Blues," "'Lectric Chair Blues," and "Black Horse Blues." All of Blind Lemon Jefferson's recordings have been reissued by Document Records.

Source: Texas State Historical Association.

Blind Blake "All the published sides" (2003)

Blind Blake "Georgia bound" (1999)

Blind Blake "Ragtime guitar's foremost fingerpicker" (1990)

Blind Blake

During the mid 1920s, strong sales of 78s by Papa Charlie Jackson and Blind Lemon Jefferson led Paramount Records to sign Blind Blake, a swinging, sophisticated guitarist whose warm, relaxed voice was a far cry from harsh country blues. Some of Blake’s 78s cast him as a jivey hipster sitting in with jazzmen, while on others he walked the long, lonely road to the gallows. The man with the “famous piano-sounding guitar” is still regarded as the unrivaled master of ragtime blues fingerpicking.
“Lord have mercy, was he sophisticated!” says Jorma Kaukonen, who helped introduce Blake’s guitar style to rock audiences during the 1970s. “He would have been sophisticated in any era. I really like the completeness of his piano-style playing, his left- and right-hand moves. He could play a complete band arrangement by himself. That appealed to the lone-wolf mentality that I aspired to when I was learning his songs. Later on, it gave me depth for playing double-guitar and piano-guitar stuff with other people. It taught me a lot about putting music together.”
“Blind Blake is a great player, a great musical figure,” echoes Ry Cooder. “In the years where he was on top, he was fabulous. Blind Blake just had a good touch. He played quietly, and he didn’t hit the guitar too hard. He had a nice feeling for syncopation. He’s from down there in the Geechie country, and all those people have a real nice roll to what they do. He was a hell of a good player, and he had a lick that was great. And Blind Blake played all over the place, with all kinds of people, including Johnny Dodds, which is just way too much for me.”
Besides his music and session details, not much is known of Blind Blake. His single surviving photograph shows us a dapper bantamweight in a neatly pressed three-piece suit and bow tie, fingerpicking a small guitar beneath closed eyes and a frozen Buddha grin.

In 1927, Blake’s label published The Paramount Book of Blues, a promotional booklet with sheet music and full-page bios of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charlie Jackson, Ma Rainey, and Ida Cox. Their Blind Blake page contained this strangely punctuated write-up:

“We have all heard expressions of people ‘singing in the rain’ or ‘laughing in the face of adversity,’ but we never saw such a good example of it, until we came upon the history of Blind Blake. Born in Jacksonville, in sunny Florida, he seemed to absorb some of the sunny atmosphere – disregarding the fact that nature had cruelly denied him a vision of outer things. He could not see the things that others saw – but he had a better gift. A gift of an inner vision, that allowed him to see things more beautiful. The pictures that he alone could see made him long to express them in some way – so he turned to music. He studied long and earnestly – listening to talented pianists and guitar players, and began to gradually draw out harmonious tunes to fit every mood. Now that he is recording exclusively for Paramount, the public has the benefit of his talent, and agrees, as one body, that he has an unexplainable gift of making one laugh or cry as he feels, and sweet chords and tones that come from his talking guitar express a feeling of his mood.”

In 1927, Blake’s label published The Paramount Book of Blues, a promotional booklet with sheet music and full-page bios of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charlie Jackson, Ma Rainey, and Ida Cox. Their Blind Blake page contained this strangely punctuated write-up:

“We have all heard expressions of people ‘singing in the rain’ or ‘laughing in the face of adversity,’ but we never saw such a good example of it, until we came upon the history of Blind Blake. Born in Jacksonville, in sunny Florida, he seemed to absorb some of the sunny atmosphere – disregarding the fact that nature had cruelly denied him a vision of outer things. He could not see the things that others saw – but he had a better gift. A gift of an inner vision, that allowed him to see things more beautiful. The pictures that he alone could see made him long to express them in some way – so he turned to music. He studied long and earnestly – listening to talented pianists and guitar players, and began to gradually draw out harmonious tunes to fit every mood. Now that he is recording exclusively for Paramount, the public has the benefit of his talent, and agrees, as one body, that he has an unexplainable gift of making one laugh or cry as he feels, and sweet chords and tones that come from his talking guitar express a feeling of his mood.”

Paramount’s ads in the Chicago Defender, a popular African American newspaper, emphasized Blake’s unparalleled guitar playing: “He accompanies himself with that snappy guitar playing, like only Blind Blake can do” read the ad copy for “Bad Feeling Blues.” The company claimed that “Blind Blake and his trusty guitar do themselves proud” on “Rumblin’ & Ramblin’ Boa Constrictor Blues,” while “Wabash Rag” was “aided by his happy guitar.”

Some believe Blind Blake was born Arthur Phelps, but during the record “Papa Charlie and Blind Blake Talk About It,” Papa Charlie Jackson asks him, “What is your right name?” Blake responds, “My name is Arthur Blake.” The name on the copyrights for “C.C. Pill Blues” and “Panther Squall Blues” is Arthur “Blind” Blake, which strengthens the case for Blake being his given name. He had a pronounced Southern accent and reportedly worked in south Georgia, Kentucky, along the East Coast, and in Bristol, Tennessee, before landing in Chicago.
On his death certificate, which turned up in 2011, Blake’s place of birth was listed as Newport News, Virginia, and 1896 was entered as his “date of birth.” “No matter where Blake was from, he ranks as a musical curiosity,” wrote Steve Calt and Woody Mann in the liners for Yazoo’s Blind Blake collection. “His records betray no basic musical orientation, and it’s anyone’s guess as to whether blues, guitar instrumentals, or even pop ditties were his original specialty. How he actually made his livelihood as a performer is another enigma. While most blind guitarists were soloists who used the helter-skelter phrasing of the street dancer, Blake’s blues phrasing had the strictness of a dance or band musician. It is likely that ensemble playing (perhaps with a jazz band) had a real impact on his music.”
Blind Blake made his first records for Paramount during the summer of 1926, playing solo guitar behind Leola B. Wilson’s lazy vaudeville blues. “Mayo Williams, the Paramount scout, says that Blind Blake was sent up from Jacksonville by a dealer,” reports blues researcher Gayle Dean Wardlow. “That’s how he first got on record, and his records sold very, very well.” Blake showed nerves of steel his first time before the recording horn at Chicago’s Marsh Studios, playing outstanding solos on Wilson’s “Dying Blues” and “Ashley St. Blues.”
A month later Paramount cast him as a solo artist. “Early Morning Blues” was a grim “leaving blues” reminiscent of Lonnie Johnson. The 78’s flip side, the brilliant “West Coast Blues,” was a ragged dance tune injected with spoken asides such as “Whoop that thing” and “I’m gonna satisfy you if I can” [to legally download this and other Blake tracks, visit www.archive.org].
Blake’s releases no doubt astonished and influenced other blues guitarists, such as William Moore, who patterned his Paramount 78 of “Old Country Rock” on “West Coast Blues.” Blind Gary Davis likewise studied Blake’s 78s. “The guitar was being played like a piano in almost all the areas of America except the Delta,” explains Stefan Grossman, “meaning that the left hand was literally doing that boom-chick, boom-chick pattern. Blake was able to use his right-hand thumb to syncopate it more, like a Charleston. He was very, very rhythmic and incredibly fast – I don’t know anyone who can get to that speed. That’s Blake’s real claim to fame, because his chord progressions are nothing fancy. But the thumb work is fantastic, and what he’s doing with his right hand set him apart from everyone. Rev. Gary Davis said Blake had a ‘sportin’ right hand.’ Davis took that and got into even more complicated modes.”
“I suspect Blind Blake was a three-finger picker,” offers Jorma Kaukonen, “and I have a sneaking suspicion he wore picks, because he had such a snappy, percussive sound and he’s not popping the strings the way bare-finger players do. His favorite keys were C, G, and E, although I’m pretty sure he could play in any of them if he wanted to.”
At his next session, October 1926, Blake balanced down-and-out blues songs with the good-time hokum of “Too Tight” and “Come On Boys Let’s Do That Messin’ Around,” which has an early example of a scat solo. He flexed his guitar prowess on his next 78, “Skeedle Loo Doo Blues” and the double-time sections of “Stonewall Street Blues.” Paramount summoned Blake and pianist Jimmy Blythe to Leola Wilson’s November session, which produced a pair of fine 78s. Less than six months after his entry into the record biz, Blake was playing behind the great Ma Rainey on “Morning Hour Blues,” “Little Low Mama Blues,” and “Grievin’ Hearted Blues.”
Early the next year Paramount featured kazoo – possibly played by Blake himself – on “Buck-Town Blues” and brought in a bones percussionist for “Dry Bone Shuffle” and “That’ll Never Happen No More.” Blind Blake cut another seven songs during October ’27. The smoothly syncopated “Hey Hey Daddy Blues,” the hip horn imitations of “Sea Board Stomp,” and the tour de force “Southern Rag” suggest that he woodshedded on guitar during his half-year recording hiatus. “I’m goin’ to give you some music they call the Geechie music now,” Blake announced at the beginning of “Southern Rag,” which he laced with images of planting rice, sugar cane, cotton, and peas. Some authors suggest that Blake slips into the Geechie and Gullah accents of Georgia’s South Sea Islands during the track, but Wardlow disagrees: “I don’t think he intentionally goes into the Geechie accent, but he was down from around that part of the country – South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.”
In November ’27, Gus Cannon joined in on banjo for the minstrel tune “He’s In the Jailhouse Now.” During the 1950s Sam Charters asked Cannon for his memories of Blake. According to the book Sweet as the Showers of Rain, Cannon responded: “We drank so much whiskey! I’m telling you we drank more whiskey than a shop! And that boy would take me out with him at night and get me so turned around I’d be lost if I left his side. He could see more with his blind eyes than I with my two good ones.” Mayo Williams also reported that Blake would get drunk and fight.

During the spring of 1928 Blind Blake cut his most ambitious records. Jimmy Bertrand manned xylophone for “Doggin’ Me Mama Blues” and warbled slide whistle on “C.C. Pill Blues,” while the great Johnny Dodds soloed on clarinet. “Oh, that record!” enthuses Ry Cooder. “That’s it, see. That’s the whole thing right there. That’s all you need to hear. And then you know: There’s a whole world we’ve all missed and will never know.” (The “C.C.” stood for “compound cathartic.”)

Dodds and Bertrand provided more crazy horn and percussion accompaniment on Blake’s raggy “Hot Potatoes” and the swinging “South Bound Rag.” Bertrand, Dodds, and Blake were also teamed on “Elzadie’s Policy Blues”/”Pay Day Daddy Blues” with Elzadie Robinson, a cabaret singer and former chorus girl from Logansport, Louisiana. Blake was soon back in the studio with blues moaner Bertha Henderson and gospel crooner Daniel Brown. Bertha’s “Let Your Love Come Down” featured Blake playing stride piano with rocking solos. Working solo, Blake simultaneously played guitar and harmonica on “Panther Squall Blues.”

