Bechet is the first great soloist in jazz. Even before Louis Armstrong came along, he was playing vertical improvisations on the chords of a tune, rather than simple melodic breaks. Like Pops, Bechet grew up in New Orleans, transported his style north and then became the American star in Europe. A pioneer of the soprano saxophone, Sidney managed to combine its intense, sometimes treacherous tonality with the warm, woody sound of the clarinet.
“Since his death, Bechet’s star has waned somewhat: although he was a showbiz celebrity in the 20s, that is very long ago now, and his contrary nature helped prevent him from securing the immortality which accrued to more durable entertainment figures such as Armstrong and Ellington (his centenary passed almost unremarked in 1997). But the glorious exuberance of his music remains an inspiration to any who aspire to playing in a traditional style, and he remains perhaps the most immediately identifiable of all Jazz musicians.”
– Richard Cook’s Jazz Encyclopedia
© Copyright ® Whitney Balliett, copyright protected, all rights reserved, the author claims no right of copyright usage.
The great New Orleans clarinettist and soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet was, like Jelly Roll Morton, a Creole of color. He was born in 1897, the youngest of seven children. His father, Omar, was a cornettist and a shoemaker, and his mother, Josephine, was an octoroon [one eight black and seven-eights white] who loved to dance. When he was six, he was playing the clarinet and taking lessons from the New Orleans master George Baquet, and soon afterward he went to work in his brother Leonard’s band. When he was sixteen or seventeen, he and Clarence Williams (the pianist and composer) rode the rods into Texas. Bechet got into a fight with a white man, and fled to Galveston, where another brother lived. At twenty, he joined the Bruce & Bruce Stock Company, and ended up in Chicago. He had played with everyone of consequence in New Orleans (Bunk Johnson, Buddy Petit, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong), and in Chicago he played with Lil Hardin and Roy Palmer, and then with the cornettist Freddie Keppard—another iconoclast, whom he admired enormously.
He was heard by the bandleader Will Marion Cook, who had a large, Paul Whiteman-type ensemble, and Cook hired him as a soloist (Bechet could not read music, and never fully learned) and took him to England. It was June of 1919, and Bechet was a sensation. Ernest Ansermet, a thirty-five-year-old Swiss who had conducted the premiere of Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du Soldat,” went repeatedly to hear the band. He also talked with Bechet, and in due course wrote a review in the Swiss Revue Romande. Here is part of the last, prescient paragraph:
“There is in the Southern Syncopated Orchestra an extraordinary clarinet virtuoso who is, so it seems, the first of his race to have composed perfectly formed blues on the clarinet. I’ve heard two of them which he had elaborated at great length [and] they are equally admirable for their richness of invention, force of accent, and daring in novelty and the unexpected. Already, they gave the idea of a style, and their form was gripping, abrupt, harsh, with a brusque and pitiless ending like that of Bach’s second “Brandenburg Concerto.” I wish to set down the name of this artist of genius; as for myself, I shall never forget it—it is Sidney Bechet. . . . What a moving thing it is to meet this very black, fat boy with white teeth and that narrow forehead, who is very glad one likes what he does, but who can say nothing of his art, save that he follows his “own way” . . . His “own way” is perhaps the highway the whole world will swing along tomorrow.”
Cook disbanded, and Bechet stayed on with a drummer named Benny Peyton. Then Bechet got into hot water over an English prostitute and was deported, despite his having bewitched the Royal Family at a command performance at Buckingham Palace. Back in America, he went into a show called “How Come?” with Bessie Smith. Bechet liked Bessie Smith. This is how he described her in Treat It Gentle, his autobiography: “She could be plenty tough . . . She always drank plenty and she could hold it, but sometimes, after she’d been drinking a while, she’d get like there was no pleasing her. There were times you had to know just how to handle her right.” He played with James P. Johnson at the Kentucky Club, and around 1924 joined the fledgling Duke Ellington band. Ellington never got over Bechet’s great lyrical bent. He wrote of him in Music Is My Mistress:
Often, when Bechet was blowing, he would say, “I’m going to call Goola this time!” Goola was his dog, a big German shepherd. Goola wasn’t always there, but he was calling him anyway with a kind of throaty growl.
Call was very important in that kind of music. Today, the music has grown up and become quite scholastic, but this was au naturel, close to the primitive, where people send messages in what they play, calling somebody, or making facts and emotions known. Painting a picture, or having a story to go with what you were going to play, was of vital importance in those days. The audience didn’t know anything about it, but the cats in the band did.
