Bechet was the very epitome of Jazz…
Everything he played in his whole life was completely original.
I honestly think he was the most unique man ever to be in this music.
……Duke Ellington
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Sidney Bechet (May 14, 1897 – May 14, 1959) was an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, and composer.
Bechet's mercurial temperament hampered his career, however, and not until the late 1940s did he earn wide acclaim.
Biography
Bechet was born in New Orleans. From a young age, Bechet quickly mastered any musical instrument he encountered. Some New Orleanians remembered him as a cornet hot-shot in his youth. At first he decided on the clarinet as his main instrument and Bechet remained one of jazz's greatest clarinetists for decades. The clarinetist Jimmie Noone, who became famous in his own right, took lessons from Bechet when the latter was only thirteen-years old. Despite his prowess on clarinet, Bechet became best remembered as the first great master of the soprano saxophone.
Bechet had experience playing in traveling shows even before he left New Orleans at the age of twenty. Never long content in one place, he alternated using Chicago, New York, and Europe as his base of operations. Bechet was jailed [2] in Paris, France when a female [3] passerby was wounded during a pistol duel (which Bechet had instigated in an argument over chord changes); after serving jail time, Bechet was deported.
He continued recording and touring, although his success was intermittent.
Bechet relocated to France in 1950. He married Elisabeth Ziegler in Antibes, France in 1951. Existentialists in France called him "le dieu".
Shortly before his death in Paris, Bechet dictated his poetic autobiography, Treat It Gentle. He died from lung cancer on his sixty-second birthday.
Career highlights
Bechet successfully composed in jazz, pop-tune, and extended concert work forms. He never learned to read music, he developed his own fingering system, and he never played section parts in a big band or swing-style combo. His recordings often have been reissued.
Some of the highlights of his career include 1923 sides with Louis Armstrong in "Clarence Williams Blue Five"; the 1932, 1940, 1941 "New Orleans Feetwarmers" sides; a 1938 "Tommy Ladnier Orchestra" session ("Weary Blues", "Really the Blues"); a hit 1938 recording of "Summertime"; and various versions of his own composition, "Petite Fleur".
On April 18, 1941, as an early experiment in overdubbing at RCA Studios on 24th street in New York City, Bechet recorded a version of the pop song "Sheik of Araby", playing six different instruments: clarinet, soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone, piano, bass, and drums. A theretofore unissued master of this recording was included in the 1965 LP Bechet of New Orleans, issued by RCA Victor as LPV-510. On the liner notes, George Hoeffer quotes Sidney as follows: "I started by playing The Sheik on piano, and played the drums while listening to the piano. I meant to play all the rhythm instruments, but got all mixed up and grabbed my soprano, then the bass, then the tenor saxophone, and finally finished up with the clarinet."
In 1944, 1946, and 1953 he recorded and performed in concert with Chicago Jazz Pianist and Vibraphonist Max Miller, private recordings which are part of the Max Miller archive and have never been released. These concerts and recordings are covered completely in John Chilton's great book on Bechet.
Bechet was an important influence on alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges, who studied with Bechet as a teenager.
In 1968, Bechet was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame.
The New York Times music writer Robert Palmer wrote of Bechet that, "by combining the 'cry' of the blues players and the finesse of the Creoles into his 'own way,' Sidney Bechet created a style which moved the emotions even as it dazzled the mind."[5]
Tributes
Renowned blues harmonica player Sugar Blue claims to have taken his name from the Bechet recording "Sugar Blues".
Philip Larkin wrote an ode to Bechet in The Whitsun Weddings.
Bechet is said to have served as a prototype for the saxophonist "Pablo" in the novel Steppenwolf, since it was almost certainly through listening to his playing in Europe in the 1920s that Hermann Hesse became acquainted with the world of jazz music.