Although Blind Blake may have been earning up to $50 per Paramount side, Little Brother Montgomery claimed that the guitarist’s regular source of income during the late 1920s came from playing South Side Chicago house rent parties. With its piano in the living room, Blake’s apartment at 31st and Cottage Grove became a gathering place where Montgomery, Charlie Spand, Roosevelt Sykes, Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy, and other musicians could drink moonshine and jam blues. But not everyone could keep up. “I met Blind Blake in Chicago,” Ishman Bracey told Gayle Dean Wardlow, “but I couldn’t second him. He was too fast for me. Blind Blake, Tampa Red, Lonnie Johnson, and Scrapper Blackwell – all of them guitar players was buckin’ one another. Blind Blake was too fast.”
Blake’s 1928 releases “Ramblin’ Mama Blues,” “Back Door Slam Blues,” “Cold Hearted Mama Blues,” and “Low Down Loving Gal” suggest he had bitter feelings toward women. His anger took a scarier turn on “Notoriety Woman Blues,” during which he sang, “To keep her quiet I knocked her teeth out her mouth.” By contrast, Blake’s final recording that year, “Sweet Papa Low Down,” was a bouncy Charleston with piano, cornet, xylophone, and Blake’s happy jiving.
The bluesman journeyed to Richmond, Indiana, in June 1929 for a series of sides with Alex Robinson on piano. “Slippery Rag” rocked the house with driving chords and mind-boggling solos. “Fightin’ the Jug” reinforced his reputation for being a heavy drinker:
“When I die, folks, without a doubt,
When I die, folks, without a doubt,
You won’t have to do nothin’ but pour me out”

Blind Blake was at the height of his powers on August 17, 1929, at what was to be his last great session. During the course of that Saturday, he recorded several of his most enduring songs. While some of these songs were played in the bluesier keys of D and E, Blake relied on his favorite ragtime tuning, C, for “Georgia Bound.” Blake blasted toe-to-toe with Charlie Spand, Detroit’s premier piano boogieman, on “Hastings St. (Hastings St. Boogy),” named after a street in the city’s old black section. I played this track for John Lee Hooker, who’d never heard it before, and he reacted by calling it “the real blues.” John speculated that Blake must have lived in Detroit at some point, since Blake mentions a specific address, 169 Brady, during the song and then says, “Must be somethin’ there very marvelous, mm, mm, mm. I believe it’s somethin’ that’ll make you feel oh boy and how!” “Yeah, Brady was right off of Gratiot,” Hooker said. “Detroit was jumpin’ then, and Hastings Street was the best street in town. Everything you wanted was right there. Everything you didn’t want was right there. It ain’t no more now. It’s a freeway now, called Chrysler Freeway. But that was a good street, a street known all over the world.”

Blake’s next selection, “Diddie Wa Diddie,” is classic ragtime blues, each break a minor masterpiece. Blake masterfully heightened the song’s rhythmic intensity by rushing to the root of a new chord an eighth-note before the next downbeat. With its beautiful lines, harmonic chimes, and bluesy bends, “Police Dog Blues” likewise showcases his consummate guitarmanship. Kaukonen and Cooder have both recorded inspired covers of this song. Blake also recorded “Chump Man Blues” at the session. “Blind Blake was basically a ragtime guitar player,” notes Stefan Grossman, “but then he had things like ‘Chump Man Blues,’ which is a blues in D. It’s not as exciting as his playing in C or G, but it has an almost Bahaman, Joseph Spence sound.”

Blind Blake made a few more sides in Chicago later that summer – a 78 featuring Tiny Parham or Aletha Dickerson on piano, the agile instrumentals “Guitar Chimes” and “Blind Arthur’s Breakdown.” “Papa Charlie and Blind Blake Talk About It,” the first Blake 78 recorded at Paramount’s new studio in Grafton, Wisconsin, joined two musical giants in a stuttering shuck-and-jive routine. With its exaggerated vocals and Jackson’s utilitarian banjo strums overwhelming the arrangement, the song wasn’t far removed from blackface minstrelsy.
Blake was in fabulous form backing Irene Scruggs (billed as Chocolate Brown) during his next Grafton trip. Her “Itching Heel” no doubt struck a resonant chord among many women attached to bluesmen: “He don’t do nothing but play on his old guitar / While I’m busting suds out in the white folks’ yard.” Blake, in turn, responded to her verbal jabs with sped-up guitar parts.
Beginning with his May 1930 solo sides, the sheen was mostly gone from Blind Blake’s playing and singing. “When he started to drink too much – you can hear it towards the end – it just doesn’t work anymore,” observes Cooder. “He’s physically past it, because you’ve got to be sharp to sound that good.” He rekindled the old fire in “Righteous Blues” that December, and made his final appearance as a sideman in May ’31 behind Laura Rucker. Blake cut three 78s under his own name that year, but no copies of “Dissatisfied Blues”/”Miss Emma Liza (Sweetness)” are known to have survived. “Night and Day Blues”/”Sun to Sun” are among his most lackluster performances, while the more intriguing two-part “Rope Stretchin’ Blues” tells the woeful tale of a man who catches a stranger in his house, busts his head with a club, and winds up hanging for it.
The final Blind Blake release, the old Victorian music hall standard “Champagne Charlie Is My Name” backed by “Depression’s Gone From Me Blues,” which recycles the “Sitting On Top of the World” melody, was recorded in Grafton during June 1932. But is it Blake? “Even though it says Blind Blake on the label on both sides,” says Gayle Dean Wardlow, “it seems like that last record’s a split side – one side is him, and one side is not him. ‘Depression’s Gone From Me Blues’ – that’s Blake. I think ‘Champagne Charlie’ is by someone else – it doesn’t sound like Blake to me.” Grossman concurs: “That 78 doesn’t have his taste, his feel. Who knows? It might have been somebody else, even a different Blind Blake.”
For decades, the bluesman’s final fate was uncertain. “Blind Blake – now, that’s another one that’s a mystery,” reported Georgia Tom Dorsey during the 1960s. “How he got out of the show [business], I don’t know. But he was a good worker and a nice fellow to get along with, as far as I’m concerned.” After Paramount folded in 1932, Blake never recorded again. Chances are, he’s the Arthur Blake whose death certificate was discovered in 2011 by a team of astute researchers that included Alex van der Tuuk, Bob Eagle, Rob Ford, Eric LeBlanc, and Angela Mack. Published in Blues & Rhythm magazine issue #263, their research suggests that Blake spent the last two or three years of his life living at 1844 B North 10th Street in the Bronzeville section of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with his wife Beatrice McGee Blake, whom he’d married around 1931. His death certificate lists his profession as “unemployed musician,” and his date of death was entered as December 1, 1934. The cause? Pulmonary tuberculosis.
For a while, Blind Blake’s records sold almost as well as Blind Lemon Jefferson’s, and he had a tremendous impact, especially in the Southeast. Personally, I’d like to believe Blind Blake lived the lines he sang in “Poker Woman Blues”:
“Sometime I’m rich, sometime I ain’t got a cent,
Sometime I’m rich, sometime I ain’t got a cent,
But I’ve had a good time everywhere I went”

Source: Jas Obrecht Music Archive

Black & white hillbilly music: early harmonica recordings from the 1920s & 1930s (1996)

Bix Beiderbecke "An introduction to Bix Beiderbecke 1924-30" (1996)

Bix Beiderbecke

Leon Bismark "Bix" Beiderbecke (March 10, 1903 – August 6, 1931) was an American jazz cornetist, jazz pianist, and composer.
With Louis Armstrong, Beiderbecke was one of the most influential jazz soloists of the 1920s. His turns on "Singin' the Blues" (1927) and "I'm Coming, Virginia" (1927), in particular, demonstrated an unusual purity of tone and a gift for improvisation. With these two recordings, especially, he helped to invent the jazz ballad style and hinted at what, in the 1950s, would become cool jazz. "In a Mist" (1927), one of a handful of his piano compositions but the only one he recorded, mixed classical influences with jazz syncopation. Beiderbecke also has been credited for his influence, directly, on Bing Crosby and, indirectly, via saxophonist Frank Trumbauer, on Lester Young.
A native of Davenport, Iowa, Beiderbecke taught himself to play cornet largely by ear, leading him to adopt a non-standard fingering that some critics have connected to his original sound. He first recorded with a Midwestern jazz ensemble The Wolverines in 1924, after which he played briefly for the Detroit-based Jean Goldkette Orchestra before joining Frankie "Tram" Trumbauer for an extended gig at the Arcadia Ballroom in St. Louis, Missouri. Beiderbecke and Trumbauer both joined Goldkette in 1926. The band toured widely and famously played a set opposite Fletcher Henderson at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City in October 1926. The following year, Trumbauer and Beiderbecke left Detroit to join the best-known and most prestigious dance orchestra in the country: the New York–based Paul Whiteman Orchestra.
Beiderbecke's most influential recordings date from his time with Goldkette and Whiteman, although they were generally recorded under his own name or Trumbauer's. The Whiteman period also marked a precipitous decline in Beiderbecke's health, brought on by the demand of the bandleader's relentless touring and recording schedule in combination with Beiderbecke's persistent alcoholism. A few stints in rehabilitation centers, as well as the support of Whiteman and the Beiderbecke family in Davenport, did not check Beiderbecke's decline in health. He left the Whiteman band in 1930 and the following summer died in his Queens apartment at the age of twenty-eight.
His death, in turn, gave rise to one of the original legends of jazz. In magazine articles, musicians' memoirs, novels, and Hollywood films, Beiderbecke has been reincarnated as a Romantic hero, the "Young Man with a Horn". His life has been portrayed as a battle against such common obstacles to art as family and commerce, while his death has been seen as a martyrdom for the sake of art. The musician-critic Benny Green sarcastically called Beiderbecke "jazz's Number One Saint," while Ralph Berton compared him to Jesus. The historical Beiderbecke, meanwhile, is the subject of scholarly controversy regarding his true name, his sexual orientation, the cause of his death, and the importance of his contributions to jazz.

