Is This Heaven? No, It's Iowa.

With a jazz festival thrown in.

Was I in Heaven?  No, I was in Iowa.  But I had a pretty good time.  Weekend before last, I traveled to Iowa, and I have some things to report.

Because some of these things are in the way of personal information, I’m making this for paid subscribers only.  What things do I have to report?

Not so much political things, because there’s more to Iowa than corn and politics.  Instead, I went with my mother, daughter, and son-in-law to the Bix Biederbecke International Jazz Festival, which takes place every year (except for a Covid-induced gap) in Bix’s birthplace of Davenport.  Some of the Biederbecke family is there every year, and this year was no exception.

We went because my mother is a towering figure in the world of Bix Biederbecke fandom.  (No, I’m not the first generation of geeks in my family.).  She’s been a huge Bix fan since even before the Bix revival in the 1970s.  Though he died long before she was born, she collected jazz records in her youth, and bought many, used, from a local jukebox company at deeply discounted prices.  She still has those on 78 and 45.  There’s a lot of old Louis Armstrong, mostly from the Hot Five and Hot Seven days (I remember she has one record where Jack Teagarden plays a trombone with the bell removed and a water glass mute), a lot of other stuff, and some Bix.  Somehow, it was the Bix stuff that spoke to her the most.