Bechet to me was the very epitome of jazz... everything he played in his whole life was completely original. I honestly think he was the most unique man to ever be in this music. — Duke Ellington
In the 1997 documentary Wild Man Blues, filmmaker and clarinet aficionado Woody Allen repeatedly refers to Sidney Bechet. One of his adopted children with Soon-Yi Previn also is named Bechet.
Bechet, portrayed by Jeffrey Wright appeared as a character in two episodes of the television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
Bechet performs at an underground Paris jazz club in the novel Replay by Ken Grimwood. This appearance is slightly anachronistic, as the scene takes place in 1963 even though Bechet died in 1959.
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Biography by Scott Yanow
Sidney Bechet was the first important jazz soloist on records in history (beating Louis Armstrong by a few months). A brilliant soprano saxophonist and clarinetist with a wide vibrato that listeners either loved or hated, Bechet's style did not evolve much through the years but he never lost his enthusiasm or creativity. A master at both individual and collective improvisation within the genre of New Orleans jazz, Bechet was such a dominant player that trumpeters found it very difficult to play with him. Bechet wanted to play lead and it was up to the other horns to stay out of his way.
Sidney Bechet studied clarinet in New Orleans with Lorenzo Tio, Big Eye Louis Nelson, and George Baquet and he developed so quickly that as a child he was playing with some of the top bands in the city. He even taught clarinet, and one of his students (Jimmie Noone) was actually two years older than him. In 1917, he traveled to Chicago, and in 1919 he joined Will Marion Cook's orchestra, touring Europe with Cook and receiving a remarkably perceptive review from Ernst Ansermet. While overseas he found a soprano sax in a store and from then on it was his main instrument. Back in the U.S., Bechet made his recording debut in 1923 with Clarence Williams and during the next two years he appeared on records backing blues singers, interacting with Louis Armstrong and playing some stunning solos. He was with Duke Ellington's early orchestra for a period and at one point hired a young Johnny Hodges for his own band. However, from 1925-1929 Bechet was overseas, traveling as far as Russia but getting in trouble (and spending jail time) in France before being deported.
Most of the 1930s were comparatively lean times for Bechet. He worked with Noble Sissle on and off and had a brilliant session with his New Orleans Feetwarmers in 1932 (featuring trumpeter Tommy Ladnier). But he also ran a tailor's shop which was more notable for its jam sessions than for any money it might make. However, in 1938 he had a hit recording of "Summertime," Hugues Panassie featured Bechet on some records and soon he was signed to Bluebird where he recorded quite a few classics during the next three years. Bechet worked regularly in New York, appeared on some of Eddie Condon's Town Hall concerts, and in 1945 he tried unsuccessfully to have a band with the veteran trumpeter Bunk Johnson (whose constant drinking killed the project). Jobs began to dry up about this time, and Bechet opened up what he hoped would be a music school. He only had one main pupil, but Bob Wilber became his protégé.
Sidney Bechet's fortunes changed drastically in 1949. He was invited to the Salle Pleyel Jazz Festival in Paris, caused a sensation, and decided to move permanently overseas. Within a couple years he was a major celebrity and a national hero in France, even though the general public in the U.S. never did know who he was. Bechet's last decade was filled with exciting concerts, many recordings, and infrequent visits back to the U.S. before his death from cancer. His colorful (if sometimes fanciful) memoirs Treat It Gentle and John Chilton's magnificent Bechet biography The Wizard of Jazz (which traces his life nearly week-by-week) are both highly recommended. Many of Sidney Bechet's recordings are currently available on CD.
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Who was Sidney Bechet?
Sidney Bechet: The Almost-Forgotten Jazz Immortal
Who was the New Orleans jazz pioneer who did most to make this music a unique art form? When this question is asked, the name of Louis Armstrong invariably comes to mind, and rightly so.
But there is another jazz musician whose name deserves to be coupled with Armstrong as the greatest of the New Orleans Jazz players. His name is Sidney Bechet.
