That train wasn't more than a hundred feet away when he finally woke up to what was happening. All of us began screaming at Bix to get the hell out of there, but he thought we were just kidding him and he threw stones at us. Just then we saw a fast train coming round the bend. If he let go of that crock he could have pulled himself loose, but not Pee Wee-what's a guy's hide compared to a gallon of corn? By this time Bix, having staggered down to the railroad tracks, found he had a lot of sand between his toes, so he sat down on the rail and yanked his shoes off to empty them. But as we were hopping the fence Pee Wee got stuck on the wire and just hung there, squealing for help and hugging the jug for dear life. Sure enough, he dug out a jug, handed it to Pee Wee, and started back. ‘I get around,' he said.'7 The nonchalance, the conveyed sense that much was going on below the surface under the tip of the oh-so-cool iceberg, Beiderbecke throwing off comments and chord voicings with equal disdain, his ambiguous boast that he gets around.We don't even need to be told that the complete English translation of Proust's masterwork A la recherche du temps perdu had not even been published in the United States at the time of Beiderbecke's death to appreciate the rich new character type, the cool cat, on display for Condon's edification. 'How the hell did you find that out?' I demanded. His stuff is no good in translation.' I leaned over the piano. Eddie Condon tells of Beiderbecke making dismissive comments on the need for schooling and education, and Condon responding by trying to point out the cornetist's ignorance: '’By the way,' I said, ‘Who is Proust?' He hit a chord, listened to it, and then said, casually, ‘A French writer who lived in a cork-lined room. Various tales culled from the many Beiderbecke left behind define different aspects of the cool ethos in formation. How much things change over a half century! Beiderbecke's friends saw him as one of a kind-Benny Goodman wondered which moon he came from,2 and Jimmy McPartland called him a myster圓-but he would have been a familiar type on a 1960s college campus. He embraces the most raucous and uninhibited music he can find, not just for how it sounds, but also as a symbol of his way of life. He shocks the older generation with his transgression of community mores. He experiments with illegal substances, which eventually prove more harmful than he realizes. Parents and grown-ups want him to pursue a stable career, but he prefers to find himself, to follow his own muse. He has run-ins with school authorities and sometimes with the law. A youngster finds himself at odds with the values of his bourgeois family, his rebellion facilitated by their doting indulgence. Yet so much of his story, as it is commonly told and mythologized, would have been commonplace in the late sixties. To those who knew him, Beiderbecke was larger than life. Even if he achieves great success- a rarity, but possible in the case of a few white jazz players such as Stan Getz or Chet Baker or Bill Evans-he still feels like an outcast beyond the scope of mainstream society. He values experiences the way a banker hordes capital. He flouts the rules, which he sees as applying to others, not him. But for the jazz player, the creative ferment on the bandstand inevitably carries over into day-to-day life, and his ways of dealing with circumstances and situations radiate an artistic quality that persists even amidst dissipation and squalor.

At least it is in his eyes- the more straitlaced would simply see his offstage behavior as wasted and debauched. He likes the improvisatory aspects of his chosen art form and brings the same celebration of spontaneity to his life, which is often as experimental as his music. He roots for the underdog and the misunderstood, and he often sees himself in these terms, even if his own background marks him as a child of privilege. The white jazz player is the outsider among outsiders, but has voluntarily chosen this double exclusion, even takes satisfaction in its far remove from social norms and expectations. Someday a great psychologist will write a study of the psyche of the white jazz musicians from the early and middle decades of the twentieth century in many ways they are the forerunners of the personality type that became dominant among the baby boom generation in the late sixties.

Bix beiderbecke