Bouquet to Bechet by George Hoefer

© Introduction Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

One of the most discerning features differentiating the music of modern Jazz from the New Orleans and Swing era Jazz that preceded it is the lack of vibrato. This was true irrespective of the instrument.

With the advent of Bebop and beyond, the quivering tone which was the mark of distinction during Jazz’s early years was no longer de rigueur. It went the way of four beats to the bar played on the bass drum.

One of my earliest friends in Jazz was trombonist Jim Trimble. His Dad - Kenny Trimble - was a featured trombonist with the Lawrence Welk Orchestra. I can remember a number of arguments between the two as Kenny called out to Jim “sweeten it a bit,” meaning, add some vibrato to his tone, while Jim would get this derisive look on his face as if to say, “Yeah, right!”

With regard to vibrato, perhaps a basic reason why modern Jazz saxophonists shunned the soprano sax for so long was that its most noted practitioner was Sidney Bechet, who played the instrument with what some referred to as a “nanny goat vibrato.”

A few years after Bechet’s death in 1959, John Coltrane took up the instrument, playing it in a vibrato-less manner that helped revive interest in the horn on the part of some modern Jazz saxophonists.

“There have been times through the years when some critics have commented dourly on Bechet's vibrato, finding it too wide and overbearing. This reaction is palpably a matter of taste and temperament. I've never found his vibrato annoying, and find it, in fact, a quite natural vocalized part of his expressiveness. With all that heat coming through a technique and conception that, after all, began in an era when vibrato was the most natural concomitant of jazz imaginable, I'm only surprised that the vibrato sometimes doesn't erupt volcano-like and swallow us all — colleagues, record and listeners alike.”

— NAT HENTOFF, Jazz author and critic

“Sidney Bechet was one of the most potent and powerful instrumental voices in the history of jazz. He has been called the first great jazz soloist, and rightly so (as long as we keep in mind that there were pianists, men such as Jelly Roll Morton and James P. Johnson, who'd developed full-fledged solo styles on their instrument before horn players came into their own). When young Duke Ellington heard him in 1923, it was a revelatory experience: "I have never forgotten the power and imagination with which he played," he wrote almost 50 years later.”

-Dan Morgenstern, Institute of Jazz Studies, Director Emeritus

The story that follows is an excellent example of what Ray Bradbury, in commenting about his own evolution as a writer, referred to as “Making Yourself as You Go.” 

For Sidney Bechet’s Jazz Life, this would at times include performing as a circus act, owning and operating a restaurant and becoming the proprietor of a tailor shop!

Sadly, often a somewhat forgotten figure in terms of the celebration of the early origins of Jazz, if there ever was a universal Jazz Master, Sidney Bechet would rank near the top in the Jazz Saxophone category.

The following piece is a rare article from the archives of Downbeat magazine.

© Copyright ® George Hoefer, copyright protected, all rights reserved, the author claims no right of copyright usage.

(Ed. Note Sidney Bechet is the 24th musician to be profiled in Down Beat's Bouquets to the Living series.) 

By GEORGE HOEFER Chicago, Downbeat 12.14.1951

—“This man could be elected Mayor of Paris tomorrow if he wanted to run. Crowds actually follow him in the streets. Why, I was never so amazed in all my life to find a countryman of mine virtually the toast of France, and I had hardly ever heard of him. It was so embarrassing in French society not to know all about this fabulous musician. 

“Right here and now I'm going to learn something about jazz. Please give me all the Sidney Bechet records you have.” This was spoken by a Chicago society matron in a music shop after spending the summer of 1950 in Paris. 

Sidney Bechet, New Orleans-born jazz pioneer, owns a villa outside Paris at 8 Rue Pierre-Brassolette Grigny, where he has been working on his autobiography. He feels a need for a true explanation of jazz music, the history of which has been simultaneous to his own life span, but derivations of which he has traced back to his grandfather’s time. 

He says a better understanding of jazz is required, since the critics have gotten it all tied up with houses of ill repute. He wants to explain why people who hate jazz pat their feet when they hear it. 

Wrote Ballet 

Originally Sidney’s work was finished in the form of a ballet in which jazz was depicted as a feeling. The strength of this feeling was enhanced by visual appreciation. The ballet was once accepted for production but Sidney did not like the way it was to be done, so he took it away, and now plans to complete it in book form. His new format will include the many original numbers he composed for the ballet. 