Bechet was born in New Orleans in May 1897, just three years before his compatriot, Louis Armstrong. Although the two boys grew up in the same city, their home environments were worlds apart.
Armstrong grew up in dire poverty, living alternately with his mother and a succession of "stepfathers" and his grandmother, and spending time in a reform school.
Sidney Bechet, who was of Creole ancestry, grew up in a middle class environment. His father, Omar, who was a shoemaker, played the flute as a hobby. Indeed, music had an important role in the Bechet household, as Sidney's four brothers also played instruments.
His brother, Leonard, played the clarinet and trombone, and it was to the former instrument that eight-year-old Sidney was attracted. Leonard, whose main interest was the trombone, passed along his clarinet to his younger brother.
At first, Sidney played in the family musicales - waltzes, quadrilles, the polite music of the middle class. But as he grew into adolescence, Sidney was attracted to the syncopated music played in the dance halls and brothels in the Storyville District of New Orleans.
As a boy, he would watch the street parades in which jazz bands played. Young Sidney was so attracted to the music, that he often played hooky from school. And as he became more proficient on the clarinet, Sidney played in local jazz bands, such as the Young Olympians. His playing so impressed Bunk Johnson, the legendary cornet player, that Sidney was invited to join Johnson's band, the Eagle Band. Sidney gained much experience, playing in dance halls, and for picnics, and parties.
Bechet left New Orleans for the first time when he was 19, traveling to Chicago with pianist, Clarence Williams and his variety show. Bechet's big break came in 1919 when the composer-conductor Will Marion Cook asked him to join his Southern Syncopated Orchestra for an engagement in London.
Here Bechet came to the attention of the noted Swiss Conductor, Ernst Ansermet, who conducted the music of Stravinsky for the Ballets Russa. Ansermet wrote in a Swiss musical Journal, "The extraordinary clarinet virtuoso Bechet is an artist of genius!"
Sidney Bechet eventually became even better known as a virtuoso of the soprano saxophone. He first tried to play on a beat-up old soprano sax he purchased in a pawn shop. Such was the difficulty of the soprano sax, an instrument extremely difficult to play in tune, that Bechet gave up and obtained his money back from the pawnbroker.
A year latter in London, Bechet purchased a brand new instrument and tried again. This time he was successful and succeeded in making the soprano saxophone an important voice in jazz.
Bechet played both the clarinet and soprano saxophone with a broad vibrato, a characteristic that gave passion and intensity to his playing.
Much of Sidney Bechet's subsequent career was spent abroad. In 1925 he played in Claude Hopkin's band, which was accompanying a revue starring Josephine Baker. Bechet also played in bands led by Noble Sissle in London and Paris, and later, in the United States. Some of the numbers performed and recorded by Bechet with Nobel Sissle are Loveless Love, Polka Dot Rag, and Dear Old Southland.
In 1932, Bechet and his friend, trumpet player Tommy Ladnier, formed their own band, the New Orleans Feetwarmers. When engagements for the Feetwarmers became scarce, Ladnier and Bechet opened a dry cleaning shop in Harlem. Bechet became quite adept at pressing and altering clothes.
Sidney Bechet's association with Brooklyn began in 1945 when he moved into a house at 160 Quincy Street. To augment the unstable income of a jazz musician, Bechet began teaching music. The adolescent that became his star pupil and disciple was Bob Wilber, then still in high school. Bechet taught Wilber the rudiments of both the clarinet and soprano saxophone. When he finished high school, Wilber moved into the Quincy Street house with Bechet so that he could have longer and more frequent lessons. Today, Bob Wilber is a leading exponent of the soprano sax and clarinet, and with his own group, the Bechet Legacy, he plays in the Bechet tradition.
Much of the latter part of his life, Bechet spent in France. Many of his compositions are inspired by his love for that country. They include Petite Fleur, Rue des Champs Elysees, and Si tous vois ma mere. Other Bechet compositions include Chant in the Night, Blues in the Air, Bechet's Fantasy, and his ode to his Brooklyn home, Quincy Street Stomp.
