Wikipedia:Today's featured article/November 29, 2011

Bix Beiderbecke (1903–1931) was an American jazz cornetist, jazz pianist, and composer. He was one of the most influential jazz soloists of the 1920s. He helped to invent the jazz ballad style and hinted at what, in the 1950s, would become cool jazz. Beiderbecke taught himself to play cornet largely by ear, leading him to adopt a non-standard fingering that some critics have connected to his original sound. He first recorded with a Midwestern jazz ensemble The Wolverines in 1924, after which he played briefly for the Jean Goldkette Orchestra before joining Frankie Trumbauer for an extended gig at the Arcadia Ballroom in St. Louis, Missouri. Beiderbecke and Trumbauer both joined Goldkette in 1926. The band toured widely and famously played a set opposite Fletcher Henderson at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City in October 1926. The following year, Trumbauer and Beiderbecke left Detroit to join the best-known and most prestigious dance orchestra in the country: the New York-based Paul Whiteman Orchestra. Beiderbecke's most influential recordings date from his time with Goldkette and Whiteman, although they were generally recorded under his own name or Trumbauer's. Beiderbecke left the Whiteman band in 1930 and the following summer died in his Queens apartment at the age of twenty-eight. (more...)

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