His new tentative publisher advised him to put more names in the book, as every name mentioned means another copy sold. When he returns to Paris after his current American tour he will revise the text to include more names and tell the story of his recent marriage. 

Bechet, like Armstrong, has become legendary during his lifetime. He has had one of the most fabulous and colorful careers of any jazz musician living or dead. His great reputation was made as a leader of a long line of New Orleans clarinetists, but today is world renowned as the virtuoso of the soprano saxophone, an instrument he alone features. 

Whole Band 

When Sidney sings out on his soprano he is a whole band by himself. His New Orleans clarinet style with long, slow, melodic phrases is combined with a fast trumpet lead effect when using the heavier-voiced soprano. He effectively adapts his chosen instrument to fine blues playing, making full use of its range and contrasts of tone between low and high register. Bechet possesses a truly “hot” intonation and an intense vibrato. 

Any soloist who dares to get entangled in a “carving contest” with Sidney is in for a frustrating disappointment. This happened a couple of years ago at the Paris Jazz Festival when bopper Charlie Parker, the great alto soloist, got involved in trading choruses with Bechet. Even if the Parisian crowd hadn’t been on the Dixie side, Bird would have had considerable difficulty in matching the vibrant avalanche of exciting sound Bechet is capable of putting down when aroused. 

Bunk Johnson once worked a week with Sidney in Boston, an association that ended abruptly when Bunk, tired of Sidney outblowing him, remarked, “Hey, Pops, put that sewer pipe down and let me blow awhile.”

 One-Man Feat

As stated above, Bechet is a by himself, a fact that he literally illustrated when engineer John Reid, then at RCA Victor, worked out a one-man-band record where Sidney played clarinet, soprano, tenor, piano, bass, and drums. The sides, Blues of Bechet and The Sheik of Araby, on Victor 27485, demonstrate the versatility of the self-taught genius. It was accomplished by using a pair of earphones and adding one instrument to the others while listening to playbacks of the previous renditions until the whole thing was together. 

Bechet’s interest in the soprano sax dates way back to 1919, while he was playing clarinet accompanied by the late great Tony Jackson on piano at Chicago’s Pel inn. One day he heard a record called Bull Frog Blues by the Six Brown Brothers, a saxophone sextet. One of the saxes included was a soprano and Sidney became interested in the powerful tone coming from the instrument. A short time later he saw a curved soprano in a pawn shop window and bought it. He was sorely disappointed with it, after a couple of weeks of experimenting with the horn he wasn’t able to get any volume or tone out of it. The horn was soon returned to the hockshop; he realized later it was defective. 

Had One Made 

Later in the year while with Marion Cook’s concert orchestra in London, he had a straight soprano made up to his special order. “I was delighted with the resulting full, round tone, and its power and volume in the low register compared with the thinness of the clarinet. He felt much more familiar with the new horn and from that point on he favored it until today he plays it exclusively. He performed in Chicago last September on an old American horn but recently in Paris he was presented with a new French make. This latter horn has been cut down three times so far as the pitch has not been to Sidney’s liking. 

Sidney was born in the Creole section of New Orleans on May 14,1897. He is, therefore, a contemporary of Louis Armstrong and Zutty Singleton. Due to his early start in music, the jazz historians have written about him as though he came along with such men as Keppard, Big Eye Louis Nelson, Bunk Joineon, and even Buddy Bolden. This has led to an erroneous impression that Bechet is much older than he actually is, but it is true he played with most of the- jazz pioneers of his early youth.

First Languages

His current love for France is understandable when you take into consideration his first languages were Creole and French, with the latter taught to him in his elementary school. The music language came along naturally after watching and hearing the musicians playing in wagons advertising dances, prize fights, picnics, and political campaigns. He also paid a great deal of attention to the brass bands with circuses and in all the parades of the day. It was on these occasions that he heard Buddy Bolden.

One of Sidney’s older brothers. Dr Leonard Bechet, now a dentist in New Orleans, bought a second hand clarinet held together with elastic bands and chewing gum and began taking lessons on it, when Sidney himself was only 6. Baby brother began to sneak the instrument out of the house and experiment with it under the front porch When he was finally discovered, his experiments were developed to such an extent that he amazed everybody with his musical prowess.