Sidney Bechet died in Paris, May 14, 1959. In July 1997, The Sidney Bechet Society has been formed to perpetuate the name and fame of Sidney Bechet. To that end, the Sidney Bechet Society sponsors concerts, symposia, in-depth studies, a newsletter, change the name of Quincy Street to Bechet Street and a Website to carry the appreciation of this great jazz pioneer into the next century.
Source: http://www.sidneybechet.org/
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Sidney Bechet was a child prodigy in New Orleans. He was such good clarinet player that, in his youth he was featured by some of the top bands in the city. Bechet's style of playing clarinet and soprano sax dominated many of the bands that he was in. He played lead parts that were usually reserved for trumpets and was a master of improvisation. In 1917 he moved to Chicago. In 1919 he was playing with Will Marion Cook's Syncopated Orchestra and with Louis Mitchell's Jazz Kings in Europe. While overseas he bought a soprano sax and from then on it was his main instrument. Back in the U.S. Bechet made his recording debut in 1923 with Clarence Williams and during the next two years he appeared on several of Williams' records backing up blues singers and on a classic session with the Clarence Williams Blue Five, featuring Louis Armstrong whom he knew as a child in New Orleans. He played in an early version of Duke Ellington's Washingtonians but unfortunately never recorded with them. From 1925 to 1929 Bechet lived and played in Europe, playing in England, France, Germany and Russia. While living in Paris, Bechet got into a dispute with another musician and a gun fight broke out. Three people were wounded and Sidney spent a year in a French jail as a result of the fracas. He was deported upon release from prison and went to Berlin, Germany. He could not stay in France and he would not get a visa for England so he stayed in Berlin till 1931 then joined the Noble Sissle Orchestra and returned to America. Bechet managed to keep playing during the Thirties, but he also ran an unsuccessful tailor's shop with Tommy Ladnier and made some memorable recordings with the trumpeter under the name of the New Orleans Feetwarmers. In 1938 he had a hit record of "Summertime". In the Forties Bechet worked regularly in New York with Eddie Condon and tried to start a band with Bunk Johnson. Bechet was a popular figure of the Dixieland revival of the late Forties often recording with Mezz Mezzrow. Bechet returned to France in 1952 and was warmly received there. While in France he recorded hit records that rivaled the sales of pop stars. Bechet was one of the great soloists of early Jazz. He lived a very rich life, always managing to "make the scene" where it was "happening", whether it be in New Orleans, Chicago, New York, Berlin or Paris.
Here's a special bonus recording courtesy of Verne Buland
This is a strange record. The Sheik Of Araby is an early example of multi-track recording. Sidney Bechet was at the RCA studios on April 18th, 1941 (before tape) and the engineers fiddled with some early multiple recordings. This is the result. Record an instrument, play the record back while he played another instrument along with the record, ad nauseum - the first ones recorded sounding worse each time another record is made. Clarinet, soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone, piano, bass and drums, all played by Bechet. If you can hear the drums, you win a cigar.
Source: http://www.redhotjazz.com/bechet.html
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Sidney Bechet was a proponent of Dixieland Jazz who played the clarinet and was the first person to play Jazz on a Soprano Saxophone. Domineering is a word often used to describe his music. His various fights showed he had a short temper that shows in his music. His solo’s were often soaring and passionate, endlessly inventive, direct rather than ornate, and quite unmistakable. Early recordings show him as Louis Armstrong’s equal and, as he commands the ensemble with his burnished sound, his timing seems more in keeping with a trumpet lead than with the contrapuntal line usually adopted by saxophones and clarinets. Throughout his life, he never had the discipline needed to play in a regular band, he always preferred to be a soloist and worked in many different bands.
1897 Sidney Bechet was born on May 14, in New Orleans, Louisiana, into a "Creole" family. His father ran a shoe shop. All of Bechet’s brothers were keen musicians, but Sidney was the most talented.