Bechet slipped away from Ellington, and opened a place of his own, the Club Basha. Then, never still long, he returned to Europe, with Claude Hopkins and Josephine Baker, for a show called “Revue Negre.” Bechet put down his European roots during the twenties. He toured Russia, and roamed Western Europe. But he got into another fracas, in 1928. One morning around eight, he and the American banjoist Little Mike McKendrick had a gun battle outside a Montmartre bar. Bechet grazed McKendrick, hit the pianist Glover Compton in the leg, and wounded a Frenchwoman on her way to work. He went to jail for eleven months. When he got out, he worked at the Wild West Bar in Berlin and then went back to New York.
In 1932, he joined Duke Ellington again, and tutored Johnny Hodges on the soprano saxophone, thus indirectly and permanently altering the Ellington band. Bechet put together the first of his New Orleans Feetwarmers bands and took it into the Savoy Ballroom, in Harlem. The group, which included the trumpeter Tommy Ladnier and the pianist Hank Duncan, made six numbers for Victor, which are among the most joyous and swinging of all jazz records. Bechet had met Ladnier in Russia, and the two men spent much time together in the thirties. When the Depression closed in, they quit the music and started a sort of basement store in Harlem, called the Southern Tailor Shop. Willie the Lion Smith remembered it in Music on My Mind:
I’d ask Sidney where he was living.
He would reply, “I’m at 129th Street and St. Nicholas. I’m the proprietor of the Southern Tailor Shop.”
That would gas me. I couldn’t figure out what a good jazz clarinet player was doing playing “tailor.”
So I said, “How many suits you got in there?”
“Oh,” he said, “I’ve got up to about twenty; but we don’t make them, just press ’em.”
Then I asked, “Who’s we?”
He replied, “Tommy and myself.”
Well, I knew Tommy Ladnier from Chicago days. He was a good trumpet player. I found out later that Sidney would press and repair the suits, while Ladnier specialized in shining shoes. . . .
Bechet mentioned they had some good sessions in the back of the shop. So one night I agreed to come around to see what was happening.
But first, I wanted some information. “How much you charge to press a suit?”
He replied, “Oh, the regular fee.”
You see I figured if nothing was going on I could at least get my suit pressed. Then I wanted to know, “What do we sleep on?”
He then said, “I’ve got a couple of cots in the back. But usually there’s a bunch of musicians playing back there.”
“You ain’t gonna press any clothes tonight then,” I said.
“No, man. I cooked up a batch of red beans and rice to add to a lot of cold fried chicken. We’ll have us a party.”
When the drummer Zutty Singleton arrived in New York from Chicago in 1937, he moved into the building Bechet and Ladnier shared quarters in. Singleton once said, “They called their place the House of Meditation, and they had a picture of Beethoven on the wall. One day, Ladnier said to Bechet, ‘You know something, Bash? You the dead image of Beethoven,’ and that pleased Bechet. Bechet and Ladnier would stand in front of this big old mirror they had and watch themselves while they practiced. They listened to classical music, and they talked a lot about their travels—when Bechet wasn’t talking about the Rosicrucians. He was a hell of a cat. He could be mean. He could be sweet. He could be in between.”
Jazz concerts were beginning to take hold by 1940, and that year Bechet gave one in Washington, D.C. It was organized by Nesuhi Ertegun. “Not long after I came to the United States, I decided to give a jazz concert built around Sidney Bechet,” Ertegun has said. “My father was the Turkish Ambassador, and I lived at the Embassy in Washington, so I decided to give it in Washington. I had in mind a concert with a mixed band and a mixed audience, but Washington was still a Southern racist town, and no concert hall would touch such an affair. Finally, the Jewish Community Center, which had a four-hundred-seat auditorium, agreed. In addition to Bechet, I wanted Sidney De Paris on trumpet, Vic Dickenson on trombone, Art Hodes on piano, Wellman Braud on bass, and Manzie Johnson on drums. The alternating group would be Meade Lux Lewis and the blues shouter Joe Turner. I found Bechet at the Mimmo Club, in Harlem. He was backing a slick show, with a chorus line and singers and all that, and the band was in tuxedos. It all looked very prosperous. But the truth was that Bechet, who was already a hero in France, wasn’t doing at all well here. The next day, he invited me to his apartment for a drink and something to eat. After we sat down, his wife came in and said to Bechet, ‘Who’s that? What does he want?’ Bechet introduced me and said he’d brought me home for a bite. She said, ‘You know there’s no food in this house. Now, go on, get out and find your own food!’ We went to a bar and had a drink and worked out the details of the concert. When the band arrived in Washington, they came to the Embassy, and we had an elegant lunch. I knew Bechet loved red beans and rice, so we had red beans and rice, and he was astonished. He wanted to know if we had a Creole cook, and I said no, a Turkish cook, and that beans and rice was a common dish in Turkey, too. Bechet couldn’t believe it, and he said we must be copying the Creoles, and a very pleasant argument went on for some time about the roots of red beans and rice. The musicians were relaxed and in a good mood, and the concert, which was in the afternoon, was a tremendous success musically.
