Benny Goodman, Jimmy Dorsey and Bix Beiderbecke all launched their careers at the Sunset.

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Now Bix Beiderbecke it happened to, Fats Waller wasn't too old, Charlie Parker, Frankie Teschmaker.

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That's partly what motivates Bix, a bespectacled, bicycle-riding grandfather who teaches at Tokyo's prestigious Hitotsubashi University.

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"He was not an evil man, " Bix says of his subject.

CNN: ASIANOW - TIME Asia | Lesser Majesty

"The taboo on the monarchy is still alive today, " Bix says.

CNN: ASIANOW - TIME Asia | Lesser Majesty

Though he was born in London, his family moved to Chicago and Styne soon found himself playing in dance bands with musicians like Bix Beiderbecke and Benny Goodman.

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He added jazz to his critical portfolio two years later, publishing some of the first essays of substance about such now-legendary artists as Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman.

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Bix devoted more than a decade to his research.

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Laura Bix, an associate professor of packaging at Michigan State University, published a small study in 2012 in online journal PLOS One that found young and old people look at pill bottles differently.

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Fully titled "There Ain't No Sweet Man That's Worth the Salt of My Tears, " the track uses the classic disc (also 1928) by Paul Whiteman's Orchestra with Bix Beiderbecke and Bing Crosby as a starting point, with an unmistakably similar two-beat underpinning, a slow grind that makes it impossible to pin it down either rhythmically or chronologically.

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