1926: Bix Plays The Arcadia Ballroom

A brief history of the Arcadia Ballroom

3517 Olive Street is a parking lot across the street from the St. Louis University Wool Building. A two story building stood here for years, beginning around the time of World War I. Originally the Dreamland Dance Palace, in 1915 it became the Arcadia Ballroom.  

The Arcadia was an art deco treasure. Its wide curtained bandstand opened onto a 15,000 square foot polished hardwood dance floor. Above the dancers were sloping multicolored murals and Tiffany style fixtures. 

This was a venue dedicated to dancing. It also witnessed the evolution of American dance from foxtrot to jitterbug to swing. Many of the top jazz bands of 20s and 30s played the Arcadia for short engagements on their endless roadshows. The house band was the Arcadia Peacock Orchestra. Here’s a representative number from that band in 1924:

The Arcadia Ballroom hosted the bands of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton and many others. 

In 1939, it was remodeled and rechristened Tune Town. Count Basie wrote and performed the  “Tune Town Shuffle” in 1941, to honor the new venue.  If the song was anything like the dance hall, it was “hot,” not “sweet.”

Bix enters the St. Louis scene

From September 1925 through May 1926, the Frankie Trumbauer Orchestra signed a six month engagement to play the Arcadia Ballroom. This group featured cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and a St. Louis native, clarinetist Pee Wee Russell. For a short time, even famed trombonist Jack Teagarden sat in. The popular and inventive Beiderbecke frequently contributed to afternoon performances of the St. Louis Symphony, further widening his local fan base. Unfortunately, his time in St. Louis was never recorded, but there is much to explore of his from that era. 

Leon Bismarck ‘Bix’ Beiderbecke was 23 years old at the time; an enigmatic and gifted young musician in a hurry.

Bix and his contemporary Louis Armstrong took divergent paths in their playing. ‘Pops’ was a flamboyant performer, seeking to thrill by changing registers and shouting through his instrument.  Bix took a cool introspective approach, staying mostly to the middle ground, choosing his notes and his runs with care, complementing the music, rather than dominating it. “Jazz’s first balladeer,” as reviewer Brendan Wolfe put it. Both were key to understanding jazz evolution into the 1950s, influenced as it was by these two schools of performance. 

Here is a later 1927 track excerpt from “Singin The Blues” by Frank Trumbauer (sax) and his Orchestra, featuring Bix on cornet at the 1:00 mark. 

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxMNkKsQsGpF7ueNRsERYUdiD-SHHFA224

That solo, as Wolfe wrote, “changed jazz forever.” Low key work – Bix generally stared at his shoes as he played, with no hint of the emotion pouring from the New Orleans trumpeters of the time.

After his early Trumbauer work, Bix played three years with Jean Goldkette’s (broadcast over WGN radio) and then Paul Whiteman’s bands. Whiteman paid Bix $200 a week in 1928. The group’s singer was Bing Crosby, who rated $150 a week. Harper Barnes opined that the experience with Whiteman (“think Barry Manilow with a touch of the Boston Pops”) drowned Beiderbecke’s music, and figuratively, Beiderbecke himself. In after hours places, Bix did his own thing, for the admiration and affection of his peers. Today, a listener must tease out his soaring solos from the maudlin Whiteman compositions that surround it. An example will follow in a bit.

Longtime friend Ralph Berton would have rather been at Chicago’s Friars Inn back in 1922, hearing Bix sit in with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. Eddie Condon caught that grouping, and wrote, “for the first time I realize music has become an entirely new set of sounds.” Bix was catalyzing that. 

Beiderbecke was a clean-cut mid-American boy from Davenport, Iowa; a polite but unpolished school drop out, although a musical prodigy. Unable to read music, he learned by ear. Bix’s early piano teachers ran out of things to teach him. He puzzled those around him. In 1920, at the age of 16, he bought his first cornet. From then on, he demonstrated an unwavering certainty of what to do with that instrument. Not that everyone else understood. 

Bix in the early years

Hoagy Carmichael booked the Wolverines for some dance dates at the University of Indiana in 1923. He said, “I tried to explain Bix to the gang….it was no good, like relating a vivid but personal dream. The emotion couldn’t be transmitted….It was best to just hear Bix. Sloppy, coupled up…always the enigma.” 