His brother was so disgusted with his own inability to match young Sid that he turned the instrument over to him to keep. Afterwards things began to happen in rapid order with Sid showing up in music circles all over town. Freddie Keppard was playing a lawn party during Sidney's eighth year and discerned a wellplayed clarinet accompanying his band coming from the parlor of the house Upon investigation he found Sidney playing away and

asked him to come out and sit in with the band.

Taught Correct Method 

George Baquet heard him playing and gave him an old clarinet of his own, a clarinet exercise book to teach him the correct method of fingering. Sidney had already developed his own technique and it was many years before he was able to change to the conventional method. He also never bothered to learn sightreading, and even today depends on his phenomenal memory for the notes and ideas that he plays.

Even at the age of 10, when he played his first professional engagement in New Orleans’ Storyville district, he had discovered he had the knack of knowing intuitively what came next after hearing a bar or a couple of notes of the melody.

Brother Leonard had switched to trombone after Sid took over the clarinet

And in 1907 he organized the Silver Bell Band with Joe Bechet on guitar; Sidney Desvigne, cornet, and Adolf DeMassiliere, drums The next year Sidney was in Buddy Petit’s Young Olympians, and the next year he continued up the ladder as replaced Big Eye Louis in the main Olympia Band.

Finally he attained the top rung in 1911 when Lorenzo Tio Sr. left the Eagle Band and Sidney replaced him. Now he was in the big time at the age of 14, sponsored by the Eagle’s cornet star, Willie (Bunk) Johnson, who picked him up and delivered him home on the Saturday nights the Eagle played for dancing at the Masonic Hall.

Met Louis

Sidney learned to play a fair cornet during this association with Bunk, and it was during this period that he became acquainted with Louis Armstrong, a fact that probably caused him to give up any idea he might have had regarding becoming a cornetist.

In 1913 he joined Jack Carey’s Uptown band for a spell until an opening became available with the Olympia Band when George Baquet and Keppard went to California. Bechet worked with Joe (King) Oliver and trombonist Zue Robertson in this band. After the war started in 1914 an economic depression hit New Orleans and jobs were less plentiful. Sidney’s good friend Louis Wade signed up to play with a traveling stock company through Texas and Sid went along, doing a comedy act and playing clarinet solos featuring his ability to take his instrument apart playing the separate sections. Clarence Williams was also a comedian with the show.

By 1916, Sidney was back in New Orleans gigging around town with King

and others. When Storyville was closed in 1917, Sidney and pianist Louis Wade joined the Bruce and Bruce Stock company and toured Alabama, Georgia, Ohio. and Indiana. By fall they landed in Chicago and Sidney quit to join up with a group of Crescent City jazz men at the Deluxe cafe that included clarinetist Lawrence Duhe, Freddie Keppard, Minor Hall, and others.

The band split when Duhe got a better job at the nearby Dreamland and Keppard stayed at the Deluxe. Sidney and Duhe got King Oliver up to play with them, Bechet doubled during this period with Eddie Venson’s band at an after-hour spot called the Royal Gardens. One night Sidney got the wrong pay envelope and found out Duhe was making more money so he went back to the Deluxe with Keppard. During 1919 the Royal Gardens closed and Sidney replaced this late job with another at the Pekin with Tony Jackson.

Joined Cook

Will Marion Cook, who had brought his Southern Syncopated concert orchestra to Chicago, heard Bechet at the Pekin and offered him a job. Sid joined for $60 a week and went east to New York, where he worked with Tim Bryman’s band at Coney Island, while Cook lined up a European tour. Sidney made his first crossing to England in late 1919 when Cook finally left. He had to up Sidney's salary to $200 a week to get Bechet to make the trip. Cook had a concert group of 36 pieces, of which 20 were banjos, and its specialty was spirituals and group singing. Sidney played clarinet solos on blues numbers, and was featured in the concerts at the Philharmonic Hall in London.

After he obtained the soprano, an arrangement of Song of Songs was especially made for him to perform on his new horn. When the Cook group finally broke up, Sidney and Benny Peyton got a job in London’s Embassy Club where the Prince of Wales and Ernest Ansermet came often to hear them. In the fall of 1920 they took the group to Paris and played several spots there. They made a recording of High Society and Tiger Rag for Columbia in London but it was never issued. 

Armistice Day, 1921, Sidney arrived back in New York and started playing gigs with Ford Dabney and finally joined a show where he played a Chinese character part and soloed on clarinet and soprano. 