1903 Without telling his family, he practiced secretly on his brother Leonard’s clarinet. During a family party he played along side Freddie Keppard. His playing was heard by George Baquet who was amazed by his promise and decided there and then to give him free lessons.
1908 At the age of just 11, he was hired by Bunk Johnson’s Eagle Band.
1910 His mother gave him permission to play in the Storyville clubs, provided that Bunk Johnson, who acted as a kind of guardian, brought him home each night.
1913 He started playing with King Oliver
1915 He made a tour of Texas in a band led by Clarence Williams.
1917 From clubs in Perdido Street in New Orleans he moved to Chicago, first with King Oliver and then Freddie Keppard. Later he left Keppard to play in other bands.
1919 With a band of Will Marion Cook he achieved great personal success in England, earning the admiration, among others, of the conductor Ernest Ansermet. When the band broke up he decided to stay in London with some other members of the band. He stayed there until, following a somewhat immoral adventure, he was hauled before the magistrates and expelled from the country. In addition to his love of traveling, Bechet was also well known for his love of the opposite sex, a fact that often got him into serious trouble.
Also while in London he brought a Soprano Saxophone, a more domineering instrument than the clarinet.
1921 He returned to the United States and got a job with the musical show "How Come?", in which the unknown Bessie Smith made her debut.
1923 He made his first recording with Clarence Williams in the Blue Five and also recorded with Louis Armstrong.
During this period he started to prefer the Soprano Saxophone to the Clarinet.
1924-25 In these years he worked with Mamie Smith, James P. Johnson and Duke Ellington’s Washingtonians. He also found time to manage a night club in Harlem the "Club Basha", but soon gotten tired of that. He also made his debut in Paris in a band led by Claude Hopkins, taking part in a show featuring Josephine Baker. When the show finally ended, in Berlin, Bechet once more indulged his love of traveling by taking part in a tour with Benny Peyton. He ended up in Russia and in Moscow he met Tommy Ladnier, who was also on tour. After this he toured all over Europe before finally going back to Harlem.
1929 He returned to Paris where after an episode of violence in which 3 people were wounded he was sentenced to 11 months in jail and expelled from France.
1928-31 Bechet continued to move back and forth between Europe and the United States. He went to Berlin and (clandestinely) to Paris with Noble Sissle’s band, then to New York and then back to Berlin. He also made a brief appearance with Duke Ellington’s orchestra, just enough to influence the style of Johnny Hodges.
1932 He formed "The New Orleans Feetwarmers" with Tommy Ladnier and recorded some real "gems".
1933 At the end of the year he suddenly decided to give up music to open , in partnership with Tommy Ladnier, a shop for mending and ironing clothes, which they called the "Southern Tailor Shop".
1934 Tired of his business life, Bechet again joined Noble Sissle’s band and made some excellent recordings.
1938 He left Sissle and free-lanced for a while. He took part in the "Panassie Session" with Tommy Ladnier and Milton "Mezz" Mezzrow.
1939 He made a superb recording of "Summertime" with Meade "Lux" Lewis and Teddy Bunn. He also recorded with Jelly Roll Morton.
1940 An extremely important year. He recorded four masterpieces with Louis Armstrong, including "Perdido Street Blues". He also made some excellent recordings with a group known as the "Bechet-Spanier Big Four". He also recorded again with the "New Orleans Feetwarmers", reformed as a studio band. One result was the magnificent "Blues In Thirds" with Bechet on Clarinet and Earl Hines on Piano.
1944-48 During these year’s Bechet used many jazz soloists in his recording sessions: Sidney De Paris, Vic Dickson, Art Hodes, Pops Foster, Max Kaminsky, Albert Nicholas and others. He recorded a series of numbers with Mezz Mezzrow. In 1946 he had an idea of setting up a music school in Brooklyn; his most important pupil was Bob Wilber who recorded with him on several occasions. In 1947 he was a guest on several editions of Rudy Blesh’s radio show "This Is Jazz". In 1948 he played at the Jazz LTD in Chicago.