EARLY LIFE

Bix Beiderbecke was born on March 10, 1903, in Davenport, Iowa, the son of Bismark Herman and Agatha Jane (Hilton) Beiderbecke. There is disagreement over whether Beiderbecke was christened Leon Bismark (and nicknamed "Bix") or Leon Bix. His father was nicknamed "Bix," as, for a time, was his older brother, Charles Burnette "Burnie" Beiderbecke. Burnie Beiderbecke claimed that the boy was named Leon Bix and subsequent biographers have reproduced birth certificates to that effect. However, more recent research—which takes into account church and school records in addition to the will of a relative—has suggested that he was originally named Leon Bismark. Regardless, his parents called him Bix, which seems to have been his preference. In a letter to his mother when he was nine years old, Beiderbecke signed off, "frome [sic] your Leon Bix Beiderbecke not Bismark Remeber" [sic].
Beiderbecke's father, the son of German immigrants, was a well-to-do coal and lumber merchant, named after the Iron Chancellor of his native Germany. Beiderbecke's mother was the daughter of a Mississippi riverboat captain. She played the organ at Davenport's First Presbyterian Church, and encouraged young Bix's interest in the piano. Bix Beiderbecke was the youngest of three children. His brother, Burnie, was born in 1895, and his sister, Mary Louise, in 1898. Bix began playing piano at age two or three. His sister recalls that he stood on the floor and played it with his hands over his head. Five years later, he was the subject of an admiring article in the Davenport Daily Democrat that proclaimed: "Seven-year-old boy musical wonder! Little Bickie Beiderbecke plays any selection he hears."
At age ten, his older brother Burnie recalled that he stopped coming home for supper, instead hurrying down to the riverfront and slipping aboard one or another of the excursion boats to play the Calliope. A friend remembered that the plots of the silent matinees Bix and his friends watched on Saturdays didn't interest him much, but as soon as the lights came on he'd rush home to see if he could duplicate the melodies the accompanist had played during the action.
When his brother Burnie returned to Davenport at the end of 1918 after serving stateside during World War I, he brought with him a Victrola phonograph machine and several records, including "Tiger Rag" and "Skeleton Jangle" by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. From these records Bix Beiderbecke first learned to love hot jazz; he taught himself to play cornet by listening to Nick LaRocca's horn lines. Beiderbecke also listened to jazz music off the riverboats that docked in downtown Davenport. Louis Armstrong and the drummer Baby Dodds claimed to have met Beiderbecke when their New Orleans-based excursion boat stopped in Davenport. Historians disagree over whether that's true.
Beiderbecke attended Davenport High School from 1919 to 1921. During this time, he sat in and played professionally with various bands, including those of Wilbur Hatch, Floyd Bean, and Carlisle Evans. In the spring of 1920 he performed for the school's Vaudeville Night, singing in a vocal quintet called the Black Jazz Babies and playing his horn. He also performed, at the invitation of his friend Fritz Putzier, in Neal Buckley's Novelty Orchestra. The group was hired for a gig in December 1920, but a complaint was lodged with the American Federation of Musicians, Local 67, that the boys did not have union cards. In an audition before a union executive, Beiderbecke was forced to sight read and failed. He did not earn his card.
On April 22, 1921, a month after he turned eighteen, Beiderbecke was arrested by two Davenport police officers on a charge brought by the father of a young girl. According to biographer Jean Pierre Lion, "Bix was accused of having taken this man's five-year-old daughter into a garage and committing on her an act qualified by the police report as 'lewd and lascivious.'" Although Beiderbecke was briefly taken into custody and held on a $1,500 bond, the charge was dropped after the girl was not made available to testify. According to an affidavit submitted by her father, this was because "of the child's age and the harm that would result to her in going over this case." It is not clear from the father's affidavit if the girl had identified Beiderbecke. Until recently, biographers have largely ignored this incident in Beiderbecke's life, and Lion was the first, in 2005, to print the police blotter and affidavit associated with the arrest. He dismissed the seriousness of the charge, but speculated that the arrest nevertheless might have led Beiderbecke to "feel abandoned and ashamed: he saw himself as suspect of perversion." Beiderbecke fans and scholars continue to argue over this incident's relevance and importance.
Beiderbecke's parents enrolled him in the exclusive Lake Forest Academy, north of Chicago in Lake Forest, Illinois. While historians have traditionally suggested that his parents sent him to Lake Forest to discourage his interest in jazz, others have begun to doubt this version of events, believing that he may have been sent away in response to his arrest. Regardless, Mr. and Mrs. Beiderbecke apparently felt that a boarding school would provide their son with both the necessary faculty attention and discipline to improve his academic performance. His interests, however, remained limited to music and sports. In pursuit of the former, Beiderbecke took the train into Chicago to catch the hot jazz bands at clubs and speakeasies, including the infamous Friar's Inn, where he listened to and sometimes sat in with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. He also traveled to the predominantly African-American South Side to listen to what he called "real" jazz musicians. "Don't think I'm getting hard, Burnie," he wrote to his brother, "but I'd go to hell to hear a good band." On campus, he helped organize the Cy-Bix Orchestra with drummer Walter "Cy" Welge and almost immediately got into trouble with the Lake Forest headmaster for performing indecorously at a school dance.
Beiderbecke often failed to return to his dormitory before curfew, and sometimes stayed off-campus the next day. In the early morning hours of May 20, he was caught on the fire escape to his dormitory, attempting to climb back into his room. The faculty voted to expel him the next day, due both to his academic failings and his extracurricular activities, which included drinking. The headmaster informed Beiderbecke's parents by letter that following his expulsion school officials confirmed that Beiderbecke "was drinking himself and was responsible, in part at least, in having liquor brought into the School." Soon after, Beiderbecke began pursuing a career in music.
He returned to Davenport briefly in the summer of 1922, then moved to Chicago to join the Cascades Band, working that summer on Lake Michigan excursion boats. He gigged around Chicago until the fall of 1923, at times returning to Davenport to work for his father.

WOLVERINES

Beiderbecke joined the Wolverine Orchestra late in 1923, and the seven-man group first played a speakeasy called the Stockton Club near Hamilton, Ohio. Specializing in hot jazz and recoiling from so-called sweet music, the band took its name from one of its most frequent numbers, Jelly Roll Morton's "Wolverine Blues." During this time, Beiderbecke also took piano lessons from a young woman who introduced him to the works of Eastwood Lane. Lane's piano suites and orchestral arrangements were both self-consciously American and influenced by the French Impressionists, and it is said to have greatly influenced Beiderbecke's style, especially on "In a Mist." A subsequent gig at Doyle's Dance Academy in Cincinnati became the occasion for a series of band and individual photographs that resulted in the most famous image of Beiderbecke—sitting fresh-faced, his hair perfectly combed, his horn resting on his right knee.
On February 18, 1924, the Wolverines first recorded at Gennett Records in Richmond, Indiana. Their two sides that day included "Fidgety Feet," written by Nick LaRocca and Larry Shields from the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and "Jazz Me Blues." Beiderbecke's solo on the latter suggested something new and significant in jazz, according to biographers Richard M. Sudhalter and Philip R. Evans:

Both qualities—complementary or "correlated" phrasing and cultivation of the vocal, "singing" middle-range of the cornet—are on display in Bix's "Jazz Me Blues" solo, along with an already discernible inclination for unusual accidentals and inner chordal voices. It is a pioneer record, introducing a musician of great originality with a pace-setting band. And it astonished even the Wolverines themselves.

The Wolverines recorded fifteen sides for Gennett Records between February and October 1924. The titles revealed a tough and well-formed cornet talent. His lip had toughened from earlier, more tentative years; on nine of the Wolverines' recorded titles he proceeds commandingly from lead to opening solo without any need for a respite from playing.
Beiderbecke made his first recordings twenty-one months before Armstrong recorded as a leader with the Hot Five. Beiderbecke's style was very different from that of Louis Armstrong according to the The Oxford Companion to Jazz:

Where Armstrong's playing was bravura, regularly optimistic, and openly emotional, Beiderbecke's conveyed a range of intellectual alternatives. Where Armstrong, at the head of an ensemble, played it hard, straight, and true, Beiderbecke, like a shadowboxer, invented his own way of phrasing "around the lead." Where Armstrong's superior strength delighted in the sheer power of what a cornet could produce, Beiderbecke's cool approach invited rather than commanded you to listen.

Where Armstrong emphasized showmanship and virtuosity, Beiderbecke emphasized melody, even when improvising, and—different from Armstrong and contrary to how the Bix Beiderbecke of legend would be portrayed—he rarely strayed into the upper reaches of the register. Paul Mares of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings insisted that Beiderbecke's chief influence was the New Orleans cornetist Emmett Hardy, who died in 1925 at the age of twenty-three. Indeed, Beiderbecke had met Hardy and the clarinetist Leon Roppolo in Davenport in 1921 when the two joined a local band and played in town for three months. Beiderbecke apparently spent time with them, but the degree to which Hardy's style influenced Beiderbecke's is difficult to know because Hardy never recorded. In some respects, Beiderbecke's playing was sui generis, but he nevertheless listened to and studied the music around him: from Armstrong and Joe "King" Oliver to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings to Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.
Soon, he was listening to Hoagy Carmichael, too. A law student and aspiring pianist and songwriter, Carmichael invited the Wolverines to Bloomington, Indiana, late in April 1924. Beiderbecke had met Carmichael a couple of times before and the two became friends. On May 6, 1924, the Wolverines recorded a tune Carmichael had written especially for Beiderbecke and his colleagues: "Riverboat Shuffle".
Beiderbecke left the Wolverines in October 1924 for a spot with Jean Goldkette in Detroit, but the job didn't last long. Goldkette recorded for the Victor Talking Machine Company, whose musical director, Eddie King, objected to Beiderbecke's hot-jazz style of soloing; it wasn't copacetic with the commercial obligations that came with the band's recording contract. King also was frustrated by the cornetist's inability to deftly sight read. After a few weeks, Beiderbecke was bounced from the Goldkette band, but soon arranged a recording session back in Richmond with some of its members. On January 26, 1925, Bix and His Rhythm Jugglers set two tunes to wax: "Toddlin' Blues," another number by LaRocca and Shields, and Beiderbecke's own composition, "Davenport Blues." Beiderbecke biographer Lion has complained that the second number was marred by the alcohol consumed by the musicians. In subsequent years, "Davenport Blues" has been recorded by musicians from Bunny Berigan to Ry Cooder to Geoff Muldaur.
The following month, Beiderbecke enrolled at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa. His stint in academia was even briefer than his time in Detroit, however. When he attempted to pack his course schedule with music, his guidance counselor forced him instead to take religion, ethics, physical education, and military training. It was an institutional blunder that Benny Green described as being, in retrospect, "comical," "fatuous," and "a parody." Beiderbecke promptly began to skip classes, and after he participated in a drunken bar fight, he was expelled. That summer he played with his friends Don Murray and Howdy Quicksell at a lake resort in Michigan. The band was run by Goldkette, and it put Beiderbecke in touch with another musician he had met before: the C-melody saxophone player Frankie Trumbauer. The two hit it off, both personally and musically, despite Trumbauer having been warned by other musicians: "Look out, he's trouble. He drinks and you'll have a hard time handling him." They were inseparable for much of the rest of Beiderbecke's career, with Trumbauer acting as a father figure to Beiderbecke. When Trumbauer organized a band for an extended run at the Arcadia Ballroom in St. Louis, Beiderbecke joined him. There he also played alongside the clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, who praised Beiderbecke's ability to drive the band. "He more or less made you play whether you wanted to or not," Russell said. "If you had any talent at all he made you play better."

GOLDKETTE

In the spring of 1926, Trumbauer closed up shop in St. Louis and, with Beiderbecke, moved to Detroit, this time to play with Goldkette's headline ensemble. They played the summer at Hudson Lake, a resort in northern Indiana, and split the next year between touring, recording, and performing at Detroit's Graystone Ballroom. In October 1926, Goldkette's "Famous Fourteen," as they came to be called, opened at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City opposite the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, one of the East Coast's outstanding African American big bands. The Roseland promoted a "Battle of the Bands" in the local press and, on October 12, after a night of furious playing, Goldkette's men were declared the winners. "We … were amazed, angry, morose, and bewildered," Rex Stewart, Fletcher's lead trumpeter, said of listening to Beiderbecke and his colleagues play. He called the experience "most humiliating."
Although the band recorded numerous sides for Victor during this period, none of them showcases Beiderbecke's most famous solos. Much of Goldkette's money was made through these records, but they were subject—as Eddie King had well understood—to the forces of the commercial market. As a result, their sound was often "sweeter" than what many of the hot jazz musicians would have preferred. In addition to their sessions with Goldkette, Beiderbecke and his friends recorded under their own names for the Okeh label. For instance, on February 4, 1927, Frank Trumbauer and His Orchestra recorded "Trumbology," "Clarinet Marmalade," and "Singin' the Blues," all three of which featured some of Beiderbecke's best work. Again with Trumbauer, Beiderbecke re-recorded Carmichael's "Riverboat Shuffle" in May and delivered two of his best known solos a few days later on "I'm Coming, Virginia" and "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans". Beiderbecke earned co-writing credit with Trumbauer on "For No Reason at All in C," recorded under the name Tram, Bix and Eddie (in their Three Piece Band). Beiderbecke switched between cornet and piano on that number, and then in September played only piano for his recording of "In A Mist." This was perhaps the most fruitful year of his short career.
Under financial pressure, Goldkette folded his premier band in September in New York. Paul Whiteman hoped to snatch up Goldkette's best musicians for his traveling orchestra, but Beiderbecke, Trumbauer, Murray, Rank, Eddie Lang, Joe Venuti, Chauncey Morehouse, and Frank Signorelli instead joined the bass saxophone player Adrian Rollini at the Club New Yorker. When that job ended sooner than expected, in October 1927, Beiderbecke and Trumbauer signed on with Whiteman. They joined his orchestra in Indianapolis on October 27.

