Posted in: Jazz by Steve Newman on June 11th, 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.
” 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…
