Bix Biederbecke: Bix Lives.

Bix Beiderbecke: Bix Lives-Ignore the Presleyesque title. These are 23 cuts of prime Beiderbecke, mostly with the Paul Whiteman hot section, and include some good scatting by Bing Crosby in his soprano days. If Bix was in a band, you could hear him even if he was only playing lead cornet. His phrasing, intonation, melodic line, and cadence were unique, as were his solo bursts of emotion. Even at his most exuberant, there was a plangency to his expression that at late-night jam sessions must have been overwhelming (Bluebird 6845-2-RB).

It was my fear, when CDs began replacing LPs, that much of the great old and righteous jazz would be lost. But the CD jazz library continues to grow gracias a Dios and the record companies-and I will try to keep the aficionados informed.

KURT WEILL was a composer of considerable distinction who translated to the musical stage both the dissonances and atonalities of the music of this century's first decades, and the moodiness, bitterness, and intellectual corruption of Weimar Germany. His Threepenny Opera, derived from but lacking the light-hearted cynicism of John Gay's Beggar's Opera, is a document of that era and that provenance.- So too is The Seven Deadly Sins, whose book also was by that Communist dramatic laurcate, the grim Bertolt Brecht. The Sins on stage was an unusual combination of ballet and morality-sung, spoken, and dancedbroken up not into scenes but into seven parts, one for each sin. It was produced in Paris not long before World War II with choreography by Balanchine. But I suspect that as a CD recording, with Julia Migenes as the two Annas and the London Symphony Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas, it will be far more successful than the staged ballet drama. The score overcomes the message, which is not a very convincing one, and Julia Migenes's interpretation has just the shade of acerbic desperation that is called for (CBS Masterworks MK44529).