Bessie Smith was a young blues singer featured in the same show. Sidney played an accompaniment for Bessie when she did an audition singing Sister Kate for Okeh but it was never released and Bessie wound up with Columbia records instead. 

By 1924, Bechet was active in recording with Clarence Williams’ Blue Five, composing songs, and playing for five months in Duke Ellington’s orchestra at the Kentucky club. The tunes were published by Fred Fisher, Inc., including Pleasure Mad, Do That Thing, Foolin’ Me, and Broken Window. The royalties from these tunes enabled him to open up a restaurant on Lenox avenue named the Club Bash. Many musician friends still call Sidney “Bash.” 

The spot folded in 1925 and Sidney joined the Black Revue, which included Claude Hopkins and Sidney in the pit band and Josephine Baker on the stage This show headed for Europe playing Paris, Brussels, and finally broke up in Berlin in 1926

Back with Bennie

Bechet next got together again with Benny Peyton and they took a band on tour of Russia playing Moscow, Kiev and Odessa where Sidney was billed as “The Talking Saxophone.” A strange meeting and resulting friendship took place in Moscow. Sidney met for the first time Tommy Ladnier, a New Orleans musician of his own age. Tommy was working in Russia with Sam Wooding’s orchestra.

After the Russian tour Sidney went to Berlin and rejoined Louis Douglas' Black and White Revue He led the 14-piece white and colored band featured with the show. This musical unit had representatives from four or five nationalities and toured throughout Europe. About this time Sidney was made an American representative to the World’s Fair of Music at the famous Beethoven hall at Frankfurt-au-Main. 

Bechet made his first connection with bandleader Noble Sissle when he joined him in Paris in July, 1928. This association was to last on and off for many years. While in Paris at Les Ambassadeurs Sidney bought a double E flat bass sax which he played in the Sissle band. Bechet has always had a flair for unusual and different instruments. On some of the Clarence Williams Blue Five sides he played a sarrusophone, a cross between a bassoon and bass sax. He also made a blues accompaniment playing guitar at one time, so he had considerable experience with different modes of playing music before he made the famous one-man-band side.

Talked-Of Incident

It was in 1928 in Paris that the “trouble” incident that is frequently mentioned among jazz people took place. It involved a shooting scrape in Joe Zelli’s Royal Box in Montmartre. A woman was involved and Sidney was deported. He went to Berlin and got a job in the famous Haus Vaterland. 

Sissle wired Bechet from New York in 1930 and Sidney returned home to play for another spell in the Sissle aggregation. That summer the Sissle unit went back to Europe and no sooner had it arrived back on the continent when Sidney returned to the Haus Vaterland in Berlin, and in time, again hooked up with the Black and White Revue for an extensive tour of Europe. 

History again repeated itself when Sissle wired Sidney in the winter of 1930-31 to come back to New York and join his band. A salary tiff in late ’31 again broke up the Bechet-Sissle relationship and then Sidney played at the Nest with an old New Orleans associate, Lorenzo Tio Jr., who played clarinet and alto. Next he spent a few weeks with Duke Ellington in Philadelphia working with Johnny Hodges on soprano. Hodges recorded The Sheik a short time after and the Bechet influence is quite discernible.

Joined with Ladnier

Tommy Ladnier left the Sissle band in 1932 and started a period of Bechet-Ladnier bands playing around in New York spots. It was at this time that the famous New Orleans Feetwarmer records were made for Victor. 

By the end of 1933, the depression had really caught up with the jazz musicians and Bechet opened a tailor shop at 128th street and St. Nicholas Avenue Sidney pressed while Tommy Ladnier shined the shoes. This situation lasted a year until Sissle again called and Sidney toured the United States with him for the next four years. 

The beginning of his current career as a virtuoso soloist can be said to have started in October, 1938, when he left Sissle for the last time and opened at Nick’s in Greenwich Village, fronting the Spirits of Rhythm. 

For a while at first there were many disappointments and jobs with rubber checks. His chief joy during these years was a big Cadillac he hardly had the money to operate.

There was one summer spent playing up at Fonda, N. Y.. where a Communist camp was located. They wanted Sidney to attend the meetings in the daytime, but he definitely refused, saying “I can't see anything in that stuff. Instead of the early bird getting the worm, they want the early bird to cut up the worm and give away the pieces.’’ It was strictly a job for Sidney, playing nightly for the camp members at the Log Cabin at a good salary. There was a long spell early during his current period that he led a small combo in a spot in Springfield, Ill.

