Sidney Bechet: Jazz Musician

Treat in Gentle

The list of books about jazz and jazz musicians, and by jazz musicians, grows and grows, but amongst them only a few really stand out, most notably Ian Carr’s Miles Davis, Artie Shaw’s autobiography The Trouble with Cinderella, and Sidney Bechet’s superb 1960 autobiography Treat it Gentle, recorded on tape by Joan Williams and Desmond Flower.

And there can be no doubt that Bechet helped shape the music of the 20th century (and the 21st), but ( like the best writers of the 20th century, such as Hemingway, Steinbeck, Miller, Lawrence) he also helped shape  how we feel about the 20th century, how we feel about life and about the past.

In other words Bechet’s sound on the clarinet and the soprano sax is always stripped down, yet hallmarked by his incredible vibrato, which leaves little or no trace of period, which means that, like Arthur Miller’s dialogue, Bechet’s sound is always modern (and I don’t mean in the ‘Modern Jazz’ sense, but in the sense of the wider modernist movement), always striving for something close to perfection.

And Bechet – apart from the strength and inspiration of his family background in New Orleans – found most of his early creative inspiration from living and working in Europe soon after the First World War. This is how he describes the effect the early syncopated music had when he arrived in England as part of Will Marion Cook’s Southern Syncopated Orchestra 90 years ago:

” We sailed in a cattle boat; trip took fifteen days and we were all as sick as dogs. We got there in the June of 1919 and we played at the Royal Philharmonic Hall. That’s where I met the Swiss conductor, Ernest Ansermet [born in 1883, Ansermet, at the time of meeting Bechet, was the conductor of the Diaghilev Ballet]. He used to come to every performance. He’d sit there in his box and after it was over he used to go back stage and talk to Will. Many a time he’d come over to where I was and he’d ask me all about how I was playing, what it was I was doing, was I singing into my instrument to make it sound that way? We talked a whole lot about music. This man, he was trained for classical, but he had a real interest in our music. There was just no end to the questions he could think to ask about it. I don’t think he missed a performance all the time he was there. And then he wrote a piece about us and he said – I’ve still got it by me now – he said, ‘ The first thing that strikes one about the Southern Syncopated Orchestra is the astonishing perfection, the superb taste, and the fervour of its playing.’ He then went on, ‘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 wish to set down the name of this artist of genius, as for myself, I shall never forget it – it is Sidney Bechet.’ Well, I don’t know about this genius business; but like I said, I’ve played the music I know the way I feel it, and I was mighty glad at the way Ernest Ansermet understood right off what we were doing.”

To Be Continued…