Wednesday, August 3, 1927: New York City
The Babe And His Pal Bix
The Babe has been doing a lot of practicing lately, on the field and off.
On the field recently during batting practice the Babe spent 10 minutes just hitting the ball to the opposite field. He popped line drive after line drive to left center, then left, and then straight down the left field line. Like so many things the Babe does, it was breathtaking to watch. I swear to God, if Jidge wasn’t always swinging for the fences, he could hit .400 every year.
Off the field Ruth has been practicing his saxophone. The sax was given to him by Paul Whiteman, the man who all the newspapers call the “King of Jazz” and who is one of the Babe’s best pals.
On days when they’re both in town, Whiteman goes over to Ruth’s apartment in the Ansonia Hotel to give him saxophone lessons. The press just got hold of the story and they’ve all been writing about it, but it’s been going on since we got back from spring training.
That must be something to see: the King of Jazz — the highest paid and most popular musician in the world — giving lessons to the Sultan of Swat — the highest paid and most popular baseball player in the world and probably the most famous man on earth.
The Babe’s musical talents don’t measure up to his baseball genius, but he actually does have great instincts. He plays a terrific harmonica, and he loves all kinds of music, though his taste in music is more dance band than hot jazz.
On the road, the Babe takes lessons from my roomie, Benny Bengough, our saxophone-playing catcher. Benny’s not exactly the King of Jazz — he couldn’t cut it with the likes of Whiteman’s orchestra, or Jean Goldkette’s, or Fletcher Henderson’s — but he’s good enough to sit in with your average band.
Benny does his tutoring on the train, since once we get into a town Ruth’s always on the go — at a stadium, in a restaurant, or just out catting. Our last trip lasted three weeks and took us from New York to Toronto, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, St. Paul and Chicago, and every night on the train Ruth was blowing his sax.
Most of the time the Babe stays in his private compartment, where he and Benny often play along to records that Whiteman’s given him. But sometimes after he’s learned a new song, Jidge will pop out of his parlor car like a jack in the box, wearing his big red silk robe, and parade up and down the parlor car tooting his horn. His favorite song this past trip was “Glow Worm” — which a bunch of the players used to like, ’til Ruth wrapped his lips around it.
There’s also a piano on the train, and our oft-injured and error-prone young shortstop, Mark Koenig, is a pretty good player. Actually, from what I can tell, he makes fewer errors on the keyboard than in the field.
Koenig plays mostly old-time music from before the Great War, stuff like “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” and some basic classical stuff, but nothing too fancy. He loves to play “Roll Out the Barrel,” which has become the song we sing in the dugout after every victory, as we march back to the locker room. Just another silly tradition that’s part of the glue of a winning team.
Since Koenig can play by ear, guys can even hum songs to him and he’ll then noodle around on the piano until he gets it right, and next thing you know everyone’s singing along to some old-time tune from before the War.
Thank god, it only happens once or twice a trip.
After our getaway game in St. Louis we jump on the train and head off to Chicago, with a stop first in St. Paul, Minnesota, for an exhibition game.
Benny and I are are sitting in the dining car about to order dinner when one of the porters comes up to him and whispers in his ear. Benny tells me he’ll be right back, and when he returns a few minutes later he’s got a sly grin on his face. We both order steaks, then he tells our waiter, “We’ll be dining in Mr. Ruth’s compartment. Do us a favor and bring our dinner in there when it’s ready. Thanks.”
Then he stands up and with just his index finger bids me to follow him. When we get to the Babe’s compartment, through the door we can hear his Victrola playing the Whiteman Orchestra’s recording of “I’m Coming Virginia.” It’s a tune that Benny and Jidge have been practicing on this trip. We can hear the Babe playing along to the record, and we can also hear another softer horn, too, one that seems to be dancing all over the music.
Benny raps softly on the door with his knuckle, like he’s tapping a code on a speakeasy door.
“Come on in,” says Ruth, his voice swallowing up the door as it comes through it.
Benny and I walk into a smoke-filled room.
Ruth is sitting in a large upright chair in his satin robe and slippers, his sax hanging from his neck, a cigar burning in the ashtray beside him, along with two dead cigar butts.
