Would Bix' Muse Allow Him to Use Uncle Brad's Mouthpiece?
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Does this ring true to you? A trumpet sounding beginner's mouthpiece? Where in the Bix story do we hear of him making compromises? He fried his own fish virtually ignoring the Louis tidal wave, wouldn't record for Trum cause he couldn't meet his own standards, probably the same for not rejoining Whiteman, never switched to trumpet, seemingly sat and sulked during his Bunny encounter till the guys got him a setting where he could play his own stuff without being drowned out by the new cat, and even that bar mocking scene at the end sounds like a cat going down with the ship doing things his way, or trying anyway. Doing or dying.
It's kind of hard to imagine what a true originator would feel inside, us with everything out there already to draw from and copy, with nothing left to invent, but it must have been a tremendous force within a person. You're young and there's a new voice for young people, the ODJB, it's a movement, and you wanna get in on it, and you practice and realize you've got so much inside to add that isn't being said elsewhere, and you find out that booze gives you the power to practice and play all night. Other originators I know seemed to have had a vision of how the horn was only to be played, and what the true music is supposed to be for that particular player, and that one must play the horn the way it's supposed to be played. There's that tale of Ben Webster hearing Charlie Parker on a tenor and leaping up on stage to grab the horn out of his mouth and tell him a tenor ain't supposed to sound like that. And you still see tenors in bands sitting at opposite ends cause way back Lester and Herschel each felt the other's sound was all wrong and couldn't be tolerated.
Deep Down South is my tangible evidence. That dark haunted sound, the wounded notes and the magnifique notes, they're all more cornet sounding than a cornet. Beyond cornet. Surely not with a trumpet mouthpiece. I just heard KD Lang say an artist's goal should be vulnerability and honesty and that solo, the cohesive take, anyway, is all of that. I wouldn't be fooled by the shaky intonation. I think Bix' mind was as powerful there as anywhere and that solo, while it's simpler than the stately twenties masterworks, is more universal music, what everybody eventually played like. Swings so hard, so heavy, so sexy, so ferocious, so swing era, Ben and Herschel could have brought down the house with it in the late thirties, and with those emphatic r 'n b repetitions, the sixties guitar gods could have shook the world with that thing through their Marshall stacks. I just can't accept that that could have been played by someone who was struggling just to get a note out of his horn. Brad, did Hoagy actually say Bix played it? Maybe he bought it for the Hoagster.