Sidney Bechet
Jazz, pushed aside in its homeland, became a legend again in Paris and came back home.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The people around him ⏳🌊
- FamilyOmar Bechet
His father, a shoemaker and amateur musician.
- TeacherGeorge Baquet
The New Orleans player who taught the young Bechet the clarinet.
- InfluenceKing Oliver
As a boy, Bechet is said to have been spurred on by secretly listening to his band.
- RivalryLouis Armstrong
The colleague with whom he waged a friendly duel of pride on "Cake Walking Babies from Home."
- PatronageAlfred Lion
The producer who founded Blue Note and made his “Summertime” a hit.
- FamilyElisabeth Ziegler
The wife he married in 1951, who shared his final years.
I. The boy from New Orleans · 1897–1916 (age 0–19)
(New Orleans) He was born in May 1897 in New Orleans, Louisiana. His father, Omar Bechet, was a shoemaker who played the cornet for pleasure. He was the youngest of seven children, and his brother Leonard Bechet, who later became a dentist without ever setting down his trombone, led the family band. He grew up in the musical atmosphere peculiar to the Creole (French-speaking people of color) community, and the house was never without the sound of instruments. (Self-taught) Around the age of six he first touched an instrument, secretly picking up a clarinet his brother had left behind. Instead of learning to read music he absorbed sound by ear and by imitation, and all his life he never enjoyed reading notes. He took brief lessons from the neighborhood clarinetist George Baquet, but he was closer to self-made, teaching himself by eavesdropping on grown men playing in the streets and yards rather than through formal instruction. (Prodigy) Barely past ten, he was already known as a prodigy summoned to play in adult bands. He honed his skill moving among the many groups around the edges of Storyville, and it is said that he once slipped into a gig by the far more seasoned King Oliver's band and astonished the grown men. The story of a baby-faced boy holding his own among cornet players who had seen it all was retold in New Orleans music circles for years. (Stubbornness) From childhood he had an unmistakable dislike of losing to anyone. Rather than doing as bandleaders told him, he insisted on his own way, and so he drifted from band to band. That stubbornness would later become the force that set his playing apart from everyone else's, but it was also the seed of the conflicts that followed him all his life.
II. Wandering and Europe · 1916–1922 (age 19–25)
(On the road) From his late teens he left New Orleans, moving from one touring band to another and traveling back and forth between Chicago and New York. His was a life more used to motion than to settling down, and the experience of many cities gathered in these years later lent his playing its many colors. (To Europe) In 1919 he set off on a European tour as a member of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, led by the composer Will Marion Cook, and took the stage in London. Outside America for the first time, he stood before audiences on whom the weight of racial prejudice pressed less heavily, and that sense of release seeped into his playing. (Soprano) In a London music shop he came upon a soprano saxophone by chance. Instantly captivated by this instrument, larger and sharper in tone than the clarinet, he made it his signature, and went on to become the first figure in jazz history to establish the soprano saxophone as a serious solo instrument. (Acclaim) The Swiss classical conductor Ernest Ansermet heard him play and wrote about him in a review in 1919. He called Bechet an artist of genius and wrote that the road he was following might one day be the highway the whole world would travel. No critic in the history of jazz had ever treated an improviser so seriously, yet for a long time the piece remained almost unknown in the American jazz world. (Deportation) It is said that he was arrested after a quarrel with a woman in London, served a prison sentence, and was deported from Britain. Coming so soon after such glowing praise, the incident reveals one facet of a life in which talent and an unstable temperament always traveled together.