WHITEMAN

The Paul Whiteman Orchestra was the most popular and highest paid band of the day. In spite of Whiteman's nickname, "The King of Jazz," his was not a jazz ensemble, but a popular music outfit that played bits of jazz and classical music according to the demands of its record-buying and concert-going audience. Whiteman was perhaps best known for having premiered George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in New York in 1924, and the orchestrator of that piece, Ferde Grofé, continued to be an important part of the band in 1928. At three hundred pounds, Whiteman was huge both physically and culturally—"a man flabby, virile, quick, coarse, untidy and sleek, with a hard core of shrewdness in an envelope of sentimentalism," according to a 1926 New Yorker profile. And many Beiderbecke partisans have turned Whiteman into a villain in the years since.
Benny Green, in particular, derided Whiteman for being a mere "mediocre vaudeville act," and suggesting that "today we only tolerate the horrors of Whiteman's recordings at all in the hope that here and there a Bixian fragment will redeem the mess." Richard Sudhalter has responded by suggesting that Beiderbecke saw Whiteman as an opportunity to pursue musical ambitions that did not stop at jazz:

Colleagues have testified that, far from feeling bound or stifled by the Whiteman orchestra, as Green and others have suggested, Bix often felt a sense of exhilaration. It was like attending a music school, learning and broadening: formal music, especially the synthesis of the American vernacular idiom with a more classical orientation, so much sought-after in the 1920s, were calling out to him.

The education that Beiderbecke did not receive from the University of Iowa, in other words, he sought through Whiteman. In the meantime, Beiderbecke played on four number-one records in 1928, all under the Whiteman name: "Together," "Ramona," "My Angel," and "Ol' Man River", which featured Bing Crosby on vocals. This accomplishment says less about the jazz excellence of these records than it does about the tastes of the largely white, record-buying public to which Whiteman (and Goldkette before him) catered.
For Beiderbecke, the downside of being with Whiteman was the relentless touring and recording schedule, exacerbated by Beiderbecke's alcoholism. On November 30, 1928, in Cleveland, Beiderbecke suffered what Lion terms "a severe nervous crisis" and Sudhalter and Evans suggest "was in all probability an acute attack of delirium tremens," presumably triggered by Beiderbecke's attempt to curb his alcohol intake. "He cracked up, that's all," trombonist Bill Rank said. "Just went to pieces; broke up a roomful of furniture in the hotel."
In February 1929, Beiderbecke returned home to Davenport to convalesce and was hailed by the local press as "the world's hottest cornetist." He then spent the summer with Whiteman's band in Hollywood in preparation for the shooting of a new talking picture, The King of Jazz. Production delays prevented any real work from being done on the film, leaving Beiderbecke and his pals plenty of time to drink heavily. By September, he was back in Davenport, where his parents helped him to seek treatment. He spent a month, from October 14 until November 18, at the Keeley Institute in Dwight, Illinois.
While he was away, Whiteman famously kept a chair empty in Beiderbecke's honor. But when he returned to New York at the end of January 1930, the renowned soloist did not rejoin Whiteman and performed only sparingly. On his last recording session, in New York, on September 15, 1930, Beiderbecke played on the original recording of Hoagy Carmichael's new song, "Georgia on My Mind", with Carmichael doing the vocal, Eddie Lang on guitar, Joe Venuti on violin, Jimmy Dorsey on clarinet and alto saxophone, Jack Teagarden on trombone, and Bud Freeman on tenor saxophone. The song would go on to become a jazz and popular music standard.
Two years earlier, Beiderbecke had influenced another Carmichael standard, "Star Dust". A Beiderbecke riff caught in Carmichael's head and became the tune's chorus. Bing Crosby, who sang with Whiteman, also cited Beiderbecke as an important influence. "Bix and all the rest would play and exchange ideas on the piano," he said.

With all the noise [of a New York pub] going on, I don't know how they heard themselves, but they did. I didn't contribute anything, but I listened and learned … I was now being influenced by these musicians, particularly horn men. I could hum and sing all of the jazz choruses from the recordings made by Bix, Phil Napoleon, and the rest.

Following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the once-booming music industry contracted and work became more difficult to find. For a while, Beiderbecke's only income came from a radio show booked by Whiteman, The Camel Pleasure Hour. However, during a live broadcast on October 8, 1930, Beiderbecke's seemingly limitless gift for improvisation finally failed him: "He stood up to take his solo, but his mind went blank and nothing happened," recalled a fellow musician, Frankie Cush. Whiteman finally let Beiderbecke go. The cornetist spent the rest of the year at home in Davenport and then, in February 1931, he returned to New York one last time. Hoagy Carmichael kept in touch, but Beiderbecke's Whiteman buddies were busy touring and recording.

DEATH

Beiderbecke died in his apartment, #1G, 43-30 46th Street, in Sunnyside, Queens, on Thursday, August 6, 1931. The week had been quite hot, making sleep difficult, and late into the evenings, Beiderbecke had played piano, both to the annoyance and the delight of his neighbors. On the evening of the sixth, at about nine-thirty, his rental agent, George Kraslow, heard noises coming from across the hallway. "His hysterical shouts brought me to his apartment on the run," Kraslow told Philip Evans in 1959.

He pulled me in and pointed to the bed. His whole body was trembling violently. He was screaming there were two Mexicans hiding under his bed with long daggers. To humor him, I looked under the bed and when I rose to assure him there was no one hiding there, he staggered and fell, a dead weight, in my arms. I ran across the hall and called in a woman doctor, Dr. Haberski, to examine him. She pronounced him dead.

Historians have disagreed over the identity of the doctor who pronounced Beiderbecke dead. The official cause of death, meanwhile, was lobar pneumonia, with scholars continuing to debate the extent to which his alcoholism was also a factor. Beiderbecke's mother and brother took the train to New York and brought his body home to Davenport. He was buried there on August 11 in the family plot at Oakdale Cemetery.

LEGEND AND LEGACY

When he died, Beiderbecke was little known except among fellow musicians, and for several years critics paid his music little mind. As Jean Pierre Lion has pointed out, "the only serious and analytical obituary to have been published in the months" after his death was by a Frenchman, Hugues Panassié. The notice appeared in October 1931 and began with a bit of hyperbole and an incorrect fact, two hallmarks of much of the subsequent writing about Beiderbecke: "The announcement of Bix Beiderbecke's death plunged all jazz musicians into despair. We first believed it was a false alarm, as we had heard so often before about Bix. Unfortunately, precise information has been forthcoming, and we even know the day—August 7—when he passed away."
The New Republic critic Otis Ferguson wrote two short articles for the magazine, "Young Man with a Horn" (July 29, 1936) and "Young Man with a Horn Again" (November 18, 1940), that worked to revive interest not only in Beiderbecke's music but also in his biography. Beiderbecke "lived very briefly … in what might be called the servants' entrance to art," Ferguson wrote. "His story is a good story, quite humble and right." The romantic notion of the doomed jazz genius can be traced back at least as far as Beiderbecke, and lived on in Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, and many more.
Ferguson's sense of what was "right" became the basis for the Beiderbecke Romantic legend, which has traditionally emphasized the musician's Iowa roots, his often careless dress, his difficulty sight reading, the purity of his tone, his drinking, and his early death. These themes were repeated by Beiderbecke's friends in various memoirs, including The Stardust Road (1946) and Sometimes I Wonder (1965) by Hoagy Carmichael, Really the Blues (1946) by Mezz Mezzrow, and We Called It Music (1947) by Eddie Condon. Beiderbecke was portrayed as a tragic genius along the lines of Ludwig van Beethoven, but without the high-culture pretensions. "For his talent there were no conservatories to get stuffy in, no high-trumpet didoes to be learned doggedly, note-perfect as written," Ferguson wrote, "because in his chosen form the only writing of any account was traced in the close shouting air of Royal Gardens, Grand Pavilions, honkeytonks, etc." He was "this big overgrown kid, who looked like he'd been snatched out of a cradle in the cornfields," Mezzrow wrote. "The guy didn't have an enemy in the world," recalled Beiderbecke's friend Russ Morgan, "but he was out of this world most of the time." According to Ralph Berton, he was "as usual gazing off into his private astronomy," but his cornet, Condon famously quipped, sounded "like a girl saying yes."
In 1938, Dorothy Baker borrowed the titles of her friend Otis Ferguson's two articles and published the novel Young Man with a Horn. Her story of the doomed trumpet player Rick Martin was inspired, she wrote, by "the music, but not the life" of Beiderbecke, but the image of Martin quickly became the image of Beiderbecke: His story is about "the gap between the man's musical ability and his ability to fit it to his own life." In 1950, Michael Curtiz directed the film Young Man with a Horn, starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day. In this version, in which Hoagy Carmichael also plays a role, the Rick Martin character lives.
In Blackboard Jungle, a 1955 film starring Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier, Beiderbecke's music is briefly featured, but as a symbol of cultural conservatism in a nation on the cusp of the rock and roll revolution. Still, the Beiderbecke of legend came to represent a certain kind of cool character that was omnipresent in 1950s popular culture: the alienated young white man rebelling against white culture and willing to engage black culture in pursuit of his art.
In 1971, on the fortieth anniversary of Beiderbecke's death, the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Festival was founded in Davenport, Iowa, to honor the musician. Three years later, Ralph Berton, whose brother Vic Berton played for a time with Beiderbecke in the Wolverines, published a memoir, Remembering Bix, in which he claimed that Beiderbecke had had a brief fling with another of Berton's brothers, Eugene. This has led to speculation that Beiderbecke was gay, accompanied by vehement denials. Also in 1974, Sudhalter and Evans published their biography, Bix: Man and Legend, which was nominated for a National Book Award. In 1977, the Beiderbecke childhood home at 1934 Grand Avenue in Davenport was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Beiderbecke's music was featured in three British comedy drama television series, all written by Alan Plater: The Beiderbecke Affair (1984), The Beiderbecke Tapes (1987), and The Beiderbecke Connection (1988). In 1991, the Italian director Pupi Avati released Bix: An Interpretation of a Legend. Filmed partially in the Beiderbecke home, which Avati had purchased and renovated, Bix was screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Beiderbecke's music continues to reside mostly out of the mainstream and some of the facts of his life are still debated, but scholars largely agree—due in part to the influence of Sudhalter and Evans—that he was an important innovator in early jazz; jazz cornetists, including Sudhalter (before his death in 2008), and Tom Pletcher, closely emulate his style. In 2003, to mark the hundredth anniversary of his birth, the Greater Astoria Historical Society and other community organizations, spearheaded by Paul Maringelli and The Bix Beiderbecke Sunnyside Memorial Committee, erected a plaque in Beiderbecke's honor at the apartment building in which he died in Queens. That same year, Frederick Turner published his novel 1929, which followed the facts of Beiderbecke's life fairly closely, focusing on his summer in Hollywood and featuring appearances by Al Capone and Clara Bow. The critic and musician Digby Fairweather sums up Beiderbecke's musical legacy, arguing that "with Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke was the most striking of jazz's cornet (and of course, trumpet) fathers; a player who first captivated his 1920s generation and after his premature death, founded a dynasty of distinguished followers beginning with Jimmy McPartland and moving on down from there."

