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SIDNEY
BECHET
clarinet,
sop saxophone
LIFELINE
1897-1959
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1897
Bechet is born in New
Orleans in a musical family. He receives some tuition but
is largely self-taught, and plays in numerous groups with,among
others, Bunk Johnson and Joe Oliver.
By 1917 he is playing in Chicago.
1920s
Back in the United States, Bechet plays
with and influences Duke Ellington,
although he never joins the band, takes a youthful Johnny
Hodges under his wing, and tours incessantly. From 1925 to
1929 he tours Europe as musical director of the Revues Nègre and
then spends a year in a Parisian jail for a shooting offence.
1951
Bechet settles to a life in France where he
spends his last decade: he receives great acclaim and celebrity
status.
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1919
With Will Marion Cook's Orchestra (not an improvising
band) he tours England and Europe. Whilst in London he
acquires a soprano saxophone, an instrument he plays extensively for
the rest of his life. He is feted in Europe but is deported
from London after a fracas.
1930s-1940s
Bechet continues his nomad life,
although work is hard to come by as Bechet's hot music is out of fashion.
He works with trumpeter Tommy Ladnier in the early 1930s, and in a
particularly lean spell they open a dry cleaning shop! His recordings
with Armstrong in 1940 are classics
and, as the New Orleans revival is underway, work slowly picks up.
A performance at the Salle Pleyel jazz festival in Paris in 1949 is
a spectacular hit. |
STYLE
 Bechet
is as important to the clarinet as Coleman
Hawkins was to the saxophone,
and to a large extent he invented its jazz vocabulary. He
introduced the soprano saxophone, a difficult instrument to play,
to jazz, and was its first and only true master until taken
up by John Coltrane in the 1960s.
Bechet was truly one of the most important of the early jazz stars
who exported the New Orleans style,
and his influence was immense. That he never established a big band
(like Ellington), that he was never
able to compromise and make more accessible his style (like Armstrong),
told against him in his lifetime, and he seemed often a solitary figure
living from a suitcase. Consequently his
influence in jazz history is often felt vicariously, through
Ellington and Johnny Hodges and others
to whom he acted as mentor. |
"The
extraordinary clarinet virtuoso Bechet is an artist of genius."
-
Ernest Ansermet
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