The impact of Beiderbecke on Carmichael was real enough, as he named his first son Hoagy Bix Carmichael. 

Part of the genius was in Bix’s grounding. He largely picked up his skills while dissecting the music on recordings of Debussy, Stravinsky and other (then) modern classical composers. Bix attempted to duplicate on piano the chords that appealed to him. 

Jazz was, by 1921, the music around him, the medium for him to work in, but he always looked beyond it for something more. 

A nicely restored early example of Bix’s uncanny mastery is this You Tube version of the Wolverines playing “Big Boy.”  Beiderbecke’s solo takes up nearly the first minute, in an age where jazz solos were fairly uncommon. In the photo below, he is seated on the far right.

Bix once said he’d go to hell to hear a good band. Maybe that became the metaphorical case. He grew up on the Mississippi River in Davenport, Iowa. There, the boy fell for jazz as the early Dixieland sound plied its way upstream with the steamboats that docked and entertained there.

He was the son of a father who managed a coal and lumber store, and a mother who played piano and church organ. Within a year of leaving high school in 1920, Bix was leading a fox-trot band.

After being expelled from a boarding school, the Lake Forest Academy, he gigged with area bands and began making some serious money for an unschooled young musician in the early 1920s. 

Cultivating a new sound in Jazz

Bix worked around Chicago with The Wolverines. Gennett Records introduced the group with Jazz Me Blues, featuring “that Beiderbecke sound, soaring out of a rough period ensemble.” Having sat in with him at an after hours gig, Louis Armstrong said, “all of a sudden, Bix stood up and took a solo. I’m telling you, those pretty notes went all through me.” 

Apparently, records did him little justice. “You had to hear him to believe it” appears repeatedly in testimonials. Sax man Bud Freeman said listening to him live was an unforgettable experience. Trumpeter Max Kaminsky sat alongside Bix on the music stage and said, “I just sat there vibrating like a harp to the echoes of Bix’s astonishing tone. It sounded like a choir of angels.” Guitarist Eddie Condon put a finer point on it, saying, “he put it to his lips and blew a phrase. The sound came out like a girl saying yes.” 

Harper Barnes, longtime cultural critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch years later wrote, “At his recorded best, Beiderbecke can raise goosebumps on your neck like few musicians.” If there is such a thing as perfect pitch, Bix possessed it; his tonal quality was precise, “like bullets hitting a bell,” as one observer stated.

That quality of sound was singular in its time. Kansas City Star music editor John Haskins described Bix’s playing as, “unhurried, the notes perfectly centered, with natural breath support and a relaxed vibrato. He could swing, and did, but he brought a new thing, lyricism,” to the jazz he played.

Music and a musician out of their time

Most of the commentary on Bix and his impact on the development of American jazz comes from critics decades removed from his performance of it. Jazz sprang from the blues, and the blues was once considered “the devil’s music.” Parents were warned about the siren qualities of saxophone music upon their daughters. There were strong undercurrents of racism to the general disapproval. This was a music that sprang up organically in America, untethered to European tradition. It valued performer over composer, and ignored established musical structure. We sometimes fear what we don’t understand. Jazz was a threat to the established order. This hindered the widespread acceptance of it for some time.  

As a result of mainstream literary disregard, it’s difficult to find much professional criticism of jazz music in its own day. There was, instead, a lot of head shaking and incomprehension, regarding that noise making the kids go crazy. This was amplified by the dancing, as the foxtrot became the Charleston, then the jitterbug. Lord knows, there’s a straight line to rock and roll in all this. Reason enough for the attempt to ignore it, lest one accidentally encourage it. The press remained largely mute, but the music did its own proselytizing through the new mass media of the time – recordings and radio. Music from the Arcadia was broadcast to whoever tuned in, on WIL and KMOX from St. Louis.

John Haskins offered that, much like the jazz itself, Beiderbecke was something different; “born out of his time.” It was twenty years after Bix’s death that musicians routinely mined his unique approach; “disciples, imitators and friends,” like Bobby Hackett, Lester Young, Jimmy McPartland and Max Kaminsky. More specifically, the cool trumpets of Miles Davis, Bobby Hackett and Chet Baker, and sax work by Art Pepper and Stan Getz derive from his sound. Bix worked within Dixieland as a style because that’s what there was in the 1920s. But the music he improvised within it anticipated a much more cosmopolitan jazz form. 