MUSIC: STYLE AND INFLUENCE

Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong were among jazz's first soloists. In New Orleans, jazz had been ensemble playing, with the various instruments weaving their parts into a single and coherent aural tapestry. There had been soloists, to be sure, with the clarinetist Sidney Bechet the best known among them, but these players "lacked the technical resources and, even more, the creative depth to make the solo the compelling centerpiece of jazz music." That changed in 1924 when Beiderbecke and Armstrong began to make their most important records. According to the critic Terry Teachout, they are "the two most influential figures in the early history of jazz" and "the twin lines of descent from which most of today's jazz can be traced."
Beiderbecke's cornet style is often described by contrasting it with Armstrong's markedly different approach. Armstrong was a virtuoso on his instrument, and his solos often took advantage of that fact. Beiderbecke was largely, although not completely, self-taught, and the constraints imposed by that fact were evident in his music. While Armstrong often soared into the upper register, Beiderbecke stayed in the middle range, more interested in exploring the melody and harmonies than in dazzling the audience. Armstrong often emphasized the performance aspect of his playing, while Beiderbecke tended to stare at his feet while playing, uninterested in personally engaging his listeners. Armstrong was deeply influenced by the blues, while Beiderbecke was influenced as much by modernist composers such as Debussy and Ravel as by his fellow jazzmen.
Beiderbecke's most famous solo was on "Singin' the Blues," recorded February 4, 1927. It has been hailed as an important example of the "jazz ballad style"—"a slow or medium-tempo piece played gently and sweetly, but not cloyingly, with no loss of muscle." The tune's laid-back emotions hinted at what would become, in the 1950s, the cool jazz style, personified by Chet Baker and Bill Evans. More than that, though, "Singin' the Blues" has been noted for the way its improvisations feel less improvised than composed, with each phrase building on the last in a logical fashion. Benny Green describes the solo's effect on practiced ears:

When a musician hears Bix's solo on 'Singing the Blues', he becomes aware after two bars that the soloist knows exactly what he is doing and that he has an exquisite sense of discord and resolution. He knows also 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. The listening musician, whatever his generation or his style, recognizes Bix as a modern, modernism being not a style but an attitude.

Like Green, who made particular mention of Beiderbecke's "amount of teaching," the jazz historian Ted Gioia also has emphasized Beiderbecke's lack of formal instruction, suggesting that it caused him to adopt "an unusual, dry embouchure" and "unconventional fingerings," which he retained for the rest of his life. Gioia points to "a characteristic streak of obstinacy" in Beiderbecke that provokes "this chronic disregard of the tried-and-true." He argues that this stubbornness was behind Beiderbecke's decision not to switch from cornet to trumpet when many other musicians, including Armstrong, did so. In addition, Gioia highlights Beiderbecke's precise timing, relaxed delivery, and pure tone, which contrasted with "the dirty, rough-edged sound" of King Oliver and his protégé Armstrong, whose playing was often more energetic and whose style held more sway early in the 1920s than Beiderbecke's. Gioia further wonders whether the many hyperbolic and quasi-poetic descriptions of Beiderbecke’s style—most notably Condon's "like a girl saying yes"—may indicate that Beiderbecke's sound was muddled on recordings.
Eddie Condon, Hoagy Carmichael, and Mezz Mezzrow, all of whom hyperbolically raved about his playing, also saw Beiderbecke play live or performed alongside him. Condon, for instance, wrote of being amazed by Beiderbecke's piano playing: "All my life I had been listening to music … But I had never heard anything remotely like what Beiderbecke played. For the first time I realized music isn't all the same, it had become an entirely new set of sounds …" "I tried to explain Bix to the gang," Carmichael wrote, but "… [i]t was no good, like the telling of a vivid, personal dream … the emotion couldn't be transmitted."
Mezzrow described Beiderbecke's tone as being "pickled in alcohol … I have never heard a tone like he got before or since. He played mostly open horn, every note full, big, rich and round, standing out like a pearl, loud but never irritating or jangling, with a powerful drive that few white musicians had in those days."
Some critics have highlighted "Jazz Me Blues," recorded with the Wolverines on February 18, 1924, as being particularly important to understanding Beiderbecke's style. Although it was one of his earliest recordings, the hallmarks of his playing were evident. "The overall impression we get from this solo, as in all of Bix at his best," writes the trumpeter Randy Sandke, "is that every note is spontaneous yet inevitable." Richard Hadlock describes Beiderbecke's contribution to "Jazz Me Blues" as "an ordered solo that seems more inspired by clarinetists Larry Shields of the ODJB and Leon Roppolo of the NORK than by other trumpet players." He goes on to suggest that clarinetists, by virtue of their not being tied to the melody as much as cornetists and trumpet players, could explore harmonies.
"Jazz Me Blues" was also important because it introduced what has been called the "correlated chorus," a method of improvising that Beiderbecke's Davenport friend Esten Spurrier attributed to both Beiderbecke and Armstrong. "Louis departed greatly from all cornet players in his ability to compose a close-knit individual 32 measures with all phrases compatible with each other …," Spurrier told the biographers Sudhalter and Evans, "so Bix and I always credited Louis as being the father of the correlated chorus: play two measures, then two related, making four measures, on which you played another four measures related to the first four, and so on ad infinitum to the end of the chorus. So the secret was simple—a series of related phrases."
Beiderbecke's piano playing, meanwhile, can be considered on his recordings "Big Boy" (October 8, 1924), "For No Reason at All in C" (May 13, 1927), "Wringin' and Twistin'" (September 17, 1927)—all with ensembles—and his only solo recorded work, "In a Mist" (September 8, 1927). Critic Frank Murphy argues that many of the same characteristics that mark Beiderbecke on the cornet mark him on the keyboard: the uncharacteristic fingering, the emphasis on inventive harmonies, and the correlated choruses. Those inventive harmonies, on both cornet and piano, eventually helped point the way to bebop, which abandoned melody almost entirely.

Source: Wikipedia.

Biréli Lagrène "Foreign affairs" (1988)

Biréli Lagrène "Inferno" (1987)

Biréli Lagrène

Biréli Lagrène (born September 4, 1966) is a French guitarist and bassist. He came to prominence in the 1980s for his Django Reinhardt-influenced style on the classical guitar, as well as for being a jazz fusion virtuoso on the electric guitar. He often performs within the swing, jazz fusion and post bop mediums.

BIO

Biréli Lagrène was born on September 4, 1966, in Soufflenheim, Bas-Rhin Alsace, France, in a traditional Manouche-Romani people (Gypsy) family and community. He started playing the guitar at the age of four. He grew up in the loving but tough environment of the "tzigane". His father Fisso (a very gifted violinist), his mother Berga and his brother Gaiti were his biggest influences. When, at the age of eight, he covered Django Reinhardt’s repertoire, his relatives were already calling him a child prodigy. Winning a Romani music festival in Strasbourg at the age of twelve gave him the opportunity to tour in Germany and, later, to record his performance on the LP Routes To Django - live At The Krokodil.
Offered a chance to leave for the United States, Lagrène met some of the most distinguished jazz musicians on the international scene, such as Stéphane Grappelli, Benny Goodman, and Benny Carter. In 1984, he met Larry Coryell in New York. Later, he was introduced to bassist Jaco Pastorius and ventured with him into jazz fusion. Together, they toured Europe, which contributed a great deal to Lagrène’s musical emancipation. Lagrène has also performed live with guitarist Al Di Meola.
Back to a more traditional style, Lagrène recorded Gipsy Project and Gipsy Project and Friends in 2002. Along with his usual cohorts Diego Imbert (double bass) and Hono Winterstein (rhythm guitar), the latter session featured Henri Salvador and Thomas Dutronc (son of legendary French pop pair Françoise Hardy  and Jacques Dutronc).

Source: Wikipedia.

Billy Joel "The stranger" (1977)

Billy Joel

William Martin "Billy" Joel (born May 9, 1949) is an American musician and pianist, singer-songwriter, and classical composer. Since releasing his first hit song, "Piano Man", in 1973, Joel has become the sixth best-selling recording artist and the third best-selling solo artist in the United States, according to the RIAA.
Joel had Top 40 hits in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, achieving 33 Top 40 hits in the United States, all of which he wrote himself. He is also a six-time Grammy Award winner, a 23-time Grammy nominee and has sold over 150 million records worldwide. He was inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame (1992), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1999), the Long Island Music Hall of Fame (2006), and the Hit Parade Hall of Fame (2009). In 2008, Billboard magazine released a list of the Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists to celebrate the US singles chart's 50th anniversary, with Joel at No. 23. With the exception of the 2007 single "All My Life," Joel discontinued recording new material after 1993's River of Dreams but continues to tour.

EARLY LIFE

Joel was born in The Bronx and raised in Hicksville, New York. His father, Howard (born Helmuth), was born in Germany, the son of German merchant and manufacturer Karl Amson Joel who, after the advent of the Nazi regime, emigrated to Switzerland and later to the United States. Billy Joel's mother, Rosalind Nyman, was born in England to Philip and Rebecca Nyman. Both Joel's parents were Jewish. They divorced in 1960, and his father moved to Vienna, Austria. Billy has a sister, Judith Joel, and a half-brother, Alexander Joel, who is an acclaimed classical conductor in Europe, currently chief musical director of the Staatstheater Braunschweig.
Joel's father was an accomplished classical pianist. Billy reluctantly began piano lessons at an early age, at his mother's insistence; his teachers included the noted American pianist Morton Estrin and musician/songwriter Timothy Ford. His interest in music, rather than sports, was a source of teasing and bullying in his early years. (He has said in interviews that his piano instructor also taught ballet. Her name was Frances Neiman, and she was a Juilliard trained musician. She gave both classic piano and ballet lessons in the studio attached to the rear of her house, leading neighborhood bullies to mistakenly think he was learning to dance.) As a teenager, Joel took up boxing so that he would be able to defend himself. He boxed successfully on the amateur Golden Gloves circuit for a short time, winning twenty-two bouts, but abandoned the sport shortly after having his nose broken in his twenty-fourth boxing match.
Joel attended Hicksville High School, class of 1967. However, he did not graduate from Hicksville. Due to playing at a piano bar, he was one English credit short of the graduation requirement; he overslept on the day of an important exam, owing to his late-night musician's lifestyle. He left high school without a diploma to begin a career in music. "I told them, 'To hell with it. If I'm not going to Columbia University, I'm going to Columbia Records and you don't need a high school diploma over there'." Columbia did, in fact, become the label that eventually signed him. In 1992, he submitted essays to the school board and was awarded his diploma at Hicksville High's annual graduation ceremony—25 years after he had left.

EARLY CAREER

Upon seeing The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, Joel decided to pursue a full-time musical career, and set about finding a local Long Island band to join. Eventually he found the Echoes, a group that specialized in British Invasion covers. The Echoes became a popular New York attraction, which convinced him to leave high school to become a professional musician. He began playing for the Echoes when he was 14 years old.
Joel began playing recording sessions with the Echoes in 1965, when he was 16 years old. Joel played piano on several recordings produced by Shadow Morton, including (as claimed by Joel, but denied by songwriter Ellie Greenwich) the Shangri-Las' Leader of the Pack, as well as several records released through Kama Sutra Productions. During this time, the Echoes started to play numerous late-night shows.
Later, in 1965, the Echoes changed their name to the Emeralds and then to the Lost Souls. For two years, Joel played sessions and performed with the Lost Souls. In 1967, he left that band to join the Hassles, a Long Island band that had signed a contract with United Artists Records. Over the next year and a half, they released The Hassles in 1967, Hour of the Wolf in 1968, and four singles, all of which failed commercially. Following The Hassles' demise in 1969, he formed the duo Attila with Hassles drummer Jon Small. Attila released their eponymous debut album in July 1970, and disbanded the following October. The reason for the group's break-up has been attributed to Joel's affair with Small's wife, Elizabeth, whom Joel eventually married.