Many Dates

Finally his name and musical stature grew to the point where he had many recording dates, jobbing gigs, and appearances at concerts, enough to keep him going comfortably. He played a long time at Jazz Ltd. in Chicago and at Ryan’s in New York. 

He started living in France regularly after going over there in 1949 to appear at the Jazz Festival. Bechet has been married three times. His first marriage took place in New York back around 1923-24. This ended in divorce in 1929. His next step in matrimony took place in June, 1935, when he married Marilouise Crawford in Chicago. This lasted until about 1942. 

His most recent marriage was world news last summer. Back in 1928 he met German-born Elizabeth Ziegler at Frankfurt. She was a dresser with the show in which Sidney starred at that time. He promised to divorce his wife back in the States, which he did in ’29. but by that time the romance had cooled and Miss Ziegler married a Frenchman she later divorced.

More than 20 years later when Sidney was back in France he saw her photograph by chance in a newspaper and renewed acquaintance by correspondence. Last August they were married amid much fanfare at Juan-Les-Pins, France. After the civil ceremony, a New Orleans style wedding procession went from the Antibes town hall to the Vieux Colombier night club where Sidney was playing.

Parade

Leading the parade were two ancient automobiles carrying a 30 foot sax while 200 jazzmen played. The French Riviera had rarely seen such a celebration with jazz fans from Paris, including the “existentialists,” French comedienne Mistinguette, jazz dancers and hundreds of fans. Sidney led La Marche Nuptiale on his soprano sax.

This fall Sidney returned to the States, leaving Elizabeth in charge of the villa, to play a series of engagements across the country. He wants to get down to New Orleans for some “gumbo,” a visit with his brother Leonard, and to get some work done on his teeth.

No Ailments

He feels pretty good and the stomach ailment that plagued him at Jazz Ltd. several years ago went away when he drank a pitcher of medicine he was required to take to line his stomach for X-ray. He was only supposed to take one glass and since he was immediately better he refused to have the x-ray taken. So far no additional treatment has been necessary.

The return home has not all been pleasant. A couple of years ago he left AWOL from Jazz Ltd. in the midst of an engagement. He later returned to talk things over and agreed! to play there again before playing another Chicago spot. A lawsuit was entered against him when he opened at the Blue Note. 

He is finding world fame has its drawbacks. A strange girl knocked on his hotel room door in Chicago and thrust a baby in his arms saying “It’s yours,” and started to cut out. After he got this straightened out, one of his ex- wives sent word she had some unpleasant things to discuss. 

Most Sincere

Bechet has had an exciting and colorful career and throughout the years he has probably been the most sincere jazzman of all. His goal is to express himself in his playing and feels that the old feeling of music is nothing but life, and through New Orleans music he wishes to bring back an expression of life, his life. 

He feels that no artist can do more than that.”

Sidney Bechet: Le Grande Bechet by Whitney Balliett

© Introduction Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Bechet is the first great soloist in jazz. Even before Louis Armstrong came along, he was playing vertical improvisations on the chords of a tune, rather than simple melodic breaks. Like Pops, Bechet grew up in New Orleans, transported his style north and then became the American star in Europe. A pioneer of the soprano saxophone, Sidney managed to combine its intense, sometimes treacherous tonality with the warm, woody sound of the clarinet.

“Since his death, Bechet's star has waned somewhat: although he was a showbiz celebrity in the 20s, that is very long ago now, and his contrary nature helped prevent him from securing the immortality which accrued to more durable entertainment figures such as Armstrong and Ellington (his centenary passed almost unremarked in 1997). But the glorious exuberance of his music remains an inspiration to any who aspire to playing in a traditional style, and he remains perhaps the most immediately identifiable of all Jazz musicians.”

- Richard Cook’s Jazz Encyclopedia

© Copyright ® Whitney Balliett, copyright protected, all rights reserved, the author claims no right of copyright usage.

The great New Orleans clarinettist and soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet was, like Jelly Roll Morton, a Creole of color. He was born in 1897, the youngest of seven children. His father, Omar, was a cornettist and a shoemaker, and his mother, Josephine, was an octoroon [one eight black and seven-eights white] who loved to dance. When he was six, he was playing the clarinet and taking lessons from the New Orleans master George Baquet, and soon afterward he went to work in his brother Leonard's band. When he was sixteen or seventeen, he and Clarence Williams (the pianist and composer) rode the rods into Texas. Bechet got into a fight with a white man, and fled to Galveston, where another brother lived. At twenty, he joined the Bruce & Bruce Stock Company, and ended up in Chicago. He had played with everyone of consequence in New Orleans (Bunk Johnson, Buddy Petit, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong), and in Chicago he played with Lil Hardin and Roy Palmer, and then with the cornettist Freddie Keppard—another iconoclast, whom he admired enormously. 