III. A duel in New York, gunshots in Paris · 1922–1929 (age 25–32)
(Return) In 1922 he came back to America and settled in New York. In 1923, with Clarence Williams' Blue Five, he recorded “Wild Cat Blues” and “Kansas City Man Blues”—recordings counted among the first jazz records to put the soprano saxophone at the center. (Duet) In 1925 he recorded “Cake Walking Babies From Home” with Louis Armstrong. The two traded solos as though neither would yield to the other, and the record was long remembered as a friendly duel of pride between two masters of the horn. Armstrong, it is said, regarded Bechet's sound ever after as something to be reckoned with. (Paris) That same year he joined La Revue nègre, starring Josephine Baker, and appeared on the Paris stage, then toured as far as Eastern Europe and Russia with drummer Benny Peyton's band. Again and again he found his music embraced more ardently in Europe than in America. (Gunshots) In 1928, on a Paris street, a musical quarrel with the banjo player Mike McKendrick ended in an exchange of gunfire. A stray bullet wounded a passing Frenchwoman, and Bechet served eleven months in prison before being deported from France as well. The reputation he had built in Europe collapsed in an instant, and for years he could not set foot again in the Paris that had once welcomed him.
With this recording alongside Clarence Williams, the soprano saxophone first became known to the world as a jazz solo instrument.
- In the opening, Bechet's soprano saxophone enters with a thicker, stronger sound than a clarinet and overpowers the ensemble.
- Despite the title, this is not a twelve-bar blues but a ragtime-style structure of successive strains, over which Bechet builds tension by repeating the same line with slight twists each time.
- The New Orleans practice of several horns layering different lines at once (collective improvisation) is alive here, so the effect is less of one man's solo than of many voices intermingling.
- Owing to the limits of recording equipment at the time, it is said to have been cut in a single take in a cramped studio, and despite the somewhat rough sound, the soprano saxophone's presence is unmistakable.
A friendly duel of pride with Louis Armstrong, preserved intact on record.
- Early in the piece, cornet and soprano saxophone trade the melody back and forth in an exchange (interplay) that sounds like a contest over who can ornament it more lavishly.
- Bechet's solo, following Armstrong's solo chorus, is famous for his trademark rich vibrato, stretching a single breath long and driving the notes forward.
- It is a head–solo–head structure, cycling through the thirty-two-bar form several times as the two take turns building their solos.
- The two horns growing ever fiercer over a rhythm section that gradually picks up speed is often cited as a model for later jazz duet recordings.
· 1929–1938 (age 32–41)
(Homecoming) Driven out of France, he returned once more to New York, but soon the Great Depression swept over America. As the record market froze, even musicians at the height of their success lost work, and Bechet was no exception. (Tailor shop) He scraped a living by opening a tailor shop in Harlem with the trumpeter Tommy Ladnier. By day they mended clothes, and by night they held jam sessions in the shop with fellow musicians; for a time this modest shop was the pair's only source of income. (Feetwarmers) In 1932 he formed the New Orleans Feetwarmers with Ladnier and recorded for the Victor label. It was then that they made a recording reviving Scott Joplin's “Maple Leaf Rag” for jazz ensemble. But with record sales sluggish in the slump, the band did not last and soon broke up. (Making ends meet) These years, when a musician once hailed in Europe as a genius had to darn shirts in America and worry about getting by, lay bare the reality of jazz musicians for whom talent alone was not enough to survive.
Formed amid the privations of the Depression, the New Orleans Feetwarmers revived Scott Joplin's ragtime masterpiece for jazz ensemble.
- In place of the steady left-hand beat of the original piano rag, bass and drums push and pull the beat slightly (swing), carrying the whole piece far more supplely.
- Bechet's soprano saxophone follows the original melody almost note for note, yet adds slightly different ornaments on each repeat, leaving room for improvisation.
- Passages where Tommy Ladnier's trumpet and Bechet's saxophone lay different lines over each other at once stand out in the latter part of the piece.
- As a session hastily assembled in lean times, the arrangement is spare, but all the more does each player's quick reflexes stand out.