Sitting next to the Babe is a young man with a small trumpet, a cornet, actually. He’s in his mid-20s, but he’s dressed like a collegian, like a Princeton man, in a rumpled white Oxford shirt and long, off-white golf pants. Between his rumpled shirt and his uncombed brown hair, he looks like he’s just rolled out of bed.
The young man with the horn keeps his head down and just looks up with his eyes, and nods a quick hello, like he’s trying hard not to be rude. There’s something both awkward and kind about his gesture. And then there’s the smile and the eyes — his eyes smile like a child’s. I don’t normally notice these things, but there’s something strikingly childlike about him.
He is also clearly lit. There’s an open bottle of gin on the table next to him. And in the ashtray beside his chair is a burning reefer, which is providing the room with an aroma that’s sweeter than Jidge’s cigar smoke.
“Bingo and Duck Eye, this is my pal Bix,” says the Babe.
He says it in an unusual way — at least unusual for the Babe — much softer than his normal voice. Ruth usually talks in the sort of voice you or I would use if we were giving a speech. Come to think of it, the only other time I’ve ever heard Jidge talk softly to two people or more is when I’ve gone with him on his weekly visits to the children’s ward in the hospital in Washington Heights.
But he’s talking softly now.
“My pal Bix,” the Babe says, clearly proud to be a friend of Beiderbecke’s, “has been playing with his band in St. Louis, but he’s got a couple of nights off, so he hopped the train to spend a few days with us.”
“Nice to meet ya’, Bix,” says Bennie.
“Same here,” I say.
“Same here,” echoes Bix.
“Hey, Bingo,” Ruth says to Benny, “start that record back up. Listen to how we can play it now.”
Benny cranks up the Victrola and we all listen to Whiteman’s new singer, a kid named Crosby, warble the first verse of “I’m Coming Virginia.” Then, softly, Bix wades in with his cornet. I’ve heard Beiderbecke play before with the Goldkette band — and at the Fire Party, back in April — but this is something different. It’s the purest sound I’ve ever heard. It’s like crystal clear water. It’s like sunlight cracking through the clouds after a summer storm. It shoots right through you. Like when someone you’re in love with whispers in your ear.
After a few bars the Babe starts playing his sax. It’s a simple part, and he’s actually not bad, especially with Bix quietly playing all around him.
When the song finishes we all just sit there listening to the needle scratching against the record label, clicking over and over again. No one gets up. Benny and I are stunned by the beauty of Bix’s horn. The Babe and Bix are just sitting in their chairs with silly grins on their faces. Jidge looks like a kid who just found out he got an A+ on his first-grade spelling test.
Our silence is interrupted by a knock at the door.
“Mr. Ruth, we got your dinners for you and your friends.”
“Come on in, boys!” says the Babe, back to his normal life-is-a-party voice.
Two waiters come in and set up Ruth’s dinner table. We sit down at the table and they bring in our food: two steaks for Benny and me, two enormous porterhouse steaks just for Ruth — enough meat for five normal people — and a large chocolate cake, an apple pie, and a bowl of vanilla ice cream, all of which they place in front of Bix.
Before the rest of us can pick up our knives, Bix cuts into his pie and begins to eat it like it’s an omelet.
“Sweet tooth,” is all the Babe says.
We stay with Bix and the Babe listening to records, as our train rolls on toward St. Paul.
When Bix is playing he’s in a trance. Each time he finishes, he wakes up with a small giggle. After a while, Bix lights up a new muggle and asks the Babe to put on some classical music. Ruth pulls out a couple of opera records with arias by Caruso and Beniamino Gigli. Bix plays his cornet to the arias in his own way — not along with them, but around them, somehow blending Caruso and Gigli’s opera with his jazz. And it’s not just a parlor trick. With each piece he’s experimenting with the sound, gracefully searching to create something new.
It’s even better than watching Ruth repeatedly smash the ball into left field.
Around midnight Ruth says he’s turning in. Benny and I say our goodnights and head to the door. Bix says, “See ya’ in the morning, Babe,” and gets up to leave with us.
We exit the Babe’s compartment and start walking back through the train.
“Where are you sleeping tonight?” I ask Bix.
“I’m not,” he replies.
“What do you mean?”
“I normally don’t go to bed ’til five or six, so I’ll stay up tonight, have breakfast with the Babe, and then while you guys play your exhibition game in St. Paul, I’ll crash in his compartment.”
“Honest?” I ask him.
“Honest,” says Bix.
