In a gloomy March weekend in a windowless banquet room at the Kenosha Holiday Inn, a group of determined people are trying to raise the dead. It doesn’t look like a seance–most of the attendees are eating cake, sipping coffee and beer, and munching on sandwiches. The rest are onstage, playing a form of music known as “hot jazz.”
Three weeks before this year’s event, Pospychala is frantically searching for an E-flat tuba for the West Jesmond Rhythm Kings, a hot-jazz band from England. It’s too expensive to ship the large instrument, and local music shops don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. He’s also worrying about the lighting in the Racine banquet room, which is inadequate for live performance, and lining up other gigs for the musicians so that traveling to Wisconsin will be worth their while.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“This is way too much work, and I can’t trust anyone else to handle it,” Pospychala grumbles, trying to coordinate the details from his cluttered, pet-filled home in Libertyville. “But when you’re doing this, you get on a high. And for four days, I’m a little emperor.”
“We 78 collectors don’t want to hear anything else,” Pospychala says, raving about the laminated Okeh disks for their “beautiful surfaces and wonderful fidelity.” In fact Pospychala does a brisk trade buying and selling 78s on eBay, which helps make up for his losses on the festival.
Bix, who got his start in Chicago, played with many of the era’s finest jazzmen. A portion of the monolithic Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns documentary is dedicated to Bix–with photos and information provided by Pospychala. Although some purists say Bix’s playing couldn’t touch Armstrong’s, there’s no denying that Bix was and is a formidable influence on jazz. In the foreword to Phil and Linda Evans’s Bix: The Leon Bix Beiderbecke Story, Tom Pletcher writes that “his tone, vibrato and selection of notes could express passion, joy, sadness or humor….No jazz musician before or since could capture so much emotion.” Guitarist Eddie Condon is quoted as saying that Bix’s playing “sounded like a girl saying yes.”
Kicked out of Lake Forest Academy at 18, shortly after he started there, Bix headed to Chicago, where he formed a band with two Northwestern University students. Their seven-piece group, the Wolverines, played the midwest and cut records in Indiana. Bix went on to play with some of the most popular bandleaders of the day, such as Jean Goldkette and Paul Whiteman. However, large commercial orchestras didn’t always afford him the creativity he needed, and since he played almost entirely by ear, he struggled with the complex charts. He died from pneumonia complicated by years of excessive drinking at the age of 28.
Besides organizing the Bix fest, Pospychala is a die-hard beer can collector, beer drinker (he wrote for Barfly), and brewery fan. On his four-hour bus tours to the sites of historical north- and south-side breweries (which originate at the Goose Island Brewpub), “We give them a little bit of Elliott Ness and a lot of Chicago history,” he says.