1949 He took part in the Paris Jazz Festival, organized by Charles Delauney, with triumphant success. The French finally forgot about the sad episode of 1929.
1950-54 Apart from some brief visits to the United States, Bechet lived and worked in Paris; he was literally adored by the French who knew him affectionately as "Le Dieu". His music was praised by Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialists, along with that of Juliette Greco. Bechet played mostly with the traditional bands of Claude Luter and André Reweillotty. In 1952 is song "Petite Fleur" became a world wide hit, and in 1953 his ballet score "La Nuit Est Une Sorciere" premiered in Paris.
1955 Bechet settled in Paris for good.
1957 He recorded an album with Martial Solal, Pierre Michelot and Kenny Clarke, entitled "When a Soprano meets a Piano".
1959 Sidney Bechet died on his sixty-second birthday, May 14. He had 3 wives over his life and kept a mistress to which he had a son to till he died.
The inhabitants of Jean-Les-Pins erected a monument in his honour.
Source: http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/Delta/5853/sid.html
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Sidney Bechet by Peter Stone
Sidney Joseph Bechet, the American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, and composer, was born on May 14, 1897, in New Orleans, Louisiana. One of the first important jazz soloists, his recordings precede those of Louis Armstrong, three years his junior, with whom he would later play duets. Noted for well-conceived improvisations and a wide vibrato on both clarinet and soprano sax — due in no small part to his love of operatic tenors, especially Enrico Caruso — Bechet, though initially making the clarinet his primary instrument, may well have been the first well-known jazz saxophonist and the first great soprano saxophonist, giving it a prominent place in jazz. Bechet’s compositions include jazz and pop-tune forms, as well as extended concert works.
Unlike Louis Armstrong, who grew up, sometimes with his mother and a series of “stepfathers,” sometimes with his grandmother, and sometimes in reform school, Bechet, of Creole ancestry, grew up in a middle class environment. His father, Omar, was shoemaker and an amateur flutist; his four brothers pursued other musical instruments. His brother Leonard (a dentist) played trombone and clarinet. When eight-year-old Sidney gravitated toward the latter, Leonard made him a present of it.
Even in Sidney’s youth he mastered any instrument he tried; indeed, he had started out on cornet. But, John Chilton tells us in his biography, Sidney Bechet: The Wizard of Jazz (London: Macmillan, 1987) that George Baquet, a noted clarinetist, who had coached young Sidney from time to time beginning in 1907, found that Sidney, who had already developed his own fingerings for the instrument, took in everything Baquet had to say about “embouchure, reeds, mouthpieces, and legato and staccato playing, but any talk about reading music ...and studying harmonies seemed to be quite pointless.” Sidney could follow all that without studying chord names or poring over the written score. He remained a non-reader his entire life, depending solely upon his ear.
As part of his research for his book Mr. Jelly Roll, Alan Lomax recorded, in April 1949, first-hand recollections by Sidney’s brother Leonard Bechet, Albert Glenny, Johnny St. Cyr, Alphonse Picou, and Paul Dominguez, Jr., about early New Orleans jazz and Creole music. They recounted that older Creoles had avoided jazz and favored the polite music of their own Down-town dance halls, just as they spoke French or their own patois and attended plays in French in order to maintain their culture. Alphonse Picou was a good clarinetist, Leonard Bechet relates, but he played a cooler “High Society,” not “hot” jazz. Creole society wanted “respectful,...not jazz, [but] nice, music,” so its musicians hesitated to play jazz, the music of “rough, ignorant,... Up-town” New Orleans.