He was heard by the bandleader Will Marion Cook, who had a large, Paul Whiteman-type ensemble, and Cook hired him as a soloist (Bechet could not read music, and never fully learned) and took him to England. It was June of 1919, and Bechet was a sensation. Ernest Ansermet, a thirty-five-year-old Swiss who had conducted the premiere of Stravinsky's "L'Histoire du Soldat," went repeatedly to hear the band. He also talked with Bechet, and in due course wrote a review in the Swiss Revue Romande. Here is part of the last, prescient paragraph:

“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've heard two of them which he had elaborated at great length [and] they are equally admirable for their richness of invention, force of accent, and daring in novelty and the unexpected. Already, they gave the idea of a style, and their form was gripping, abrupt, harsh, with a brusque and pitiless ending like that of Bach's second "Brandenburg Concerto.” I wish to set down the name of this artist of genius; as for myself, I shall never forget it—it is Sidney Bechet. . . . What a moving thing it is to meet this very black, fat boy with white teeth and that narrow forehead, who is very glad one likes what he does, but who can say nothing of his art, save that he follows his "own way" . . . His "own way" is perhaps the highway the whole world will swing along tomorrow.”

Cook disbanded, and Bechet stayed on with a drummer named Benny Peyton. Then Bechet got into hot water over an English prostitute and was deported, despite his having bewitched the Royal Family at a command performance at Buckingham Palace. Back in America, he went into a show called "How Come?” with Bessie Smith. Bechet liked Bessie Smith. This is how he described her in Treat It Gentle, his autobiography: "She could be plenty tough . . . She always drank plenty and she could hold it, but sometimes, after she'd been drinking a while, she'd get like there was no pleasing her. There were times you had to know just how to handle her right." He played with James P. Johnson at the Kentucky Club, and around 1924 joined the fledgling Duke Ellington band. Ellington never got over Bechet's great lyrical bent. He wrote of him in Music Is My Mistress:

Often, when Bechet was blowing, he would say, "I'm going to call Goola this time!" Goola was his dog, a big German shepherd. Goola wasn't always there, but he was calling him anyway with a kind of throaty growl.

Call was very important in that kind of music. Today, the music has grown up and become quite scholastic, but this was au naturel, close to the primitive, where people send messages in what they play, calling somebody, or making facts and emotions known. Painting a picture, or having a story to go with what you were going to play, was of vital importance in those days. The audience didn't know anything about it, but the cats in the band did.

Bechet slipped away from Ellington, and opened a place of his own, the Club Basha. Then, never still long, he returned to Europe, with Claude Hopkins and Josephine Baker, for a show called "Revue Negre." Bechet put down his European roots during the twenties. He toured Russia, and roamed Western Europe. But he got into another fracas, in 1928. One morning around eight, he and the American banjoist Little Mike McKendrick had a gun battle outside a Montmartre bar. Bechet grazed McKendrick, hit the pianist Glover Compton in the leg, and wounded a Frenchwoman on her way to work. He went to jail for eleven months. When he got out, he worked at the Wild West Bar in Berlin and then went back to New York. 

In 1932, he joined Duke Ellington again, and tutored Johnny Hodges on the soprano saxophone, thus indirectly and permanently altering the Ellington band. Bechet put together the first of his New Orleans Feetwarmers bands and took it into the Savoy Ballroom, in Harlem. The group, which included the trumpeter Tommy Ladnier and the pianist Hank Duncan, made six numbers for Victor, which are among the most joyous and swinging of all jazz records. Bechet had met Ladnier in Russia, and the two men spent much time together in the thirties. When the Depression closed in, they quit the music and started a sort of basement store in Harlem, called the Southern Tailor Shop. Willie the Lion Smith remembered it in Music on My Mind:

I’d ask Sidney where he was living.

He would reply, "I'm at 129th Street and St. Nicholas. I'm the proprietor of the Southern Tailor Shop.”

That would gas me. I couldn't figure out what a good jazz clarinet player was doing playing "tailor."

