Posted By BillHeise on April 12, 2010

Yesterday, HBO started airing Treme, a new series set in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. So, in honor of the (I quote from the series) tired old music of that broken down old city, I thought I’d go back to one of my favorite musicians of all time, Sidney Bechet.

The History Of Jazz

I first learned about Bechet in college. I took a history of jazz class as one of my only electives. I had to literally beg my way into the class, because the class was reserved for upper class music majors. The teacher’s plan was for them to learn about the history of jazz and then to cap it off with a concert. Since I could not play an instrument, I was told I couldn’t attend. They had a class filled with underclassmen they told me I could take. But classes filled with underclassmen were classes in which no one did any work because no one was all that interested. I was excited about this class, and so I went to talk to the professor. He told me no, as well, but I’m persistent. He finally allowed me in after a half an hour of friendly debate.

I learned to write about music in that class. It turned out to be more difficult than I thought. I had to figure out how to make judgments on the key, the time signature, the individual instruments, the harmoniousness of their arrangements, and a lot of other things that I had never consciously thought about. Not that I had never reacted to them. But I discovered that reacting to something and being able to make sense of my reaction were altogether different things. It was an education in itself. I worked really hard in that class to figure out how I could react to all sorts of features of music, and I got a perfect grade on every weekly paper, on every weekly quiz, every test, and an A+ on the semester paper. My perfect grade was one of my finest moments in school.

What I Loved (And Still Love) about Sidney Bechet

Bechet played the soprano saxophone. My first exposure to Bechet came in the introduction to New Orleans jazz. We were supposed to listen to a Louis Armstrong duet with someone named Sidney. For the writing assignment for the week, I was given the task of comparing Armstrong’s solo with Sidney’s in a song called Cake Walking Babies From Home. I quickly realized that Bechet was playing a complex counterpoint to Armstrong’s rather simple solo. Listen for yourself:

Woody Allen, a clarinet player himself, says that Bechet is his favorite musician. I don’t a favorite musician, but I an inclined to agree with him as far as the New Orleans tradition of jazz is concerned.

As a side note, according to the Wikipedia article,

Bechet is said to have served as a prototype for the saxophonist “Pablo” in the novel Steppenwolf, since it was almost certainly through listening to his playing in Europe in the 1920s that Hermann Hesse became acquainted with the world of jazz music.

This may be why he appeals to me as much as he does, but listen to him play the clarinet and you will be able to see that literary nostalgia is not all there is to it. In particular, listen for the wide tremulo–the aspect of playing a note on a wind instrument by which you can vary the range of the note by blowing. My history of jazz professor said it was so wide that you could walk through it. He also noted just how hard it is to do:

His recording of Summertime is another jazz standard that has been covered hundreds of times, but his is by far my favorite.

Like France Gall last week, they love Sidney in France. In fact, I once was listening to a recording of Sidney before one of my Conversational French classes. My teacher, who was French himself, walked in and asked me what I was listening to, expecting me to tell him I was listening to some ‘debased’ music like rap or pop music. He was pleasantly surprised when he found that I was listening to Sidney. Then, as always happens to me, he started lecturing me on what a great musician Bechet was (as if I didn’t know).

When I was in college, my extremely anti-American French professor told me that there were no statues of Bechet in America, which my extremely anti-American French professor, thought was a crime. It turns out not to be true anymore (I’m not sure it was true then). He was from the town in which they had actually built a statue to Bechet (it’s a bust, actually), and he was excited that at least one uncultured American might be saved. Here is a picture of one of the Sidney Bechet statues (not sure where this is).

But, despite what my extremely anti-American French professor thought about American culture, it was not always so. Once again, I refer my readers to the Wikipedia article on Bechet:

Bechet was jailed in Paris, France when a female passerby was wounded during a pistol duel (which Bechet had instigated in an argument over chord changes); after serving jail time, Bechet was deported.

In yet another interesting example of the French passion for revisionist history, they welcomed him back once the female passerby had stopped complaining about her bullet wounds. Que sera.

That’s not to say that Americans are not an ignorant bunch when it comes to culture. Even the nation of Chad issues a series of postage stamps featuring what they think are the three most important figures in jazz: Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Sidney Bechet. (As far as I know, the USPS has not issued a stamp commemorating this jazz legend. Could be wrong, though.)

Chad Stamps

Anyway, I’m not much for fighting battles I can’t win against superior opponents, so here’s another of my favorites. It’s called China Boy:

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