Music: Like BIX

From a loudspeaker outside the Brass Rail Theater Bar, a smoky, crowded joint on Chicago’s brassy Randolph Street, came hard, driving music. One old connoisseur who heard it stopped in his tracks and said, “My God. it’s Bix.” But the sign in the window said Jimmy MacPartland. It was Jimmy playing the golden cornet that Jazz Immortal Bix Beiderbecke had given him years ago.

Jimmy MacPartland was back home last week. He was the only survivor in those parts” of the “Austin High gang,” some of whom had gone to school together on Chicago’s West Side. Saxophonist Bud Freeman, Drummer Dave Tough and Guitarist Eddie Condon were playing in Manhattan.

Jimmy was 40 now but looked 30. On a stage stuck up behind the bar Jimmy drove out Jazz Me Blues and Nobody’s Sweetheart in the same hard, terse, middle-range phrases that Chicago jazz fans had first heard in the ‘205.

The Gang. Twenty-five years ago, Jimmy was a thin, good-looking kid who had been playing the cornet ever since he could remember. He and the gang at Austin High spent their time practicing in vacant houses, playing for P.T.A.-sponsored dances and listening to an old jukebox in the Straw and Spoon, a Coke joint across the street from Austin High. When they weren’t practicing themselves, they were listening to the big-timers—to King Oliver, the great New Orleans Negro trumpeter, or Beiderbecke and the Wolverines. Other Chicago kids began sitting in with the Austin High gang—one was a Hull House kid named Benny Goodman. When Bix left the Wolverines in Manhattan in 1924, they called for Jimmy, whom Bix once called “the greatest white trumpet man in the world.” Later, Jimmy joined Ben Pollack’s famed dance band. He and Benny Goodman quit when Pollack bawled them out one night for coming to work in dirty shoes. After his wife left him in 1932 Jimmy went off to the Caribbean on a cattle boat, lay on the beach for a year, playing in tinny Latin bands from Havana to Panama. In the swing boom of the mid-’30s, he had a brief burst of glory with a band that included such jazz names as George Wettling, Eddie Condon, Pee Wee Russell, Georg Brunis and Mel Powell.

Blue Bells for Scotland. When the war broke out, Jimmy joined the Army and asked for combat. When his troopship docked in Scotland, he stood in the bow with his golden cornet and played The Blue Bells of Scotland, sweet and lovingly. Then he broke into half a dozen low-driving hot choruses. One witness said: “They like to never got that ship docked. That horn held up the war.” Jimmy kept Bix’s golden horn in his pack when he landed in Normandy. One night, at a U.S.O. show, he met a girl named Marion Page, billed as “England’s Queen of the Swing Piano.” He got himself put on detached service so he could travel with the show, married the girl, and fought the rest of the war with his cornet.

Last week, in the Brass Rail, the backing Jimmy was getting was pretty bad. The drum was off the beat and wife Marion’s piano was a little too refined. But people said Jimmy had never been better. Said one: “He’s still got it . . . it’s good . . . it’s like Bix.”

* Still blowing hot, that is. Jim Lannigan went classical, and is blowing col’d.