Ralph Berton, a writer and musician who knew Bix, said that “if art was an exile from society, and jazz an exile from the accredited arts, Bix was truly an exile from all three.” His solitary spirit belonged nowhere in his own time. 

A note from New York

New York Evening Journal columnist Dorothy Kilgallen named Bix Beiderbecke to her All Time Swing Dream Band in 1940. She regretted that Bix “died before the world went mad over his type of music, and is the most outstanding of all the figures in the history of the evolution of swing.” 

In another fascinating call, Kilgallen voted Bessie Smith as the greatest jazz figure of all time. “Bessie sang with the voice of centuries of tragedy; she moaned low and wailed out strange, simple and primitive lyrics, and made them sound as real as the sound of a heart breaking. When she sang, people cried, and Bix Beiderbecke sat around listening to her and gave her all his money to keep on singing.”  

Living fast and wearing down

New Yorker arts critic Richard Brody, in his review of a Beiderbecke biopic, points out the “painfully radicalized jazz milieu of the twenties.” Even though musicians fraternized and played together privately, their bands were segregated.

Black or white, they all coped with the exhaustion of constant performance and travel. Bands played as much as possible – two shows a day, seven days a week. Meals were catch as can catch, and privacy was scarce. Most musicians drank a lot as liquor surrounded them. It numbed the discomforts and broke the tedium. Bix himself fell hard for alcohol, to the extent that he sometimes dozed on the bandstand between solos. A scribble on a score recorded by the Whiteman orchestra points to a particular passage with the note, “Wake up Bix.”  

There was something intrinsically sad within Beiderbecke. Some of this may have resulted from the consistent parental disapproval he received during his brief career. They expected him to work into some conventional profession. He constantly tried to convince them that his was a respectable field of endeavor. Hoagy Carmichael’s son said, “(Bix) always sent his recordings to his parents. He wanted them to be proud of him. Of course, they weren’t. He went home one time to dry out. He’d been there a couple of weeks when he opened a cupboard and there were all the records he’d sent them – unopened.” 

1929 finished out by ushering in the Great Depression. Few dancehall patrons had the money to party onward, so nightlife and live musical performance suffered. Beiderbecke, already deep in the throes of alcoholism worked only sporadically. 

He certainly had moments. Within a popular but soporific 1928 Whiteman piece called “Sweet Sue,” is a wide awake solo by Bix. Catch him invigorating the whole affair at the 3:20 mark. I’ll spare you the first three minutes:

The grim end of a short road

The bottle’s hold on Bix proved far stronger than he was. It’s said that his drink of choice regressed down to straight ethanol with lemon juice. To play, he generally needed to first be found, then straighted out enough to sit in with a group for the evening.

August 1931: Bix collapsed on the bed of his furnished flat and remained there for a week, alone and untended. Six years after his extended Arcadia Ballroom gig, the jazz innovator and toast of that world was found in critical condition by the landlady of his furnished flat in Long Island. He had  developed lobar pneumonia related to alcoholism, and died shortly after being admitted to a hospital. Bix Beiderbecke was 28.

Like Miles Davis a couple of decades later, Bix made cool, lonely, introspective music within a hectic musical time. Haskins paints him as, “an unpretentious, dedicated figure of unconscious tragedy; a strange careless silent saint of the Jazz Age; a human being of exceptionally fine grain and inward spirit, worth remembering.”

The world continued on. Prohibition, against which Bix did all his drinking, was repealed in 1933. This rendered the speakeasy and rebellious flapper culture obsolete, and took down many a hot jazz act in the process. The more formal big bands absorbed the small combos and cultivated a refined sound along more established musical paths.

The ebb and flow of musical trends

Perhaps looking to shake off its history, a contest was held, offering a $50 prize for a successful 1939 renaming of the Arcadia Ballroom in St. Louis. The winner was Tune Town. 

In a way, it took Pearl Harbor to shake American music back to life. Everyone scrimped for the war effort, worked to keep productivity high, and lived with the tension of global uncertainty always in the foreground. In the creases of this orderly existence came the weekend, or the 48 hour leave, and time to shake it out for a short time.