As we walk between the cars, I tell Benny I’m going to hang back for one last smoke before turning in. Still between the cars, I offer Bix my pack but he says, “I’m OK,” and then takes out a silver cigarette case from his back pocket. He opens it up and pulls out another reefer. I use my lighter for both our smokes.
“What’s in Chicago?” I ask him.
“Armstrong.”
“Do you know him?”
“A bit. I’ll go see him at the Sunset Cafe. After they close down for the night, we’ll jam.”
“What’s that like?”
“Hard to put into words. What’s it like playing with Ruth?” he asks me with a smile.
“It’s not the same thing, Bix. When you blow with Pops, you’re really playing together with him — Ruth and I just wear the same uniform at the same time.”
Bix doesn’t keep his cornet in a case; he’s just carrying it around in a brown paper bag. He pulls his horn out, folds up the bag and puts it in his back pocket. He stamps his reefer out on his tongue, and places what’s left back in his cig case. Then he takes his mouthpiece out of his front pocket and puts it on his cornet. He leans back against the outside door of the train car and smiles.
He doesn’t play or say anything. We both just stand there feeling the train roll past farm after farm.
There’s no moon out tonight. Just the same sky full of stars we had in St. Louis.
The way the train is pulled along the tracks has a rhythm to it. Bix picks it up and begins playing soft staccato notes. No melody, just seemingly random notes that fall from his cornet and dance along the tracks below us. Most of his notes are short, like the clack of the track. A few, though, he holds longer, and those rise up and become part of the wind and stars.
As we move through the night, it feels as if we’re riding on a giant phonograph needle sliding through the grooves on one of Bix’s records.
We roll through a hollow, and Bix’s horn begins to echo. He plays single notes, and then waits for them to return to him. Then he stops playing.
“My band’s probably going to break up,” he says matter-of-factly.
“Why?”
“It costs too much to keep us going. It’s a big group with a lot of salaries, so Goldkette can’t be floating too much above water. He’s a smart man. He’s gotta know he could make a lot more with a smaller outfit.”
“Would you stay with him?”
“Nah. I like playing in a large band. You can make more sounds — more new sounds.”
“So, what’s next?” I ask him.
“Whiteman wants me to join his orchestra. He’s been after me for a while. He’s the one that introduced me to the Babe last year — I think he’s trying to show me how glamorous my life could be if I signed up with him.”
“How come Whiteman can make money on such a big group but Goldkette can’t?”
“Because Whiteman’s the King of Jazz,” he says with a laugh. “He’s packing them into concert halls and big swanky parties on millionaires’ estates, he’s doing radio shows, he’s selling millions of records, and the big whale’s got a dozen dance bands with his name on ’em, traveling the country and Europe. He prints more money than the mint.”
“I read he’s been making over a million dollars a year since the Great War ended,” I tell him.
“That’s why he’s the King of Jazz — it’s not the music, it’s the money,” Bix says with a chuckle. “He’s pouring bleach on jazz, but he’s making it bigger than anyone else can.”
“Do you mind the bleach?”
“I prefer my laundry unwashed.”
Bix is talking about his music, but he could easily be talking about the clothes he wearing. He’s an unmade bed.
“It’s funny,” I say, “a lot of the colored guys resent Whiteman, but Pops Armstrong says he’s making jazz the music of America. I mean, he commissioned Gershwin to write ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’ That took some imagination.”
“Yeah,” says Bix, “he wants to make jazz the new concert music. That’s why he calls his band an orchestra. But there’s not a lot of freedom in how he lets you play. It drives guys nuts after a while.
“It’s the same thing with the record companies. They bleach all the white guys — they water down our stuff, they don’t want us playing hot jazz, they say that’s for the coloreds. And they only want the coloreds to record race records. Good luck hearing a colored band play a ballad on a record. But you hear it all mixed together when we jam.”
“So, what are you gonna do?”
“I don’t know,” Bix says, shrugging his shoulders. “I’m just going to Chicago to play for a couple of days.”
“Too bad you can’t play full time with Pops.”
“Armstrong’s band doesn’t need me. The band I’d really like to play with is Fletcher Henderson’s band. One of his boys, Don Redman, really knows how to arrange music to make it swing.”
“Those colored boys can play. Too bad that’ll never happen.”
“Never’s a long time,” says Bix.