COLD SPRING HARBOR

Joel signed his first solo record contract with Artie Ripp's Family Productions, and subsequently recorded his first solo album. Cold Spring Harbor (a reference to the Long Island town of the same name), was released in 1971. However, Ripp mastered and released the album at the wrong speed, resulting in Joel's voice sounding a semitone too high. In addition, the onerous terms of Ripp's Family Productions contract also guaranteed Joel very little money from the sales of his albums.
Popular cuts such as "She's Got a Way" and "Everybody Loves You Now" were originally released on this album, although they did not gain much attention until released as live performances in 1981 on Songs in the Attic. Since then, they have become favorite concert numbers. Cold Spring Harbor gained a second chance on the charts in 1984, when Columbia reissued the album after slowing it down to the correct speed. The album reached #158 in the US and #95 in the UK nearly a year later.
Joel gigged locally in New York City in the fall of 1971 and moved out to Los Angeles early in 1972, adopting the stage name Bill Martin. While in California he did a six month gig in The Executive Room piano bar on Wilshire Boulevard. It was there he composed his signature hit "Piano Man" about the various patrons of the lounge. Subsequently he toured with his band members (Rhys Clark on drums, Al Hertzberg on guitar, and Larry Russell on bass) until the end of June 1972 throughout the US and Puerto Rico, opening for headliners such as J. Geils Band, The Beach Boys and Taj Mahal. At the Mar y sol festival in Puerto Rico, he electrified the crowd and got a big boost for his career.
In addition Philadelphia radio station WMMR-FM started playing a tape of a new song of Joel's, "Captain Jack", taken from a live concert. It became an underground hit on the East Coast. Herb Gordon, an executive of Columbia Records, heard Joel's music and made his company aware of Joel's talent. Joel signed a recording contract with Columbia in 1972 and moved to Los Angeles. He lived there for three years (and has since declared that those three years were a big mistake), returning to New York City in 1975.

EARLY COLUMBIA YEARS: 1973-76

Joel's experiences in Los Angeles connected him with record company executives, who bought out his contract with Ripp under the condition that the Family Productions logo be displayed alongside the Columbia logo for the next ten albums. There was a stipulation that Family Productions would receive a 25-cent royalty for every album Joel sold. The stand-out track for Piano Man was the title track, which, despite only making it to #25 on the Billboard Hot 100, stands as Joel's signature song (he ends nearly all of his concerts with it).
The touring band changed as well in 1973. Don Evans replaced Al Hertzberg on guitar, and Patrick McDonald took over the bass position previously held by Larry Russell, and was then replaced in late 1974 by Doug Stegmeyer, who remained with Billy until 1989. Rhys Clark returned as drummer, Tom Whitehorse on banjo and pedal steel and then Johnny Almond on sax and keyboards rounded out the band. Billy's infectious spirit and talent galvanized the band into a tight performing unit, touring the U.S. and Canada extensively and appearing on the popular music shows of the day. Joel's songwriting was now attracting more attention; Helen Reddy recorded "You're My Home" (from Piano Man) in 1974.
Joel remained in Los Angeles to write Streetlife Serenade, his second album on the Columbia label. It was around this time that Jon Troy, an old friend from the New York neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, acted as Joel's manager although he would soon be replaced by Joel's wife Elizabeth. References to both suburbia and the inner city pepper the album.
The stand-out track on the album is "The Entertainer", a #34 hit in the U.S. which picks up thematically where "Piano Man" left off. Joel was upset that "Piano Man" had been significantly edited down to make it more radio-friendly, and in "The Entertainer," he refers to the edit with sarcastic lines such as "If you're gonna have a hit, you gotta make it fit, so they cut it down to 3:05", alluding to shortening of singles for radio play, as compared with the longer versions that appear on albums. Although Streetlife Serenade is often considered one of Joel's weaker albums (Joel has confirmed his distaste for the album), it nevertheless contains some notable tracks, including the title track, "Los Angelenos" and the instrumental "Root Beer Rag", which was a staple of his live set in the '70s and was resurrected frequently in 2007 and 2008. Streetlife Serenade also marks the beginning of a more confident vocal style on Joel's part.
In late 1975, he played piano and organ on several tracks on Bo Diddley's The 20th Anniversary of Rock 'n' Roll all-star album.
Disenchanted with the L.A. music scene, Joel returned to New York in 1976. There he recorded Turnstiles, for which he used his own hand-picked musicians in the studio for the first time, and also adopted a more hands-on role. Songs were initially recorded at Caribou Ranch with members of Elton John's band, and produced by famed Chicago producer James William Guercio, but Joel was dissatisfied with the results. The songs were re-recorded in New York, and Joel took over, producing the album himself.
The minor hit "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" echoed the Phil Spector sound, and was covered by Ronnie Spector (in a 2008 radio interview, Joel said he does not perform "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" in his live shows anymore because it is in too high a key and "shreds" his vocal cords.) The album also featured the song "New York State of Mind", a bluesy, jazzy epic that has become one of Joel's signature songs, and which was later covered by fellow Columbia labelmates Barbra Streisand, on her 1977 Streisand Superman album, and as a duet with Tony Bennett, on his 2001 Playing with My Friends: Bennett Sings the Blues album. Other songs on the album include "Summer, Highland Falls", "Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)" and "Say Goodbye to Hollywood", which became a Top 40 hit in 1981 in a live version. Songs such as the powerful "Prelude/Angry Young Man" has become a mainstay of his concerts.

THE STRANGER AND 52nd STREET

For The Stranger, Columbia Records teamed Joel with producer Phil Ramone. The album yielded four Top-25 hits on the Billboard charts in the US: "Just the Way You Are" (#3), "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)" (#17), "Only the Good Die Young" (#24), and "She's Always a Woman" (#17). Album sales exceeded Columbia's previous top-selling album, Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water, and was certified multi-platinum. His first-ever Top Ten album, it reached #2 on the charts. Ramone subsequently produced every Billy Joel studio release up to Storm Front, initially released in 1989. This album also featured "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant", an album-oriented rock classic, which has become one of his best-known songs.
The Stranger netted Joel Grammy nominations for Record of the Year and Song of the Year, for "Just the Way You Are", which was written as a gift to his wife Elizabeth. He received a late night phone call to his hotel room in Paris (he was on tour) in February 1979, letting him know he had won in both categories.
Joel faced high expectations on his next album. 52nd Street was conceived as a day in Manhattan, and was named after the famous street of same name which hosted many of the world's premier jazz venues and performers throughout the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Fans purchased over seven million copies on the strength of the hits "My Life" (#3), "Big Shot" (#14), and "Honesty" (#24). This helped 52nd Street become Joel's first #1 album. "My Life" eventually became the theme song for a new US television sitcom, Bosom Buddies, which featured actor Tom Hanks in one of his earliest roles. The album won Grammys for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male and Album of the Year. 52nd Street was the first album to be released on compact disc when it went on sale alongside Sony's CD player CDP-101 on October 1, 1982, in Japan.
Despite the publicity photos and album cover showing Joel holding a trumpet, he does not play the instrument on the album, though two tracks on the album do feature some well-known jazz trumpeters. Freddie Hubbard plays two solos on "Zanzibar" and Jon Faddis joins Michael Brecker and Randy Brecker in the horn section for "Half a Mile Away".
In 1979, Joel travelled to Havana, Cuba, to participate in the historic Havana Jam festival that took place between March 2–4, alongside Rita Coolidge, Kris Kristofferson; Stephen Stills, the CBS Jazz All-Stars, the Trio of Doom, Fania All-Stars, Billy Swan, Bonnie Bramlett, Mike Finnegan, Weather Report, plus an array of Cuban artists such as Irakere, Pacho Alonso, Tata Güines and Orquesta Aragón. His performance is captured on Ernesto Juan Castellanos's documentary Havana Jam '79.

EARLY 1980s

The success of his piano-driven ballads like "Just the Way You Are," "She's Always a Woman" and "Honesty" never sat well with Joel, as many critics were quick to slap the "balladeer" tag on him. With Glass Houses, he attacked the new wave popularity with aplomb and delivered several harder-edged songs custom made for the live shows in arenas and stadiums he was by then playing almost exclusively. The front cover consisted of Joel's real-life modern glass house. The album spent 6 weeks at #1 on the Billboard chart and yielded such hits as "You May Be Right" (used as the theme song, covered by Southside Johnny, for the CBS mid-90s sitcom Dave's World) (#7, May 1980), "Close To The Borderline" (B-side of the "You May Be Right" single), "Don't Ask Me Why" (#19, September 1980), "Sometimes a Fantasy" (#36, November 1980) and "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me", which became Joel's first Billboard #1 song (for two weeks) in July 1980. "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me" spent 11 weeks in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 and was the 7th biggest hit of 1980 according to American Top 40. Glass Houses won the Grammy for Best Rock Vocal Performance, Male. It would also win the American Music Award for Favorite Album, Pop/Rock category. The album's closing song, "Through The Long Night", (B-side of the "It's Still Rock & Roll to Me" single) was a lullaby that featured Joel harmonizing with himself in a song he says was inspired by The Beatles' "Yes It Is."
His next release, Songs in the Attic, was composed of live performances of less well-known songs from the beginning of his career. It was recorded during larger US arenas and intimate night club shows in June and July 1980. This release introduced many fans, who discovered Joel when The Stranger became a smash in 1977, to many of his earlier compositions. The album reached #8 on the Billboard chart and produced two hit singles: "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" (#17), and "She's Got a Way" (#23). It sold over 3 million copies. Though not as successful as some of his previous albums, the album was still considered a success by Joel.
The next wave of Joel's career commenced with the recording of The Nylon Curtain. Considered his most audacious and ambitious album by many critics, and cited by Joel himself to the present day as his favorite of his works, Joel took more than a page or two from the Lennon/McCartney songwriting style on this heavily Beatles-influenced album.
Work began on The Nylon Curtain in the fall of 1981. Joel was sidelined when he was involved in a serious motorcycle accident on Long Island on April 15, 1982, which delayed the completion of the album a few weeks. Joel embarked on a brief tour in support of the album, during which his first video special, Live from Long Island, was recorded at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale, New York on December 30, 1982. It was originally broadcast on HBO before it became available on VHS.
The Nylon Curtain went to #7 on the charts, partially due to heavy airplay on MTV for the videos to the singles "Allentown" and "Pressure". "Allentown" spent six weeks at a peak position of #17 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it one of the most-played radio songs of 1982, pushing it into 1983's year-end Top 70, and making it the most successful song from The Nylon Curtain album, besting "Pressure". which peaked at #20 (where it resided for three weeks) and "Goodnight Saigon" which reached #56 on U.S. charts.

