Remembering Bix: A Memoir of the Jazz Age

In this biography with a difference, Ralph Berton seeks to discover the influences, reveal the forks in the path of Bix's destiny, tracing the psychological odyssey of a legendary figure of the Jazz Age, an enormously talented artist universally loved and admired who yet could find nothing - not even his music, which he endlessly criticized - worth living for. Unlike the popularized versions of his life, the real-life Bix was a far more interesting character than any fictional projection, an enigmatic soul of depth, complexity and original psychic twists. It is this man whom we meet in Remembering Bix. For Ralph Berton, Bix was a boyhood idol, worshipped to the point of adoration. During the time Ralph knew Bix, he followed him about like a puppy, sitting in behind him on the drums, sharing his bed when Bix had no other, eagerly showing off as much as a 13-year-old can to his senior companion in the arts. Remembering Bix is a personal memoir, a pilgrimage to the author's boyhood, an age revisited, above all an appreciation from a fresh and very personal angle of vision of that gentle and rarest of artists of the Jazz Age, seen against the backdrop of the maddest time this nation ever lived room.

Ralph Berton (1910–1993) wrote extensively on jazz, serving as an editor at Metronome and Down Beat magazines and as editor-in-chief of Sound and Fury. He was also a professor of jazz history at Cooper Union, Middlesex County College, and Bloomfield College.