V. Blue Note and the shadow of swing · 1938–1949 (age 41–52)
(Comeback) In 1939 he formed a bond with Blue Note, a fledgling label just founded. Its founder, Alfred Lion, was one of the few businessmen who took seriously the traditional jazz being pushed aside by swing and fashion, and it is said he was deeply captivated by Bechet's sound from the moment he first heard it. (Summertime) His recording of Gershwin's “Summertime” became Blue Note's first hit. Rendering the original's plaintive melody in the soprano saxophone's thick, trembling tone, the recording lent deep feeling to the playing of a man who had come through the destitute years of the Depression. (Bebop) In the 1940s, bebop, led by Charlie Parker, rose to the center of jazz. Before the younger generation's music of complex harmony and breakneck tempos, Bechet's style, faithful to New Orleans collective improvisation, began to be dismissed as outdated. He is said to have shown no small hurt at being treated this way. (Loneliness) Even as his place in American jazz narrowed, he kept playing, drifting from one small club to another. Caught in the irony of being written off as a has-been in his own country after being called a genius in Europe, he came to long more and more for the Europe that had recognized him.
The first hit for the fledgling Blue Note label, it is steeped in the feeling of a musician who had come through lean years.
- Over a slow tempo, the soprano saxophone opens by stretching out the original melody at length, almost as if singing it.
- Midway through, a solo passage that breaks away from the melody and freely piles up notes is counted as the moment that made this recording especially famous.
- Instead of a fixed rhythm, the rhythm section's rather loosely flowing accompaniment sets off the soprano saxophone's thick, trembling tone all the more.
- Within a brief running time it compresses both the opening and the solo, leaving a powerful afterglow in little more than three minutes.
VI. Paris, born again · 1949–1959 (age 52–62)
(Triumph) In 1949, invited to the Paris Jazz Festival, he set foot on French soil again for the first time in twenty years. The city that had once expelled him after a shooting now welcomed him as a living legend, and he himself is said to have been astonished by the rapturous reception. (Settling down) From the following year he resolved to put down roots in France for good. In 1951 he married Elisabeth Ziegler in Antibes. His son, Daniel Bechet, later became a drummer and followed in his father's footsteps. Life in France, where he was judged purely on his music without the barrier of race, was a late consolation that stood in contrast to the discrimination he had endured all his life in America. (Petite Fleur) His own composition “Petite Fleur,” released in 1952, became a huge hit across France. The tender melody of his soprano saxophone carried his name onto the French popular music charts, and as other pieces such as “Les Oignons” won affection in turn, he became, in every sense, a national star of France. (Looking back) In his final years he dictated an autobiography, “Treat It Gentle.” In it he recalled believing that his musical gift had been handed down through the generations from his grandfather Omar, who had been enslaved — a claim better read as the meaning he gave his own life than as a matter of fact. (Death) On May 14, 1959, his sixty-second birthday, he died of lung cancer in Garches, on the outskirts of Paris. Though his music had once been dismissed as old-fashioned in America, crowds of French admirers filled the streets for his funeral. His final resting place was not the home where he was born but France, the country that had first embraced him wholly.
An original composition released after he settled in France, it symbolizes the popular success that came to him late.
- Over a slow tempo, a short, plaintive minor-key melody flows as if sung.
- The structure is simple, rarely straying from the set 32-bar form, yet with each repetition it builds emotion by subtly shifting tone color and dynamics.
- The long, breath-drawn phrasing characteristic of wind instruments and the gentle vibrato are considered the core charms that made this piece a popular hit.
- Later, Chris Barber's band rerecorded it with clarinetist Monty Sunshine, and it reached the British charts even after Bechet's death, extending the song's life.
Another of his own compositions much loved in Paris, it holds the relaxed, warm sentiment of his final years.
- Over an unhurried tempo, the soprano saxophone ranges through its low, full-bodied register, flowing easily as if singing.
- It repeats the same melody several times, yet keeps it from growing dull by placing different ornaments and rhythmic spaces each time.
- With the rhythm section supporting from behind with restrained dynamics, the breathy tone of the saxophone comes through all the more clearly.
- It is regarded as the recording that best represents the ease and contemplative mood felt throughout his playing in his late Paris years.