CHRISTIE BRINKLEY, AN INNOCENT MAN AND THE BRIDGE

The song "Uptown Girl" was one of the first songs written when Joel returned from vacation. Many believe that "Uptown Girl" was about supermodel Christie Brinkley, whom he started dating during the song's creation (the music video also included Brinkley). However, Michael Heatley and Frank Hopkinson in their book, The Girl In The Song, speculate that it was actually about model Elle Macpherson, his future missus Christie, and a then-unknown model/singer named Whitney Houston, who were staying at the same hotel as he. On November 16, 2010, during an interview on the Howard Stern Show on Sirius Radio, Billy Joel stated that the song was originally called "Uptown Girls" and that he had started to write the melody of the song around the same time he was dating Macpherson. Joel said when he started to write the lyrics, the song was only about Brinkley, "...rather than it be about all these different girls, she (Brinkley) became the "Uptown Girl" and I started writing about one person...so they (Heatley/Hopkinson) got the story wrong." The song became a worldwide hit upon its release, #3 in the U.S. and Joel's sole #1 in the United Kingdom.
The resulting album, An Innocent Man, was compiled as a tribute to the rock and roll music of the 1950s and 1960s, and also resulted in Joel's second Billboard #1 hit, "Tell Her About It", which was the first single off the album in the summer of 1983. The album itself reached #4 on the charts and #2 in UK. It also boasted 6 top-30 singles, the most of any album in Joel's catalog. At the time the album came out that summer, WCBS-FM began playing "The Longest Time" both in regular rotation and on the Doo Wop Shop. Many fans wanted this to be the next single released in the fall, but that October, "Uptown Girl" would be released, peaking at #3 and ranking at #20 on Billboard's 1983 Hot 100 year-end chart. Also, the James Brown-inspired song "Easy Money" would be featured in the 1983 Rodney Dangerfield film of the same name.
In December the title song, "An Innocent Man", would be released as a single and would peak at #10 in the U.S. and #8 in the UK, early in 1984. That March, "The Longest Time" would finally be released as a single, peaking at #14 on the Hot 100 and #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart. That summer, "Leave a Tender Moment Alone" would be released and hit #27 while "Keeping the Faith" would peak at #18 in January 1985. In the video for "Keeping the Faith", Christie Brinkley also plays the "redhead girl in a Chevrolet". An Innocent Man was also nominated for the Album of the Year Grammy, but lost to Michael Jackson's Thriller.
Joel would participate in the USA For Africa We Are The World project in 1985, capping off a series of successful singles for Joel.
Following the success of An Innocent Man, Joel had been approached to release an album of his most successful singles. This was not the first time this topic had come up, but Joel had initially considered "Greatest Hits" albums as marking the end of one's career. This time, he agreed, and Greatest Hits Vol. 1 and 2 was released as a 4-sided album and 2-CD set, with the songs in sequence of when they were released. The new songs "You're Only Human (Second Wind)" and "The Night Is Still Young" were recorded and released as singles to support the album; both reached the top 40, peaking at #9 and #34, respectively.
Greatest Hits was highly successful and has since been certified double diamond by the RIAA for over 10.5 million copies (21 million units) sold. To date it is the sixth best selling album in American music history according to the RIAA.
Coinciding with the Greatest Hits album release, Joel released a 2-volume Video Album that was a compilation of the promotional videos he had recorded from 1977 to the present time. Along with videos for the new singles off the Greatest Hits album, Joel also recorded a video for his first hit, "Piano Man", for this project.
Though it broke into the Top Ten, The Bridge was not a success in relation to some of Joel's other albums, but it yielded the hits "A Matter of Trust" and "Modern Woman" from the film Ruthless People, a dark comedy from the directors of Airplane! (both #10). In a departure from his "piano man" persona, Joel is shown in its video playing a Les Paul-autographed Gibson guitar. The ballad "This is the Time" also charted, peaking at #18, and has been a favorite on the prom circuit ever since. The reason "Modern Woman" has been left off many of Joel's compilation sets (the exception appears to be My Lives) is that he has since said in interviews he does not care for the song.
On November 18, 1986, an extended version of the song "Big Man On Mulberry Street" was used on a Season 3 episode of Moonlighting. The episode itself was also titled "Big Man on Mulberry Street." In a dream sequence, Maddie Hayes envisions David Addison with his ex-wife. An extra horn solo was added to the song. The Bridge was also Joel's last album to carry the Family Productions logo, finally severing his ties with Artie Ripp. Joel has also stated in many interviews, most recently in a 2008 interview in Performing Songwriter magazine, that he does not think The Bridge is a good album.
Shortly after The Bridge tour ended in late 1987, Joel completed voice work on Disney's Oliver & Company, released in 1988, a loose adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist. Joel brought both his acting and musical talents to the film as Dodger. For the film, Joel recorded a song titled "Why Should I Worry?" Critics were generally positive toward the film, and pointed to Joel's acting contribution as one of its highlights, despite it being his first acting job. In interviews, Joel explained that he took the job due to his love of Disney cartoons as a child.

THE RUSSIA TRIP
n October 1986, Joel and his handlers started planning a trip to the Soviet Union. He would be one of the first American rock acts to play there since the Berlin Wall went up, a fact not lost on history buff Joel. There would be live performances at indoor arenas in Moscow, Leningrad and Tbilisi. Joel and his family (including young daughter Alexa) and his full touring band made the trip in August 1987. The entourage was filmed for television and video to eventually offset the cost of the trip, and the concerts were simulcast on radio around the world.
Most of that audience took a long while to warm up to Joel's energetic show, something that never had happened in other countries he had performed in. According to Joel, each time the fans were hit with the bright lights, anybody who seemed to be enjoying themselves froze. In addition, people who were "overreacting" were removed by security.
The album КОНЦЕРТ (Russian for "Concert") was released in October 1987. Singer Peter Hewlitt was brought in to hit the high notes on his most vocally challenging songs, like "An Innocent Man." Joel also did versions of The Beatles' classic "Back in the U.S.S.R." and Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin'". It has been estimated that Joel lost more than $1 million of his own money on the trip and concerts, but he has said the goodwill he was shown there was well worth it.

STORM FRONT AND RIVER OF DREAMS

The release of the album Storm Front coincided with major changes in Joel's career and inaugurated a period of serious upheaval in his business affairs. In August 1989, just before the album was released, Joel fired his manager (and former brother-in-law) Frank Weber after an audit revealed major discrepancies in Weber's accounting. Joel subsequently sued Weber for $90 million, claiming fraud and breach of fiduciary duty and in January 1990 he was awarded $2 million in a partial judgement against Weber; in April, the court dismissed a $30 million countersuit filed by Weber.
The first single for the album "We Didn't Start the Fire", was released in September 1989 and it became Joel's third and most recent US #1 hit, spending two weeks at the top; it was also Billboard's second-last #1 single of the 1980s. Storm Front was released in October, and it eventually became Joel's first #1 album since Glass Houses, nine years earlier. Storm Front was Joel's first album since Turnstiles to be recorded without Phil Ramone as producer. For this album, he wanted a new sound, and worked with Mick Jones of Foreigner fame. Joel also revamped his backing band, firing everyone, save drummer Liberty DeVitto, guitarist David Brown, and saxophone player Mark Rivera, and bringing in new faces, including talented multi-instrumentalist Crystal Taliefero. Storm Front's second single, "I Go to Extremes" made it to #6 in early 1990. The album was also notable for its song "Leningrad", written after Joel met a clown in the Soviet city of that name during his tour in 1987, and "The Downeaster Alexa", written to underscore the plight of fishermen on Long Island who are barely able to make ends meet. Another well-known single from the album is the ballad "And So It Goes" (#37 in late 1990). The song was originally written in 1983, around the time Joel was writing songs for An Innocent Man; but "And So It Goes" did not fit that album's retro theme, so it was held back until Storm Front. Joel said in a 1996 Masterclass session in Pittsburgh that Storm Front was a turbulent album and that "And So It Goes," as the last song on the album, portrayed the calm and tranquility that often follows a violent thunderstorm.
In the summer of 1992, Joel filed another $90 million lawsuit against his former lawyer Allen Grubman, alleging a wide range of offenses including fraud, breach of fiduciary responsibility, malpractice and breach of contract but the case was eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.
Joel started work on River of Dreams in 1992 and finished the album in early 1993. Its cover art was a colorful painting by Christie Brinkley that was a series of scenes from each of the songs on the album. The eponymous first single was the last top 10 hit Joel has penned to date, reaching #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 & ranking at #21 on Billboard's 1993 year-end Hot 100 chart. In addition to the title track, the album includes the hits "All About Soul" (with Color Me Badd on backing vocals) and "Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)", written for his daughter, Alexa. A radio remix version of "All About Soul" can be found on The Essential Billy Joel (2001), and a demo version appears on My Lives (2005). The song "The Great Wall of China" was written about his ex-manager Frank Weber and was a regular in the setlist for Joel's 2006 tour. "2000 Years" was prominent in the millennium concert at Madison Square Garden, December 31, 1999, and "Famous Last Words" closed the book on Joel's pop songwriting for more than a decade.

1994-2007

On August 25, 1994, Joel and second wife Christie Brinkley divorced. On December 31, 1999, Joel performed at New York's Madison Square Garden. At the time, Joel said that it would be his last concert. The concert (dubbed The Night of the 2000 Years) ran for close to four hours and was later released as 2000 Years: The Millennium Concert.
1997's "To Make You Feel My Love" and "Hey Girl" both charted from Joel's Greatest Hits Volume III album. Joel wrote and recorded the song "Shameless" that was later covered by Garth Brooks and reached number 1 on Billboard's country charts. Joel performed with Brooks during his Central Park concert in 1997 with an estimated 980,000 people in attendance, the largest audience to attend a U.S. concert.
In 2001, Joel released Fantasies & Delusions, a collection of classical piano pieces. All were composed by Joel and performed by Richard Joo. Joel often uses bits of these songs as interludes in live performances, and some of them are part of the score for the hit show Movin' Out. The album topped the classical charts at #1. Joel performed "New York State of Mind" live on September 21, 2001, as part of the America: A Tribute to Heroes benefit concert, and on October 20, 2001, along with "Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)", at the Concert for New York City in Madison Square Garden. That night, he also performed "Your Song" with Elton John.
In 2005, Columbia released a box set, My Lives, which is largely a compilation of demos, b-sides, live/alternate versions and even a few Top 40 hits. The compilation also includes the Umixit software, in which people can remix "Zanzibar", "Only the Good Die Young", "Keepin' The Faith", and live versions of "I Go to Extremes" and "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)" with their PC. Also, a DVD of a show from the River of Dreams tour is included.
On January 7, 2006, Joel began a tour across the United States. Having not written, or at least released, any new songs in 13 years, he featured a sampling of songs from throughout his career, including major hits as well as obscure tunes like "Zanzibar" and "All for Leyna". His tour included an unprecedented 12 sold-out concerts over several months at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The singer's stint of 12 shows at Madison Square Garden broke a previous record set by New Jersey native Bruce Springsteen, who played 10 sold-out shows at the same arena. The record earned Joel the first retired number (12) in the arena owned by a non-athlete. This honor has also been given to Joel at the Wells Fargo Center (Philadelphia) (formerly the Wachovia Center) in Philadelphia where a banner in the colors of the Philadelphia Flyers is hung honoring Joel's 46 Philadelphia sold-out shows. He also had a banner raised in his honor for being the highest grossing act in the history of the Times Union Center (formerly the Knickerbocker Arena and Pepsi Arena) in Albany, New York. This honor was given to him as part of the April 17, 2007, show he did there. On June 13, 2006, Columbia released 12 Gardens Live, a double album containing 32 live recordings from a collection of the 12 different shows at Madison Square Garden during Joel's 2006 tour.
Joel visited the United Kingdom and Ireland for the first time in many years as part of the European leg of his 2006 tour. On July 31, 2006, he performed a free concert in Rome, with the Colosseum as the backdrop. Organizers estimated 500,000 people turned out for the concert, which was opened by Bryan Adams.
Joel toured South Africa, Australia, Japan, and Hawaii in late 2006, and subsequently toured the Southeastern United States in February and March 2007 before hitting the Midwest in the spring of 2007. On January 3 of that year, news was leaked to the New York Post that Billy had recorded a new song with lyrics—this being the first new song with lyrics he'd written in almost 14 years. The song, titled "All My Life", was Joel's newest single (with second track "You're My Home", live from Madison Square Garden 2006 tour) and was released into stores on February 27, 2007. On February 4, Joel sang the national anthem for Super Bowl XLI, becoming the first to sing the national anthem twice at a Super Bowl. and on April 17, 2007, Joel was honored in Albany, New York, for his ninth concert at the Times Union Center. He is now holding the highest box office attendance of any artist to play at the arena. A banner was raised in his honor marking this achievement.
On December 1, 2007, Joel premiered his new song "Christmas in Fallujah." The song was performed by Cass Dillon, a new Long Island based musician, as Joel felt it should be sung by someone in a soldier's age range. The track was dedicated to servicemen based in Iraq. Joel wrote it in September 2007 after reading numerous letters sent to him from American soldiers in Iraq. "Christmas in Fallujah" is only the second pop/rock song released by Joel since 1993's River of Dreams. Proceeds from the song benefitted the Homes For Our Troops foundation.

