He was won over to jazz by bands he heard-including Fate Marable’s, featuring Louis Armstrong-on riverboats coming up from New Orleans. It was so different, and no one knew anything like it, nobody had ever heard anything like it.” His first girlfriend, Vera Korn, says that he played at high-school assemblies and that his music “left everyone, well, just kind of aghast-nobody really understood what he was trying to say with his music. . . . A largely self-taught piano prodigy in a white, solidly middle-class family, Bix (whose full name was Leon Bismark Beiderbecke) picked up the cornet as a teen-ager and was, in a few months, an admired soloist-yet he couldn’t read music, and never learned to do so with professional proficiency. The bare-bones story is nonetheless itself a kind of art, one that reverberates far beyond its named subject. “Bix,” which opens at Metrograph on Wednesday for online viewing and on Friday in person, is a literal biography, not a critical or an analytical one it lays out the major chronological framework of Beiderbecke’s life and adorns it with the colorful, detailed, and poignant recollections of interview subjects. Their deeply moving accounts of Beiderbecke’s artistry and personality, their anecdotes about his professional and private life, their view of his wondrous talent and the obstacles that he faced in developing and deploying it-it all makes for a fascinating, even essential film, albeit one that leaves its most significant matters unexplored. When the director Brigitte Berman filmed “Bix,” between 19, many of Beiderbecke’s associates were still alive-musicians, in their seventies and eighties, who’d worked and played with him, along with friends and family from his home town of Davenport, Iowa. Bix Beiderbecke, the innovative jazz cornetist, pianist, and composer, died, in 1931, at the age of twenty-eight, leaving behind a few hundred 78s, a legend of a self-destructive artist, and a cache of stories guarded by those who knew him. As in many of the most sophisticated fiction films, the prime action in the 1981 documentary “Bix: Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet” takes place in the interstices and beneath the surfaces.
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