Posted in: Jazz by Steve Newman on June 11, 2009 | 0 Comments
As soon as Sidney Bechet played that soprano saxophone in the London instrument makers shop he knew he’d found his instrument.
Sidney Bechet was born in New Orleans on the 14th of May, 1897. His grandfather, as Bechet writes:
” Was a slave. But he was a man that could do anything. He could sing; he danced, he was a leader. It was natural to him; and everyone followed him.
” Sundays when the slaves would meet – that was their free day – he beat out rhythms on drums at the Square – Congo Square they called it – and they’d all be gathered there around him. Everyone loved him. They waited for him to start things: dances, shouts, moods even. Anything he wanted to do, he’d lead them. He had a power. He was a strong man. His name was Omar.”
Suddenly, reading that, you know that Bechet can write too (no matter how he gets it to the page) in the same way he plays, from the heart, from inside, but with a cleanness and clarity, especially when he’s writing about his father’s childhood memories about Emancipation Day, of the parades and the music, how the music sounded happier than it had ever sounded, and the tears of joy.
As Bechet explains, his father knew music, knew music better than most, but couldn’t play an instrument, tried to play the cornet but couldn’t; but how he could dance. And although it has nothing to do with anything, other than feet, Bechet’s father became a shoemaker, not a shoe mender, as Bechet points out, but a high class shoe maker with his own shop, and good shoes they were according to Bechet.
The Bechet house was always filled with music and musicianers -as Bechet called them – and dancing, where the dancers would cut figures around a jug of wine placed on the floor. And outside the house New Orleans was full of music, and crime, and policemen who could turn on a lone black man sitting on his stoop and tell him to get inside, and when he didn’t they’d beat him up with their billy-sticks; until one day this black guy, sitting on his own stoop, grabs the billy-stick off a cop and beats him up with it, an action that quickly turns into a full scale riot, resulting in death of the black guy.
This was the sort of stuff that went into Bechet’s music, and the stories his old man told him about working as a young man for the steam ship owners down on the quays, where he’d arrange for black bands to play on the boats as they travelled up and down the Mississippi. Everything was about music.
” That’s how my father wanted it. He just filled his house with music, and when it wasn’t being played at home he’d be off somewhere else where it was being played. Like I said he wasn’t a musicianer, but he really had a feeling for it.”
Bechet was given his first clarinet when he was six, and by the age of eight was proficient and taking lessons with the legendary George Bacquet, who played with Jelly Roll Morton and the Original Creole Jazz Band. By the time Bechet was a teenager he was already playing with King Oliver and Freddie Keppard.
Then around 1918, after leaving the King Oliver band in Chicago, he was asked to go to New York to work for Will Marion Cook. After a while Cook’s band broke up and Bechet found himself with the Tim Bryen Band out on Coney Island.
” We all wore very funny uniforms and the pay was good. Tim had a regular clarinet player, named Kincaid; and this Kincaid, he has a curved soprano saxophone. I liked the tone of this saxophone, so full and rich, and from that time I got more and more interested in the soprano.”
Shortly after Cook got his band back together, renamed the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, which comprised 27 musicians and 19 singers, they headed for London in that cattle boat, with Bechet taking along four large crates of soap as a result of some wag in the orchestra telling him there was a shortage of soap in Britain.
The orchestra was a huge hit in Britain, and undoubtedly gave the public an ear for this new music some were calling jazz. So popular did it become that King George V (probably prompted by his young sons) invited the orchestra to Buckingham Palace, which Bechet describes as being like Grand Cental Station ‘with lots of carpets on the walls.’
And it was while Bechet was in London that he passed a musical instrument maker’s shop in Wardour Street, Soho, and saw a straight soprano sax in the window. He went into the shop and tried it out, loving the sound it made. He bought the instrument and asked the instrument maker if he could add a double octave key, which gave Bechet an extra range that gave him a real edge.
Read Part One of this feature.
To Be Continued…
