Music of Bix, other greats has new digs

Jones, 87, sounds like a much younger man when he talks about Big Band jazz.

At the top of his list of favorites is cornet player Bix Beiderbecke, who — besides being one of the most famous musicians of his time — pretty much wrote the book on the the tragic life of a musician.

Beiderbecke was a self-taught musical genius, unable to read music, and a legendary drunk. But he was such a great player that the leader of the biggest band of his youth — Paul Whiteman of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra — wanted him anyway. So did a lot of other bandleaders. Beiderbecke recorded with many of the big names of the 1920s and '30s.

But Beiderbecke was 28 years old and already over the hill, musically when he died in 1931.

"There's a nice tale that when he died," Jones says, "Paul Whiteman sent a floral arrangement that was shaped like a cornet. Whiteman left a chair empty for a couple years in the trumpet section."

Jones lived in Davenport, Iowa, Beiderbecke's hometown, in the 1980s, many years after his death. But tragic life or not, Beiderbecke's legend was very much alive in Davenport.

Jones and his wife, Phyllis, attended the music festivals the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Society dedicates to the hometown great every summer.

"My wife made the rounds at the festival and found all these (Beiderbecke) records. She purchased them for me, a set of 14 albums," Jones says.

The set was complete, an Italian record company's compilation of reissued recordings featuring Beiderbecke. Jones knew he had something important.

"I only played them once, because I wanted to preserve them," he says. Jones played them that one time to copy them onto audiotape.

Besides the tapes of Beiderbecke playing with the greats during his short career, Jones has hundreds of tapes of other Big Band jazz radio broadcasts.

"Is that illegal?" he asks about the pre-digital-era downloading. "I'll go peacefully if it is."

When Jones and his wife moved from Green Valley to smaller quarters in Northwest Tucson a couple years ago, he gave his tape collection to Green Valley golf buddy Jim Sandin — who is 84 and also claims he wasn't much of a trumpet player.

Sandin played in Navy bands during World War II, taught music in high school and worked as a salesman for a brass-instrument company.

He says he hasn't played a cornet or trumpet in decades, that he "lost his lip" playing Big Band concerts on battleships, before the crew was shown movies.

"We'd anchor in the South Pacific and set up risers on the fantail playing Big Band stuff into the wind. You had to play loud. I blew my brains out."

Sandin recalls that when Jones mentioned he was moving, he asked if Sardin would take his music collection.

Sandin said yes, but had no idea what that entailed until he saw the collection, which included audiotapes, file cards for indexing and cross-indexing, and notebooks.

"I think about 500 audiocassettes, all of them labeled, of course. I don't know how many boxes of 3-by-5 index-card boxes, dozens and dozens of them."

Upon seeing it all, Sandin says, he realized he couldn't store it all in his condo and got the idea of donating the collection to the Tucson Jazz Society.

Jones said he had already given many of his recordings, vinyl, to libraries. But he still had the pristine 14-album set of Italian reissue LPs. When he learned that the Jazz Society was pleased to get the tape collection, he offered it the Beiderbecke albums, too.

Karen Hanshaw, education chairwoman of the society, said the Jones Collections will be a great resource for young musicians in JazzWerx, the organization's youth band program.

To show their gratitude to the Joneses, Hanshaw said, one of the JazzWerx combos will play a concert at The Fountains at La Cholla in mid-June.

Northwest