So I said, "How many suits you got in there?"

"Oh," he said, "I've got up to about twenty; but we don't make them, just press 'em."

Then I asked, "Who's we?"

He replied, "Tommy and myself."

Well, I knew Tommy Ladnier from Chicago days. He was a good trumpet player. I found out later that Sidney would press and repair the suits, while Ladnier specialized in shining shoes. . . .

Bechet mentioned they had some good sessions in the back of the shop. So one night I agreed to come around to see what was happening.

But first, I wanted some information. "How much you charge to press a suit?"

He replied, "Oh, the regular fee."

You see I figured if nothing was going on I could at least get my suit pressed. Then I wanted to know, "What do we sleep on?"

He then said, "I've got a couple of cots in the back. But usually there's a bunch of musicians playing back there."

"You ain't gonna press any clothes tonight then," I said.

"No, man. I cooked up a batch of red beans and rice to add to a lot of cold fried chicken. We'll have us a party."

When the drummer Zutty Singleton arrived in New York from Chicago in 1937, he moved into the building Bechet and Ladnier shared quarters in. Singleton once said, “They called their place the House of Meditation, and they had a picture of Beethoven on the wall. One day, Ladnier said to Bechet, 'You know something, Bash? You the dead image of Beethoven,’ and that pleased Bechet. Bechet and Ladnier would stand in front of this big old mirror they had and watch themselves while they practiced. They listened to classical music, and they talked a lot about their travels—when Bechet wasn't talking about the Rosicrucians. He was a hell of a cat. He could be mean. He could be sweet. He could be in between.”

Jazz concerts were beginning to take hold by 1940, and that year Bechet gave one in Washington, D.C. It was organized by Nesuhi Ertegun. "Not long after I came to the United States, I decided to give a jazz concert built around Sidney Bechet," Ertegun has said. "My father was the Turkish Ambassador, and I lived at the Embassy in Washington, so I decided to give it in Washington. I had in mind a concert with a mixed band and a mixed audience, but Washington was still a Southern racist town, and no concert hall would touch such an affair. Finally, the Jewish Community Center, which had a four-hundred-seat auditorium, agreed. In addition to Bechet, I wanted Sidney De Paris on trumpet, Vic Dickenson on trombone, Art Hodes on piano, Wellman Braud on bass, and Manzie Johnson on drums. The alternating group would be Meade Lux Lewis and the blues shouter Joe Turner. I found Bechet at the Mimmo Club, in Harlem. He was backing a slick show, with a chorus line and singers and all that, and the band was in tuxedos. It all looked very prosperous. But the truth was that Bechet, who was already a hero in France, wasn't doing at all well here. The next day, he invited me to his apartment for a drink and something to eat. After we sat down, his wife came in and said to Bechet, 'Who's that? What does he want?' Bechet introduced me and said he'd brought me home for a bite. She said, 'You know there's no food in this house. Now, go on, get out and find your own food!' We went to a bar and had a drink and worked out the details of the concert. When the band arrived in Washington, they came to the Embassy, and we had an elegant lunch. I knew Bechet loved red beans and rice, so we had red beans and rice, and he was astonished. He wanted to know if we had a Creole cook, and I said no, a Turkish cook, and that beans and rice was a common dish in Turkey, too. Bechet couldn't believe it, and he said we must be copying the Creoles, and a very pleasant argument went on for some time about the roots of red beans and rice. The musicians were relaxed and in a good mood, and the concert, which was in the afternoon, was a tremendous success musically.

"From then on, Sidney and I were very friendly. He was deceptive. With his white hair and round face, he looked much older than he was. He also had this genial, sweet Creole politeness and a beautiful, harmonious way of talking. In many ways, he seemed like a typical Uncle Tom. But once you got to know him—once you had broken the mirror and got inside and found the true Bechet—you discovered he wasn't that way at all. He couldn't stand fakery or hypocrisy, and he was a tough and involved human being. He was far more intelligent than people took him for, and he knew what was going on everywhere. I never heard him play badly, even with bad groups. He was an incredibly rich player. Years later, when I was running a John Coltrane record date, Coltrane told me that Bechet had been an important influence on him."

