David AlmBy many jazz experts' accounts, the genre had two grandfathers, separated by a little less than a thousand miles along the Mississippi River: Louis Armstrong, in New Orleans, and Leon Bismarck "Bix" Beiderbecke in Davenport, Iowa. Davenport, Iowa, is known more for its surrounding cornfields and being a campaign stop for presidential hopefuls courting the Middle American electorate. But it was in that dusty Midwestern city where Bix Beiderbecke was born, in 1903, just two years after Armstrong's birth, and where he developed a reputation for his preternatural musical skill. On August 3rd, the first-ever museum dedicated entirely to Bix Beiderbecke will open in Davenport, coinciding with that city's annual Bix Jazz Festival and the better-known Bix 7 road race. Most of the items were purchased from the collections of Phil and Linda Evans, authors of two Bix biographies, Bix: the Leon Bix Beiderbecke Story and Bix, Man and Legend.

Source: Forbes July 28, 2017 20:48 UTC