2008-PRESENT

On January 26, 2008, Joel performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra celebrating the 151st anniversary of the Academy of Music. Joel premiered his new classical piece titled, "Waltz No. 2 (Steinway Hall)". He also played many of his less well-known pieces with full orchestral backing, including the rarely performed Nylon Curtain songs "Scandinavian Skies" and "Where's the Orchestra?".
On March 10, 2008, Joel inducted his friend John Mellencamp into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in a ceremony at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. During his induction speech, Joel said:

“

Don’t let this club membership change you, John. Stay ornery, stay mean. We need you to be pissed off, and restless, because no matter what they tell us—we know, this country is going to hell in a handcart. This country’s been hijacked. You know it and I know it. People are worried. People are scared, and people are angry. People need to hear a voice like yours that’s out there to echo the discontent that’s out there in the heartland. They need to hear stories about it. [Audience applauds] They need to hear stories about frustration, alienation and desperation. They need to know that somewhere out there somebody feels the way that they do, in the small towns and in the big cities. They need to hear it. And it doesn’t matter if they hear it on a jukebox, in the local gin mill, or in a goddamn truck commercial, because they ain’t gonna hear it on the radio anymore. They don’t care how they hear it, as long as they hear it good and loud and clear the way you’ve always been saying it all along. You’re right, John, this is still our country.

”

Joel's staying power as a touring act continues to the present day. He sold out 10 concerts at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, Connecticut from May to July 2008. Mohegan Sun honored him with a banner displaying his name and the number 10 to hang in the arena. On June 19, 2008, he played a concert at the grand re-opening of Caesars Windsor (formerly Casino Windsor) in Windsor, Ontario, Canada to an invite-only crowd for Casino VIPs. His mood was light, and joke-filled, even introducing himself as "Billy Joel's dad" and stating "you guys overpaid to see a fat bald guy." He also admitted that Canadian folk-pop musician Gordon Lightfoot was the musical inspiration for "She's Always A Woman".
On July 16, 2008, and July 18, 2008, Joel played the final concerts at Shea Stadium before its demolition. His guests included Tony Bennett, Don Henley, John Mayer, John Mellencamp, Steven Tyler, Roger Daltrey, Garth Brooks, and Paul McCartney. McCartney ended the show with a reference to his own performance there with the Beatles in 1965, the first major stadium concert of the rock and roll industry. The concerts were featured in the 2010 documentary film Last Play at Shea. The film was released on DVD on February 8, 2011. The CD from the show was released on March 8, 2011.
On December 11, 2008, Joel recorded his own rendition of "Christmas in Fallujah" during a concert at Acer Arena in Sydney and released it as a live single in Australia only. It is the only official release of Joel performing "Christmas in Fallujah", as Cass Dillon sang on the 2007 studio recording and the handful of times the song was played live in 2007. Joel sang the song throughout his December 2008 tour of Australia.
On May 19, 2009, Joel's former drummer, Liberty DeVitto, filed a lawsuit in NYC claiming Joel and Sony Music owed DeVitto over 10 years of royalty payments. DeVitto has never been given songwriting credit on any of Joel's songs, but he claims that he helped write some of them. In April 2010, it was announced that Joel and DeVitto amicably resolved the lawsuit.

2011 RE-RELEASES
2011 marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Joel's first album, Cold Spring Harbor. According to Billy Joel's website, in commemoration of this anniversary, "Columbia/Legacy Recordings will celebrate the occasion with a definitive reissue project of newly restored and expanded Legacy editions of the complete Billy Joel catalog, newly curated collections of rarities from the vaults, previously unavailable studio tracks and live performances, home video releases and more." The album Piano Man was re-released in a 2-disc Legacy edition in November 2011.

FACE-TO-FACE TOURS
Beginning in 1994, Joel toured extensively with Elton John on a series of "Face to Face" tours, making them the longest running and most successful concert tandem in pop music history. During these shows, the two have played their own songs, each other's songs and performed duets. They grossed over US $46 million in just 24 dates in their sold out 2003 tour. Joel and John resumed the Face to Face tour in March 2009 and it ended again, at least for the time being, in March 2010. In February 2010, Joel denied rumors in the trade press that he canceled a summer 2010 leg of the tour, claiming there were never any dates booked and that he intended to take the year off. Joel told Rolling Stone magazine: "We’ll probably pick it up again. It’s always fun playing with him."

OTHER VENTURES

In 1996, Joel merged his long-held love of boating with his desire for a second career. He formed, with Long Island boating businessman Peter Needham, the Long Island Boat Company.
In November 2010, Joel opened a shop on Oyster Bay, Long Island to manufacture custom-made, retro-styled motorcycles and accessories.
In 2011, Joel announced that he was releasing an autobiography that he had written with Fred Schruers, titled The Book of Joel: A Memoir. The book was originally going to be released in June 2011, but in March 2011 Joel decided against publishing the book and officially cancelled his deal with HarperCollins. Rolling Stone noted, "HarperCollins acquired the book project for $3 million in 2008. [However,] Joel is expected to return his advance on that sum to the publisher." According to Billboard, "the HarperCollins book was billed as an 'emotional ride' that would detail the music legend's failed marriage to Christie Brinkley, as well as his battles with substance abuse." In explaining his decision to cancel the book's release, Joel stated, "It took working on writing a book to make me realize that I'm not all that interested in talking about the past, and that the best expression of my life and its ups and downs has been and remains my music."

MARRIAGES, RELATIONSHIPS AND FAMILY

Joel married his business manager, Elizabeth Weber Small, on September 5, 1973. She was the former wife of his music partner, Jon Small, in the short-lived duo Attila. They divorced on July 20, 1982.
Joel mentioned in a television interview on the UK's Channel Five that he had dated Elle Macpherson in the 1980s prior to his marriage to Christie Brinkley. Joel has also said that the songs "This Night" and "And So It Goes" were written about his relationship with Macpherson.
Joel married Christie Brinkley on March 23, 1985. Their daughter, Alexa Ray Joel, was born December 29, 1985. Alexa was given the middle name of Ray after Ray Charles, one of Joel's musical idols. Joel and Brinkley divorced on August 25, 1994, although the couple remain friendly.
On October 2, 2004, Joel married 23-year-old Katie Lee. At the time of the wedding, Joel was 55. Joel's daughter, Alexa Ray, then 18, served as maid-of-honor. Joel's second wife, Christie Brinkley, attended the union and gave the couple her blessing. Lee works as a restaurant correspondent for the PBS show, George Hirsch: Living it Up!. In 2006, Katie Lee hosted Bravo's Top Chef. She did not return for a second season, instead going on tour with her husband. She then began writing a weekly column in Hamptons magazine, and became a field correspondent for the entertainment television show Extra. On June 17, 2009, both confirmed that they have split after five years of marriage.

DEPRESSION
Joel battled depression for many years. In 1970, a career downturn and personal problems aggravated his condition. He left a suicide note (which inspired the lyrics to "Tomorrow Is Today") and attempted to commit suicide by drinking furniture polish, saying later, "I drank furniture polish. It looked tastier than bleach." His drummer, Jon Small, rushed him to the hospital. Joel checked into Meadowbrook Hospital, where he was put on suicide watch and received treatment for depression. Joel later recorded "You're Only Human (Second Wind)" as a message to help prevent teen suicide.

SUBSTANCE ABUSE TREATMENT
In 2002, Joel entered Silver Hill Hospital, a substance abuse and psychiatric center in New Canaan, Connecticut. In March 2005, he checked into the Betty Ford Center, where he spent 30 days for the treatment of alcohol-related problems.

POLITICS
Although Joel has donated money to Democratic candidates running for office, he has never publicly endorsed any candidate or made clear his political affiliation—although he did play a benefit with Bruce Springsteen to raise money for Barack Obama's presidential campaign in 2008. He has also played at benefit concerts (like the first Live Aid concert in 1985) that have helped raise funds for political causes. However, Joel has said about musicians endorsing political candidates, "People who pay for your tickets, I don't think they want to hear who you're going to vote for and how you think they should vote."

RELIGION

Joel was born to non-observant Jewish parents and considers himself a cultural Jew.

“

My parents were both from Jewish families. I was not brought up Jewish in any religious way. My circumcision was as Jewish as they got. I used to go to Roman Catholic church with my friends, and when I was 11, I got baptized in a Church of Christ in Hicksville. I’m a cultural Jew. I like the Lower East Side humor, the food. I think the Yiddish language is terrifically expressive. Does that make me a complete Jew or a partial Jew? I’m not really sure.

”

During a 2011 interview on The Howard Stern Show, Joel referred to himself as an atheist.

AWARDS AND ACHIEVEMENTS

Despite having never graduated from high school because of a missed exam, Joel has been presented with multiple honorary doctorates:

• Doctor of Humane Letters from Fairfield University (1991)
• Doctor of Music from Berklee College of Music (1993)
• Doctor of Humane Letters from Hofstra University (1997)
• Doctor of Music from Southampton College (2000)
• Doctor of Fine Arts from Syracuse University (2006)
• Doctor of Musical Arts from the Manhattan School of Music (2008)

His high school diploma was finally awarded 25 years after he left high school by the school board.
Joel was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio in 1999. Joel was on the site selection committee for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame board. Seven members of the committee voted for San Francisco and seven voted for Cleveland, Ohio, this was a tied vote so Billy Joel was the tie breaking vote, which gave Cleveland the hall in 1986.
Joel was also named MusiCares Person of the Year for 2002, an award given each year at the same time as the Grammy Awards. At the dinner honoring Joel, various artists performed versions of his songs including Nelly Furtado, Stevie Wonder, Jon Bon Jovi, Diana Krall, Rob Thomas and Natalie Cole. He was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame on October 15, 2006. In 2005, Joel received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Joel has banners in the rafters of the Times Union Center, Nassau Coliseum, Madison Square Garden, Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, CT, Wachovia Center in Philadelphia, and Hartford Civic Center in Hartford. (Joel is erroneously cited as the first artist to perform a concert at Yankee Stadium in New York City; The Isley Brothers first performed there in 1969, and the Latin supergroup, The Fania All-Stars played and recorded live albums at the stadium during the 1970s.)
He has also sponsored the Billy Joel Visiting Composer Series at Syracuse University.
Joel is the only performing artist to have played both Yankee and Shea Stadiums, as well as Giants Stadium, Madison Square Garden, and Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum.


Source: Wikipedia.