So Sidney and his family performed waltzes, mazurkas, polkas, quadrilles, and schottisches. But the jazz he heard in street bands as a boy and the syncopated music of Up-town dance halls and the brothels of Storyville fascinated him. He played clarinet in the Young Olympians and was so good that Bunk Johnson, the famous cornettist, invited him, sometime between 1911 and 1913, to play in his own Eagle Band, which played dance halls, parties, and picnics, and soon Sidney was featured by some of the top combos in the city. In 1914, he joined Bill Johnson’s New Olympia Band, and played alongside the legendary cornettist Joe “King” Oliver, with whom he later regularly played pool.
Eventually, the Up-town people played so well that they filled the halls, and the Creoles began to mix their music with jazz. According to Leonard, Sidney “learned you had to play real hard when you played for Negroes...and when you played with Negroes.” You had to have “that drive,... like they’re killing themselves.” Liking Bechet’s music, the tough pimps of the community protected him from its dangers, one pimp, in particular, making sure that Sidney dressed well by buying him expensive clothes.
At the age of nineteen, Bechet left New Orleans for Chicago with pianist Clarence Williams. In 1918 he joined Lawrence Duhé’s band, which included Lil Hardin (later to be Louis Armstrong’s wife) as pianist, and “King” Oliver. For Duhé, Sidney was “the featured hot man.” By then he had already played with many traveling shows, but his career was launched in 1919 when conservatory-trained, African-American composer-conductor Will Marion Cook (memorably portrayed in Josef Škvorecký’s novel, Dvořák in Love) asked Sidney to join his Southern Syncopated Orchestra for a performance in London. There, Bechet met the eminent Swiss conductor of the Ballets russes, Ernest Ansermet, famed for his performances of Ravel and Stravinsky.
Bechet’s temper was legend: in September of 1922 he was deported from England, after being arrested for a brawl with some women in a London hotel room. It was not the first (or last) time he was in difficulties because of a battle with or about a woman. In December 1928 in Paris, he had a confrontation over a woman with banjoist Gilbert “Little Mike” McKendrick at Bricktop’s (Ada Smith’s) café. When Bechet later shot at McKendrick, missing and wounding some bystanders, he was arrested and deported from France.
In 1924 Bechet recorded with Louis Armstrong and the “Clarence Williams Blue Five.” In 1925 he joined Claude Hopkins’s band, which accompanied Josephine Baker. In Paris, London, then the United States, he played with Noble Sissle’s group (“Loveless Love,” “ Polka Dot Rag,” and “Dear Old Southland” were some recordings that came of that association). The short-lived New Orleans Feetwarmers, formed by Bechet and his friend, trumpeter Tommy Ladnier, made some recordings in 1932 and had a few dates at New York’s Savoy Ballroom, but when its gigs dried up, the two went into the dry cleaning business. The Southern Tailor Shop had jam sessions in its back room, but it did not last long either. In 1934 Sissle asked Bechet and Ladnier to join his band. Bechet accepted, but Ladnier remained in the tailor shop; when Bechet went back to visit, the shop had disappeared.
Four days after a March 3rd 1940 benefit for the California migrant workers, folksinger Josh White assembled a trio that included bassist Wilson Myers and Sidney Bechet, clarinet, for one of his first recordings for the two-year-old Blue Note label, a recording designed for the white listener for whom jazz was serious, not dance, music. In a 1950 interview with British music critic Dennis Preston, White (who had also started out in his career playing with pianist Clarence Williams) opined that like his own Sidney Bechet’s music overlapped the categories of jazz and folk. In contrast to the then-new genre of bebop (which he disliked), he said, “Bechet’s music — that’s folk. Like my own music, it isn’t confined to any one thing. There’s a lot that sounds like Hungarian gypsy in Sidney’s playing” (quoted in Elijah Wald’s Society Blues, page 174.)
In the Josh White’s hit “Careless Love,” recorded as part of the 78 album, Harlem Blues, Bechet’s accompanying clarinet is quite discreet behind the vocal, but comes to the fore in when it solos. “Milk Cow Blues” from that same album starts out with Bechet on the soprano sax, but switches to clarinet to fit better with White’s tunings and against Myers’s bowed bass.
