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BIX FEST 2016 HOW TO
“We had to figure out how to display it,” Hines said, “because there are certain pages where there are certain names that are interesting. Now, of course, museum visitors will be able to stand next to the real deal. Clearly, nobody was getting access to the original thing.” ” He said he’s seen pictures of pages from the register, “but it’s always been images that are kind of scratchy, like photocopy, photocopy, photocopy – copy after copy. “It was found in the collections of Liz Beiderbecke-Hart. “This has just kind of appeared” in the past three months, Hines said. Near the piano will be the register from Bix’s funeral, which serves as a testament to both his tragically short life and the impact that life had on his contemporaries. “They had no idea who Bix was, or any of the history of this piano.” Haim has loaned it to the Bix museum. in the home of a couple with two girls who were learning to play the piano,” Braren said. “It wound up in Suffolk County, Long Island.
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Braren said that “nobody knew where the heck that piano went,” but Haim tracked it through five different owners.
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He knew the make of the piano and got its serial number from the manufacturer, and then spent a year finding it. Howard Braren, the museum’s board president, explained that Burnie – then the sexton at Oakdale cemetery, where Bix is buried – gave the nine- or 10-year-old Gast the instrument when the boy helped pull weeds.Īnd there’s the Wurlitzer baby grand, the only piano Bix ever owned, which was purchased by Bix scholar Albert Haim. There’s also a cornet owned by Bix that was given to Gene Gast by the jazz musician’s brother Burnie. I think: What do I have of my children when they were young that I treasured?. “He died in 1931 we still have his vest that he wore in junior high school. “There’s anything and everything” in the 1,500-square-foot museum, said Bix historian Geri Bowers. As project manager Carol Schaefer said: “We need to bring his story together in one place, along with memorabilia that’s scattered basically all over the world so that Bix followers can really have a home to go to.” The museum pulls heavily from a pair of collections it purchased, but its objects come from far and wide. While that might be typical of a biographical museum, the process of collecting those impressions and putting them under one roof has required extraordinary effort over decades.
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BIX FEST 2016 ARCHIVE
When the Bix Beiderbecke Museum & Archive opens to the public on July 24 in the River Music Experience basement, a major draw will be seeing and being in the presence of artifacts from the legendary jazz cornetist’s life – clothes he wore, instruments he played, reproductions of letters he wrote.Īs museum developer Joe Hines said: “An exhibit like this doesn’t offer explanations it impressions.” (Author’s note: After this article was published, the opening date of the museum was changed to Thursday, August 3.)
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