Carmichael’s on His Mind

Hoagy Bix Carmichael carries not one but two of the most important names in American music. The son of the composer of “Skylark,” Georgia on My Mind,” “Stardust” and a host of other immortal songs gets his middle name from his father’s greatest inspiration, jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke.

“I don’t have to explain that my first son, I named in part after my memory of Bix,” Carmichael wrote in his 1965 autobiography, “Sometimes I Wonder.”

“Yes, the name carries some baggage,” says Hoagy Bix Carmichael, who will be in Southern California this weekend as the producer of the Hoagy Carmichael Centennial Celebration at several Southland venues. (Carmichael senior was born in Bloomington, Ind., on Nov. 22, 1899, and died in 1981.)

“My father was this little 5-foot-7-inch guy with a law degree, with no formal musical training, no acting credentials, who wasn’t a crooner but was in some wonderful films (even stole a couple of them) and wrote some of the greatest songs of the 20th century.”

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Though Beiderbecke died at the age of 28 in 1931, seven years after first meeting Carmichael and seven years before Carmichael’s son was born, the troubled cornetist loomed large in Hoagy Bix’s early years.

“Dad remembered the jazz riffs that he heard Bix play and they inspired entire melodies. One of them led to ‘Skylark.’

“Bix really took to dad, made him understand that he had more than the usual amount of talent. It must have been like Mickey Mantle saying, ‘Keep swinging, kid, and you can play next to me.’ Bix would say, ‘C’mon, Hoag, let’s go record some of your stuff.’ It had to be heady.”

The young Carmichael grew up in Hollywood, where his father had come to write songs for the movies and ended up appearing in “To Have and Have Not,” “The Best Years of Our Lives” and “Young Man With a Horn.”

“I remember some of the great lyricists coming over to the house,” said Carmichael, who learned to play drums as kid, though he never pursued it professionally. “Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser, Harry Warren. I wish I had been older then.”

“[My brother Randy] and I had to be pretty quiet hanging around the house while Dad was working. But I didn’t want to hang around. I wanted to be outside catching frogs. When he was working, he’d march us into the den and play something he was working and say, ‘What do you think, kids?’ All I wanted to do was get outside.”

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Some experiences were more memorable.

“Dad took us to the studio once and we met Victor Mature, who we’d just seen in the movie ‘Samson [and Delilah].’ [Mature] stood between a couple walls on a sound stage and started pushing on them like Samson, and we went running out of there.”

But in many ways, Carmichael was just a regular dad.

“I remember he took a block of time off in 1950 to help me build a Soap Box Derby racer. He had some ideas that nobody else would have thought of, and we made a very unusual design. He put piano wire in the wheel wells, because it wouldn’t stay bent, to give them weight and momentum.”

Carmichael now manages his father’s catalog, is working on a Broadway production of his father’s life and is the producer and artistic director of the 50-city centennial tour.

The performance features a 14-piece orchestra under the direction of pianist Tom Fay, the Small Fry vocal quartet (Carmichael’s song “Small Fry” was written for his son), vocalists Dwayne Grayman and Becky Lillie and tap-dancer Tony Waag.

“We’ll trot out about 25 of the songs, most with new arrangements. And we’ll follow ‘Stardust’ chronologically from its first piano recording in 1927, through the Louis Armstrong version of 1931, the Artie Shaw version and our own big-band arrangement,” Carmichael said.

“And between songs, the emcee will tell stories.”

Is the vision most of us have of Carmichael--a thin man seated on a piano bench in a slouch hat while puffing a cigarette as in “Young Man With a Horn”--true to life?

“It’s very close,” his son said. “Although he had this Hollywood thing that swept over him and the sun shone and the money came out, he was still always that Midwestern guy. You can hear it in his music.”

BE THERE

The Hoagy Carmichael Centennial Celebration opens tonight) at 8 at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, 2100 Thousand Oaks Blvd., (805) 449-2787; Friday at 7:30 p.m. at the Ocean Hills Society for the Performing Arts, 4600 Leisure Village Way, Oceanside, (760) 758-8772; Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Haugh Performing Arts Center, Citrus College, 1000 W. Foothill Blvd., Glendora, (626) 963-9411; and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive, (800) 300-4345.