Bechet was one of the first jazz musicians to be appreciated by classical audiences and critics and to be rated on a par with Louis Armstrong by the New Orleans jazz aficionados, not to mention by Duke Ellington (whose lead alto sax player, Johnny Hodges, had, in his teens, studied with Bechet). Ellington said that Bechet was “the very epitome of jazz.... [E]verything he played in his whole life was completely original. I honestly think he was the most unique man ever to be in this music.”
Bechet appeared on several radio shows associated with Alan Lomax, such as the one with Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Woody Guthrie, Hally Wood, Pops Foster, and Cisco Houston and the Coleman Brothers, on a Columbia Broadcasting System program (March, 10 1947), Hootenanny: A musical carpet of American folk music, hosted by John Henry Faulk, written and directed by Alan Lomax, and announced by Bill Rogers. It is reproduced on “Folk Music Radio” (Radiola series 16, release 133) and can be found in our library, VIA-308. (3-10-47).
On April 19, 1941, at RCA Studios on 24th St, in New York City, in an early instance of overdubbing, Bechet recorded the “Sheik of Araby.” He tells us (in the liner notes of George Hoefer) that he “started by playing ‘The Sheik’ on piano, and played the drums while listening to the piano. I meant to play all the rhythm instruments, but got all mixed up and grabbed my soprano, then the bass, then the tenor saxophone, and finally finished up with the clarinet.” Bechet also worked on recording and concert projects with the Chicago jazz pianist and vibraphonist Max Miller in 1944, 1946, and 1953, but those sessions, part of the Max Miller archive, have never been released.
In 1945, Bechet moved to 160 Quincy Street, in Brooklyn, New York, and began to teach music. Bob Wilber, then still in high school, became Bechet’s star pupil, learning both clarinet and soprano sax, and when Wilber finished high school, he moved into the house. In 1981 Wilber and his wife, soprano Pug Horton, formed a sextet, the Bechet Legacy, to continue the tradition.
Bechet relocated to France in 1950 and married Elisabeth Ziegler (whom he had met in 1928) in Antibes in 1951. Much of his later life Bechet spent in France, his affection for that country being reflected in such titles as “Petite fleur,” “Rue des Champs Elysées,” and “Si tous vois ma mere,” while “Quincy Street Stomp” clearly refers to his Brooklyn days.
Shortly before his death in Paris on his 62d birthday, May 14, 1959, Bechet dictated his autobiography, Treat It Gentle (London: Cassell, 1960). His influence extended far: among the existentialists of Paris, he was le dieu; the British poet Philip Larkin wrote an ode to Bechet in The Whitsun Weddings; Sugar Blue, the well-known harmonica player, claims he took his name from Bechet’s recording, “Sugar Blues”; Hermann Hesse, exposed to jazz and its world in the music and person of Bechet in the 1920s, may have used him as the prototype for the saxophonist, Pablo, in his novel, Steppenwolf; and Woody Allen, a clarinetist himself, refers often to Bechet in his 1997 documentary, Wild Man Blues and named one of his children after him.
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Best Known Recording’s of Sidney Bechet
The Legendary Sidney Bechet
includes early "Feetwarmers" and "Blues In Thirds"
Sidney Bechet In New York
includes reunion with Louis Armstrong
The King Jazz Story Vol.4
Storyville, Best of Bechet-Mezzrows
Jazz Classics Vol.1
includes Bunk Johnson, Albert Nicholas
Band Or Session Leader
New Orleans Feetwarmers King Bechet Trio
Mezzrow - Spanier Big Four Sidney Bechet's Blue Note Quartet
Mezzrow - Bechet Quintet Mezzrow - Bechet Septet
Sidney Bechet and his Creole Orchestra Sidney Bechet and his Orchestra
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