All of the techniques basic to jazz saxophone and reed playing were either invented by Bechet or brought to high order in the period when he was giving mythic intensity to the music, something natural to a man of the sort that inspires legend through his combination of intelligence, abandon, and imperial control. It was Bechet who first perfected the vocalized side of the jazz reed vocabulary, the first to play with sweep and extraordinary technique, and, finally, he was the first to use the kind of percussive attack that we hear in Sonny Rollins, the master saxophonist of this period. The unpredictability of his phrasing on the 1931 Polka Dot Rag with Noble Sissle's orchestra, foreshadows the freedom soon to be heard in Lester Young, while his relaxed virtuosity and savage bite opened the door for Charlie Parker. Therefore, what Bechet put in the air--much of it during the twenties when he was cutting heads left and right in New York--so influenced the conception of playing reeds in jazz that players very far removed from him turn corners on Bechet wheels and don't know it. They let that vibrato fool them.

On and off the bandstand, Bechet was one of the red hot red hots. Born in New Orleans in 1897, his temperament was that of a battler and an adventurer. Born to a musical family but largely self-taught, the boy Bechet was a truant who loved to run off and play him some music with the jazz guys who were laying it down in the gutbucket joints of the Crescent City. A natural, he rose to a respected position on his instrument very quickly, which was the clarinet at first. Chicago was where he found himself by 1917, having rousted about with tent shows that gave musicians like him the epic feeling of the nation.

Will Marion Cook, leader of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, took him to Europe in 1919, where the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet was overwhelmed by his virtuosity, his genius, and his foreshadowing of a new mode of musical expression. Bechet bought himself a straight soprano saxophone and remained in Europe, playing everywhere, even journeying as far east as Russia, riding mule trains on which Vodka served as a portable heater. He upset the Russians just as he had everyone else who came within hearing distance of his particular fire and the sweltering rhythm. Along the way in his tale, Bechet, an embodiment of the kind of person whom you can't take anywhere, found himself in the middle of a gunfight with some Chicagoan during rush hour in Paris. His description of it in Treat It Gentle is as good as anything in Hemingway:

It was something, the way it happened... something hard to make clear. It's like there's somebody else inside a man, somebody that's not really that man, and when it happens, an anger like I had then, that other person takes over. That's not to make excuses. I know well enough it's me all the time. That's just to try to tell you what feeling there was to it, standing there on the street, not even giving a goddamn how many shots they're sending back at me, not even seeming to know whether or not they're shooting at all, just standing there pumping my gun and wanting to see everyone of them dead in front of me.

He came to New York and worked with Duke Ellington for a short period of time during the middle twenties, setting a standard for improvising in the flesh that the bandleader never forgot, genius on the bandstand night after night. While in town, Bechet seriously smacked Coleman Hawkins upside the head during a New York saxophone battle in the twenties, following the tenor saxophonist out into the street, blowing hot blues bolts at his defeated opponent's backside. In the two Cakewalkin Babies with Louis Armstrong, one recorded in December of 1924, the other fifteen days later in January of 1925, we hear two sequoias of swing, each of them in possession of such rhythmic vitality that they perform at an Olympian elevation above their surroundings. For all of the respect that Armstrong had for his mentor, King Oliver, he had never been in the presence of a talent equal to his own. The first version lopes along while the second quick steps. The December playing is cordial but the knives come out in January, each man intent on bringing off a beheading.

Bechet went on to heat up every situation he found himself in, running his own club along the way, responding to career troubles by becoming a tailor, making the first recording on which a musician overdubbed himself, foreshadowing the work of Lennie Tristano, Bill Evans, and many others. His career had the ups and downs that go with

the fickle trends of show business but Bechet never toyed around with the faux humility that endears certain performers to their employers or their fellow band members. He knew who he was and he took life as it came, both dukes up. Sidney Bechet was a warm, humorous, proud man who was not to be messed with. The fierce power of his style, the way his phrases rose up over the time like tonal steam, his capacity for the majestic expression of romantic yearning, the way he could play the blues with unexcelled depth, and the sound of an idealism that had earned its wings through deep consideration and personal conflict with human shortcoming inside and out, are but a few of the many things we hear in the art of Sidney Bechet. We can be sure that if he were now alive at one hundred years old and some junior flip said something to him that Bechet didn't like, the old man's cane would quickly be laid across offender's head. A powerful slow blues, lyric and full of combative growls, would soon follow.

Copyright © 1997 Stanley Crouch