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Getting started
A Review by John Mole

Mention Bunny Berigan to jazz enthusiasts and almost certainly they will respond with a song title, "I Can't Get Started". Louis Armstrong bought five copies of this sensational 1937 hit from his favourite Harlem record store, and when he was later asked why he never recorded it himself replied "That's Bunny's. You just don't touch that one since he made it". According to Robert Dupuis's exhaustively researched biography, it was still to be found in the early 1990s on jukeboxes throughout the United States.

Like Bix Beiderbecke, whose short but brilliant career ran in such close parallel that Dupuis devotes one of his most illuminating chapters to a comparison of this pair of gifted white trumpeters, Berigan was much loved and much forgiven by fellow musicians. He was the act they all queued up to hear. The "drinking exploits" of the two BBs receive heavy emphasis in the legends that surround them, but Dupuis is intent on lightening the load. His book is clearly a labour of deep affection, and this rather touchingly shines through even at the many points where it is in danger of becoming a compilation of personnel changes, disc details, and repetitive anecdotes from sidemen and relatives. Invaluable to Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, Berigan's capacity for interrupting bland commercial swing arrangements with his electrifying solos is duly celebrated and examined, while the unworldliness which undermined his own efforts as a bandleader (despite that one great hit) is also sympathetically acknowledged.

Dupuis opens and closes with accounts of his visits to the annual Bunny Berigan day at Fox Lake, Wisconsin, Berigan's birthplace. Here he becomes one of the congregation of die-hard fans, and he writes with an endearing amateurism. Listening to a young trumpet player attempting to imitate the recorded solo on "I Can't Get Started", Dupuis is with him all the way, note by note and phrase by phrase: "Whew! My palms are wet with empathetic sweat". Whew!, indeed. A sentence like that recalls the vintage lingo of Billboard, much quoted throughout, and upholds the tradition.

John Mole's Counting the Chimes: New and selected poems was published in the U. K. last year.