Back in St. Louis during World War II, Tune Town hit its heyday with a flood of servicemen from Jefferson Barracks and Scott Field. Jitterbuggers and zoot suiters filled the floors. The dress code called for coats and ties, so men went wild with fashion variations on those. Any female dancer caught wearing bobby socks were made to remove them by any of the five bouncers working the hall. 

Peacetime brought with it a return to a slower, more sober social lifestyle, and small combo bebop jazz replaced big band swing music. Dwindling numbers and back taxes forced Tune Town out of business in 1948. The building was sold and refitted to accomodate the new postwar bowling mania. Tune Town became the Sports Bowl. The echoes of Trumbauer and Beiderbecke were drowned out by the rolling thunder from 24 bowling lanes.

Fred Turner in Smithsonian Magazine pointed out that a part of Bix’s appeal derived from his being a handsome young man who never grew old, whose pace matched that of his music. 

Turner cites Eddie Condon, who said Bix “drove away all the other things: food, sleep, women, ambition, vanity, desire. He played the piano and the cornet; that was all.” 

A treat from Shifrin

Paul Whiteman originally paid George Gershwin to produce “Rhapsody In Blue,” which Whiteman debuted. It’s difficult to enthuse over the highly calculated music of Paul Whiteman, but it led to the creation of an extended 23 minute piece with a sly title. It’s a meditation on passages Bix put to record and the composer Lalo Shifrin set to a unified score. It’s so good, it might bring a tear to a glass eye. With a wink toward both Gershwin and Whiteman, it’s called “Rhapsody for Bix.” 

The site of the old Dreamland/Arcadia Ballroom/Tune Town is now a parking lot serving Powell Hall near Olive and Grand. The Grand Arts District was a swinging music district in 1943. Tune Town held a place amid a cluster of concert and dance halls, including the Club Plantation (3617 Delmar – The Palladium) and 400 Club (3625 Grandel Square – Sun Theater Building). All of them saw their share of Swing and Jazz giants pass through. Though much of the marquee talent was black, their performances were restricted to white audiences only.

Keeping Bix’s spirit alive and kicking

Incidentally, the spirit of the old Arcadia Ballroom lives on in intriguing fashion today. KDHX deejay and musicologist TJ Mueller leads the Arcadia Dance Orchestra in monthly Sunday evening concerts at Maplewood’s Focal Point. It’s hot stuff, meticulously recreated fresh from the 1920s. The orchestra is living St. Louis musical history from the Bix era, and will richly repay a new listener.

Dance halls may age and turn to parking lots, but Bix Beiderbecke never grew old. LIke James Dean, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jaco Pastorius, his legacy is, in part, an effect of having been a shooting star. Despite his short life, the music still stands. 

Credits:

Notes on history of Arcadia Orchestra – Mark Berresford’s review of Arcadia Shuffle cd by Jazz Oracle

Further background on Arcadia from Lonny Lynn at lonnylynn.com

Evolution: Famous Ballroom to Bowling Alley to Parking Lot; Victor Volland; St. Louis Post-Dispatch; September 1, 1966

Remembering Bix: A Memoir Of The Jazz Age; Ralph Berton; Harper and Row; 1974

‘Bix’: An Absorbing Documentary; Harper Barnes; St. Louis Post-Dispatch; March 14, 1985

Background on the Arcadia Ballroom from a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article by Charlie Menees; January 6, 1981

1925-1926 Arcadia/Trumbauer lineup taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pee_Wee_Russell St. Louisan Russell was a great jazz clarinetist, who often played and drank with Bix. A book should be written about their escapades on the road.

Dorothy Kilgallen quotes from Broadway Columnist Names Her All-Time Swing Band; Marion County Standard; January 17, 1940.

Quote from Hoagy ‘Bix’ Carmichael; St. Louis Post-Dispatch; August 25, 1991

“Bix” Is A Jazz Documentary That Resonates Far Beyond Its Subject. Review by Richard Brody for the New Yorker; February 2, 2022

Bix: The Story Of A Young Man And His Horn; Smithsonian Magazine; Fred Turner; June 30, 1997

A good review of two books written about Beiderbecke appears in a Post-Dispatch article by Tom Yarbrough; August 4, 1974

Note: The motivation for this particular essay was to depict the musician my dog was named for. Bix the dog is a great friend and companion. He seldom barks, but when he does, it’s generally in a clear tone right around middle C.