“You know something I don’t?” I ask him.
“I don’t know anything that anybody else doesn’t know — about the music business or anything else,” he says with that smile again.
“You know how to play that thing in a way nobody else does,” I say, pointing to his horn.
“Maybe. But that’s about all I know.”
There’s a ladder at the end of each car, and without another word Bix turns around and, with one hand still holding his cornet, he starts to climb it.
“Where are you going?”
He stops and looks down on me.
“How many trains have you been on in your life?”
“A couple hundred.”
“And you’ve never done this?”
Before I can say, “No,” he’s already turned back around and climbed up into the shadows. I follow him.
At the top of the car the edges are rounded, probably to help it cut through the wind, but most of the roof is flat. When I get up there, Bix is already about 20 feet from the ladder, in the middle of the car, lying on his back and looking up at the stars. I sit down next to him.
“Benny and I saw you guys play against Henderson’s band at Roseland last year. I guess I can see why you’d want to play with them — but you guys beat them that night.”
Bix goes back to playing. Since we’re on the roof of the train, he’s playing louder now. He reprises his jazz version of one of the arias we listened to in Ruth’s compartment. Then he stops.
“That was a great night in Roseland, because it showed us we could play with the coloreds, we could play as good as them. I don’t think any of us thought we could play jazz as well as them before that night. But after that, we got so much confidence that everyone in our band kept getting better.
“We had to play against the colored guys to realize we were good enough to play with them.”
I tell Bix about the Shaw kid I’d met in Cleveland, about his desperation to play with coloreds.
“Never heard of him. But a lot of us feel the same way. We just want to play together. What about you guys?”
“Ballplayers? Honestly, we don’t talk about it much. Most guys just think it’s the way it’s going to stay. And, trust me, none of the Southern guys want to play with the coloreds. Hell, Judge Landis doesn’t want us playing against them — I’ve heard he’s even trying to cut down on major leaguers barnstorming against Negro teams.
“Ruth heard that and said Landis can go fuck himself. Of course, the last time Ruth played in exhibition games after Landis told him not to, it got him and Meusel suspended for over a month without pay, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens after the World Series this year, when the Babe goes barnstorming, just who he plays against. ’Cause all of his games against colored teams sell out.
“I’ve just started to wonder about this stuff,” I tell Bix. “I used to think it was just the way the world’s supposed to be.”
The train is slowing down. I look at my watch. It’s almost two o’clock. “Cedar Rapids,” says Bix.
We both stand up on the train and look ahead. We can see the lights of the station and a crowd of maybe a thousand people who’ve come out in the middle of the night just for a chance to see the Babe.
Bix winks at me and then sprints down to the front end of the car and jumps onto the car in front of us. “What the hell, I’m out of the rotation,” I say to myself, as I go running after him.
“Hey, Bix! Bix!” I shout to him. “You’re going the wrong way! We need to go to the back! That’s where Ruth will be.”
And so, like two kids running through a back alley, we scamper to the back of the train. There, Bix sets himself, and as the train comes to a halt he begins playing “I’m Coming Virginia,” louder and more crystal clear than he’s played all night.
“I bet they think this is the way we always pull into town at night,” I shout to him.
Then we hear the roar as Ruth walks out onto the back platform of the car beneath us and waves to the crowd. As always, he’s brought a reluctant Gehrig along with him.
Standing on roof of the car, on the edge right over Ruth and Gehrig, Bix starts playing “Singin’ the Blues.” His notes shoot through us all.
“Hey, everybody!” shouts a very surprised Ruth. “Say hello to my pal, Bix!”
- LOUIS ‘POPS’ Armstrong
- BIX Beiderbecke
- BENNY Bengough
- Bing Crosby
- Jean Goldkette
- Fletcher Henderson
- BABE Ruth
- Artie Shaw
- Paul Whiteman
- 1927 Yankees
- Battle of the Bands: Fletcher Henderson vs. Jean Goldkette
- “The Fire Party”
- “I’m Coming Virginia”
- “The Kid” (Artie Shaw): Diary Entry for Thursday, July 14, 1927
- “Rhapsody in Blue”
- Ruth’s Suspension For Barnstorming (1922)
- YouTube: “BIX BEIDERBECKE with members of Jean Goldkette’s Orchestra — 1926 — (re-posted footage)”