“From then on, Sidney and I were very friendly. He was deceptive. With his white hair and round face, he looked much older than he was. He also had this genial, sweet Creole politeness and a beautiful, harmonious way of talking. In many ways, he seemed like a typical Uncle Tom. But once you got to know him—once you had broken the mirror and got inside and found the true Bechet—you discovered he wasn’t that way at all. He couldn’t stand fakery or hypocrisy, and he was a tough and involved human being. He was far more intelligent than people took him for, and he knew what was going on everywhere. I never heard him play badly, even with bad groups. He was an incredibly rich player. Years later, when I was running a John Coltrane record date, Coltrane told me that Bechet had been an important influence on him.”
Like most New Orleans clarinetists, Bechet used the Albert-system clarinet, which has a formal, luxurious, Old World tone. New Orleans clarinet playing tended to be rich and florid. Vibratos were wide, glissandi were favored, and emotions were high and unashamed. Bechet, along with Johnny Dodds, Jimmy Noone, and Barney Bigard, belonged to the second generation of New Orleans clarinetists. (The first included Alphonse Picou, Lorenzo Tio, Jr., Big Eye Louis Nelson, and George Baquet.) Noone and Bigard concentrated on legato attacks, fed and enriched their tones, and perfected showy melodic swoops and arcs. They liked being serene and airborne.
Bechet and Dodds were rhythm players. They broke up their phrases ingeniously, used a great many blue notes, and had acidic, almost disagreeable timbres. Bechet used growls, strange bubbling sounds, and wide, swaggering notes. He shook his sounds out. When he took up the soprano saxophone, in the early twenties, he transferred his clarinet playing to this odd and difficult instrument. The soprano saxophone defies being played on pitch, and Bechet and his star pupil, Bob Wilber, are practically its only pitch-perfect practitioners. (The deliberate tonal distortions used by many modern soprano saxophonists make it impossible to tell whether they are in tune.)
Bechet developed an enormous tone that incorporated qualities of the trumpet, the oboe, and the horn. The sheer strength of his sound, and his rhythmic drive, allowed him to rule every band he played in. Wise trumpet players stood aside or were blown to smithereens. As an improviser, Bechet used the chords of a song but also followed the melody, which kept reappearing, like sunlight on a forest floor. His melodic lines were pronouncements. They were full of shouts and swoops; they gleamed and exploded. The solos left his listeners with the feeling that they had been in on important things. When he played a slow blues, he exhibited a melancholy, an ancient grieving. And when he played a slow ballad he was honeyed and insinuating and melodramatic. Johnny Hodges grew up in both sides of this divided house.
In 1946, Bechet moved to Brooklyn and opened a sort of music school. The jazz critic Richard Hadlock took some lessons from him, and wrote about them in the San Francisco Examiner:
Sidney would run off a complex series of phrases and leave me alone in his room for a couple of hours to wrestle with what he had played. One lesson could easily take up an entire afternoon, and Sidney favored giving a lesson every day.
“Look, when you emphasize a note, you throw your whole body into it,” he would say, cutting a wide arc with his horn as he slashed into a phrase.
“I’m going to give you one note today,” he once told me. “See how many ways you can play that note—growl it, smear it, flat it, sharp it, do anything you want to it. That’s how you express your feelings in this music. It’s like talking.
“Always try to complete your phrases and your ideas . . . There are lots of otherwise good musicians who sound terrible because they start a new idea without finishing the last one.”
Bob Wilber has described another facet of Bechet:
One thing he was very interested in was the concept of interpreting a song. You start out with an exposition of the melody in which you want to bring out the beauty of it. And then you start your variations, but at first they are closely related to the melody. Then, as you go on to another chorus, you get further away—you do something a little less based on the melody but more on the harmony. Sidney was much more harmonically oriented than most of the players of his generation . . . Then at the end, you would come back to the melody and there would be some kind of coda which would bring the thing to a conclusion. . . . The idea of the form was very important to him.
