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Bunny Berigan: Elusive Legend of Jazz
by Robert Dupuis
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.
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