![]() Tribute participants treat the jazz of Bix’s era not as relics you might stumble over in your grandma’s attic or even just as some of the most exciting and innovative music of its day, but as music still worth listening to, getting excited over, and debating about.īix, one of the earliest in a long line of self-destructive jazz giants, pioneered a lyrical style that’s been cited as a formative influence on Miles Davis. Less well-known and more sparsely attended than the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Festival, held every summer in the musician’s hometown of Davenport, Iowa, Pospychala’s tribute attracts between a hundred and two hundred record collectors and traditional-jazz enthusiasts from across the country and overseas with several days of concerts, vintage films, seminars, and late-night record-spinning sessions. The location holds no special significance: he held the first ten Bix tributes at a Best Western near his home in Libertyville, but differences with the management of the restaurant there persuaded him to relocate the festivities. This tour of historic 20s and 30s jazz sites around Chicago kicked off his 11th annual Tribute to Bix, held in March–the month of Beiderbecke’s birth–and headquartered at the Holiday Inn Express in sleepy downtown Kenosha. Without exception the gang idolized self-taught cornetist and pianist Bix Beiderbecke, who died of pneumonia in 1931 at age 28, and so does our grave-stalking guide, Libertyville resident Phil Pospychala. The Austin High Gang, a loose collective of jazz talent responsible for establishing what’s known as the “Chicago style,” also included future big names like Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland, Gene Krupa, and Eddie Condon. This might sound like a stop on one of those Untouchable Gangster Tours you see around town, but though Tesch and Wild Bill both did some work for Capone and his cronies during Prohibition, it was only in the capacity of playing hot music in gangster-run speakeasies. Hours earlier, we’d visited the corner of Magnolia and Wilson, where Tesch, of the famed Austin High Gang, met his demise in an auto accident, thrown from a car driven by Wild Bill Davison. ![]() About half the group–20 or 25 people, mostly couples in their 40s, 50s, or 60s–disembarks to join him and read the stone’s simple inscription: Frank Teschemacher, 1906-1932. ![]() We peer out impatiently at his flashlight beam dancing across a sea of engraved anonymity. ![]() #Bix fest 2021 driver#He motions to the driver to back up a hundred yards or so, and after more futile exploration, waves him back again. The driver stops, and our sprightly tour director jumps off to search the desolate rows. With daylight fading, the oversize bus turns into Woodlawn Cemetery in Forest Park and rolls slowly up a narrow one-way lane. ![]()
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