Bechet settled in France in 1951. He had filled the forties with gigs in and around New York and in Chicago. The pianist Dick Wellstood worked with him at Jazz Limited, in Chicago, and at the Bandbox, in New York. “He was very autocratic and nineteenth-century,” Wellstood once said. “It was like working for Bismarck. There was a right way and a wrong way, and if you did it the wrong way it was mutiny. There was a right tempo and right chords, and that was the way you reached the people. He had a gentlemanly and courtly exterior. He spoke softly, using the New Orleans accent of ‘poll’ and ‘erster’ for ‘pearl’ and ‘oyster.’ But when he was annoyed he’d lash out, and I think he always carried a knife. Once, at Jimmy Ryan’s, in New York, his piano player was late, and Bechet asked me—I just happened to be there—to sit in. When the piano player arrived, Sidney bawled him out publicly, and told him, ‘I want you to give that boy five dollars.’ I think he got increasingly egocentric. At the Bandbox, he sat in a thronelike chair backstage, and people paid court to him. Alfred Lion, of Blue Note records, would bring him champagne and all but kneel at his feet. His sense of humor was strange. One night, in Chicago, he played this game with his trombonist Munn Ware. The horn players were supposed to stand up to solo, but after Sidney had taken his solo and sat down and Munn had stood up Sidney got up again and started playing and Munn sat down. Sidney played several choruses and sat down, and when Munn stood up again to solo Sidney stood up, and on it went. Later, Munn shot him in the back of the head with a water pistol, and I waited for lightning to strike, but Sidney only giggled. The truth is, I was scared to death of him the whole time I worked for him.”
Bechet’s autobiography [Treat It Gentle], done in France with the help of Joan Reid, Desmond Flower, and John Ciardi, was published the year after his death, in 1959. The first two-thirds of the book is remarkable. It opens with a long, mythlike account of the life and death of his grandfather, a freed slave named Omar. Omar becomes obsessed with a young slave girl on a nearby plantation, and one night he takes her to the edge of the bayou and makes love to her. But the girl’s owner, also bewitched by her, follows them. He shoots Omar in the arm and takes the girl home. Then he spreads word that Omar has raped his daughter and search parties scour the bayou, where Omar hides. He sees the girl once more, at great peril, and is murdered by a slave seeking the reward. The girl has a baby, who becomes Bechet’s father. It does not matter how much improvisation there is in the story. Bechet’s language is dense and mysterious and poetical:
“All those trees there, they was standing like skeletons after the hide of the animal has disappeared. There was moonlight on their tops like blossoming, and there was the darkness under them, the light and the darkness somehow part of one thing that was darker than just plain dark, and all so still.”
The book is full of folk wisdom:
“So many people go at themselves like they was some book: they look back through themselves, they see this so and so chapter, they remember this one thing or another, but they don’t go through the pages one after the other really finding out what they’re about and who they are and where they are. They never count their whole story together.”
He talks of spirituals and the blues:
“In the spirituals the people clapped their hands—that was their rhythm. In the blues it was further down; they didn’t need the clapping, but they remembered it … And both of them, the spirituals and the blues, they was a prayer. One was praying to God and the other was praying to what’s human. It’s like one was saying, “Oh, God, let me go,” and the other was saying, “Oh, Mister, let me be.””
Bechet’s life in France appears to have fulfilled him. He married a German woman he had known in the twenties, and he kept a mistress, by whom he had a son. He made a lot of money, bought a small estate outside Paris, and drove a Salmson coupe at high speeds. In 1957, he recorded a tight, to-the-point collaboration with the modern French pianist Martial Solal. It is one of his best records. The next year, he played beautifully at the Brussels World’s Fair.
The impresario and pianist George Wein was in the band. “I never encountered the evil side of Bechet,” Wein has said. “Two things that probably caused it were his stomach, which bothered him for years, and trumpet players who tried to grab the lead in bands he was in. I think he was kind to musicians who were his inferiors, and hard on musicians who were his equals. I filled in at a Bechet concert at the Academy of Music, in Philadelphia, in 1948, when James P. Johnson failed to show, and he made me feel like I was playing beautifully, even on ‘Summertime,’ which was his big number, and which I’d never played before. He was a great lyrical force, and he had great personal force. He filled a room when he came into it. I think he could have been as big as Louis Armstrong if he hadn’t mistrusted all the bookers and managers. There was no reason for Bechet to come back from France after he settled there. He was happy and was worshipped. But he did come back a few times in the early fifties, and on one of his visits he played a gig at Storyville, my club in Boston. His stomach acted up, and we put him in Massachusetts General Hospital. They told him he had to have an operation, and what did he do? He went back to France and had the operation there. He trusted the French more than he did the Americans. Until the very end, that is. I was in France in 1959, and Charles Delaunay told me that Sidney was dying. I called him up at his house outside Paris and asked him what I could do. ‘Come and see me,’ he said. I’m very bad at such visits, but I went, and Sidney told me he wanted to go home. I told him O.K., we’d try and make arrangements and such, but before anything could be done he was gone.””