Recently I saw a Quad-City Times story about yet another book purporting to enlighten the public about the life and career of Bix Beiderbecke. I also saw the author’s unkind criticism of Bill Wundram in a recent column in these pages [of the Quad City Times]. Bill came far closer to the essence of Bix. His many interviews with family and friends have become an important contribution to the Bix Museum archives.
As I have been living in Shanghai, China, for the past few years, keeping up to date on the latest rubbish about Bix isn’t something I go out of my way to do. I stay away from it as much as possible because it is endless.
As a means of introduction, I am the one who helped Philip Evans for over 20 years with his lifelong research on Bix. After Phil’s death, I inherited his archives, and now they reside at the new Bix Museum in Davenport. It was because of the efforts of his late wife, Linda, and me that Phil published his last book on Bix, focused primarily on day-to-day facts and not so much on stories.
The archives include thousands of letters from those who knew Bix personally, as well as hundreds of hours of taped interviews. After Phil’s death, I spent 15 years restoring and preserving more than two-dozen crates of letters, articles, photographs and tape recordings.
This latest “biographer,” Brendan Wolfe, after a brief phone call, never contacted me