Lesser-known stories
(Ansermet's forgotten review) The praise of Bechet that the conductor Ernest Ansermet published in a Swiss review in 1919 is now regarded as a document important enough to stand at the very beginning of the history of jazz criticism. At the time of publication, however, it was merely an article in a small French-language magazine, and it is said that neither the American jazz world nor Bechet himself was properly aware of its existence for some time. The review came back into view only later, as scholars were assembling the sources of early jazz criticism. (Expulsion and pardon) After being expelled over the 1928 Paris shooting, Bechet was for a time officially barred from entering France. It is said that by the time the 1949 Paris Jazz Festival invitation came through, the passage of years had exhausted the force of his sentence and expulsion order — and the reversal by which a city that had once driven him out for firing a gun welcomed him some twenty years later as a national hero is often cited in his biographies as an irony. (The composer who couldn't read music) He never learned to read or write music fluently, yet he left behind some hundred composing·co-writing credits. He is said to have created his pieces by humming the melodies in his head to fellow musicians or arrangers and having them write the music down — a fact that became known in any detail only after his death, through the recollections of his family and colleagues. (The grandfather legend) In his autobiography, “Treat It Gentle,” he declared that his musical gift had been handed down through the generations from his grandfather Omar, who had been enslaved. Biographers regard the story as closer to a myth Bechet gave his own life than to anything supported by documents. More than whether it is true, the very fact that he wished to explain his music through bloodline and history remains a key to understanding his identity.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Improvisation
(Meaning) Jeukheung (卽興) means doing something on the spot (卽) as inspiration (興) arises. (In jazz) It refers to playing by inventing melodies as they come to mind in the moment, without a set score. Every player — and even the same piece — sounds different each time. Example: it is like a school choir contest where, instead of the assigned song, singers make up harmonies on the spot. (Elsewhere) In everyday speech, as in “an impromptu decision,” it refers to deciding things as they come, without a plan.
Collective improvisation
(In jazz) In New Orleans–style jazz, a way of playing in which several wind instruments, such as trumpet, clarinet and trombone, each improvise their own line at the same time, letting them mingle. Rather than one person's solo, many voices intertwine at once as if in conversation. Example: it is like several friends all saying what they want at the same time, and yet somehow the conversation still works.
Cutting contest
(Meaning) The term comes from the English “cut,” in the sense of besting a rival through skill. (In jazz) An improvised showdown in which two players or bands take turns playing to see who is better. Audiences and fellow musicians judged the winner. Example: it is like having an impromptu rap battle with friends at school to see who is better. (Elsewhere) Today it is also used figuratively for impromptu contests of skill in sports or games.
Ragtime
(Meaning) The English word “rag” means a scrap of worn cloth, and the name ragtime came from the sense that the beat seemed uneven and slightly off. (In jazz) A style of piano music in which the left hand keeps a steady beat while the right hand plays slightly against it; it flourished before jazz and became the root of jazz rhythm. Example: it is like a clapping game where, while walking, you clap slightly off the beat of your left foot.
Bebop
(In jazz) A jazz style that emerged in the 1940s, using fast, complex harmonies and rhythms; unlike swing, which was music for dancing, it aimed to be music for sitting and listening. Example: it is like singing a familiar song much faster, swapping its simple refrain for complex harmonies.
Blue note
(Meaning) The English “blue” means both melancholy and the color blue, and the name came from its use for the mournful pitches peculiar to the blues. (In jazz) Originally, the term refers to particular notes (the 3rd·5th·7th) in blues and jazz that are lowered slightly from the diatonic scale to create a mournful, sagging feeling. Example: it is like slightly lowering a note while singing and drawing it out mournfully. (Elsewhere) It is also the name of the American jazz record label that mattered in the later part of Sidney Bechet's life. The company took its name from these blues pitches, but today the name is more often used as a company·brand name.
Chorus
(In jazz) The unit of one full pass through a piece's harmonic progression from beginning to end; players go around the same chorus many times, building different improvisations on top of it. Example: it is like running several laps of the same playground track, doing a different move on each lap. (Elsewhere) In songs, it can also mean the refrain.