Like most New Orleans clarinetists, Bechet used the Albert-system clarinet, which has a formal, luxurious, Old World tone. New Orleans clarinet playing tended to be rich and florid. Vibratos were wide, glissandi were favored, and emotions were high and unashamed. Bechet, along with Johnny Dodds, Jimmy Noone, and Barney Bigard, belonged to the second generation of New Orleans clarinetists. (The first included Alphonse Picou, Lorenzo Tio, Jr., Big Eye Louis Nelson, and George Baquet.) Noone and Bigard concentrated on legato attacks, fed and enriched their tones, and perfected showy melodic swoops and arcs. They liked being serene and airborne. 

Bechet and Dodds were rhythm players. They broke up their phrases ingeniously, used a great many blue notes, and had acidic, almost disagreeable timbres. Bechet used growls, strange bubbling sounds, and wide, swaggering notes. He shook his sounds out. When he took up the soprano saxophone, in the early twenties, he transferred his clarinet playing to this odd and difficult instrument. The soprano saxophone defies being played on pitch, and Bechet and his star pupil, Bob Wilber, are practically its only pitch-perfect practitioners. (The deliberate tonal distortions used by many modern soprano saxophonists make it impossible to tell whether they are in tune.) 

Bechet developed an enormous tone that incorporated qualities of the trumpet, the oboe, and the horn. The sheer strength of his sound, and his rhythmic drive, allowed him to rule every band he played in. Wise trumpet players stood aside or were blown to smithereens. As an improviser, Bechet used the chords of a song but also followed the melody, which kept reappearing, like sunlight on a forest floor. His melodic lines were pronouncements. They were full of shouts and swoops; they gleamed and exploded. The solos left his listeners with the feeling that they had been in on important things. When he played a slow blues, he exhibited a melancholy, an ancient grieving. And when he played a slow ballad he was honeyed and insinuating and melodramatic. Johnny Hodges grew up in both sides of this divided house.

In 1946, Bechet moved to Brooklyn and opened a sort of music school. The jazz critic Richard Hadlock took some lessons from him, and wrote about them in the San Francisco Examiner:

Sidney would run off a complex series of phrases and leave me alone in his room for a couple of hours to wrestle with what he had played. One lesson could easily take up an entire afternoon, and Sidney favored giving a lesson every day.

"Look, when you emphasize a note, you throw your whole body into it," he would say, cutting a wide arc with his horn as he slashed into a phrase.

"I'm going to give you one note today," he once told me. "See how many ways you can play that note—growl it, smear it, flat it, sharp it, do anything you want to it. That's how you express your feelings in this music. It's like talking.

"Always try to complete your phrases and your ideas . . . There are lots of otherwise good musicians who sound terrible because they start a new idea without finishing the last one."

Bob Wilber has described another facet of Bechet:

One thing he was very interested in was the concept of interpreting a song. You start out with an exposition of the melody in which you want to bring out the beauty of it. And then you start your variations, but at first they are closely related to the melody. Then, as you go on to another chorus, you get further away—you do something a little less based on the melody but more on the harmony. Sidney was much more harmonically oriented than most of the players of his generation . . . Then at the end, you would come back to the melody and there would be some kind of coda which would bring the thing to a conclusion. . . . The idea of the form was very important to him.

Bechet settled in France in 1951. He had filled the forties with gigs in and around New York and in Chicago. The pianist Dick Wellstood worked with him at Jazz Limited, in Chicago, and at the Bandbox, in New York. "He was very autocratic and nineteenth-century," Wellstood once said. "It was like working for Bismarck. There was a right way and a wrong way, and if you did it the wrong way it was mutiny. There was a right tempo and right chords, and that was the way you reached the people. He had a gentlemanly and courtly exterior. He spoke softly, using the New Orleans accent of 'poll' and 'erster' for 'pearl' and 'oyster.' But when he was annoyed he'd lash out, and I think he always carried a knife. Once, at Jimmy Ryan's, in New York, his piano player was late, and Bechet asked me—I just happened to be there—to sit in. When the piano player arrived, Sidney bawled him out publicly, and told him, 'I want you to give that boy five dollars.' I think he got increasingly egocentric. At the Bandbox, he sat in a thronelike chair backstage, and people paid court to him. Alfred Lion, of Blue Note records, would bring him champagne and all but kneel at his feet. His sense of humor was strange. One night, in Chicago, he played this game with his trombonist Munn Ware. The horn players were supposed to stand up to solo, but after Sidney had taken his solo and sat down and Munn had stood up Sidney got up again and started playing and Munn sat down. Sidney played several choruses and sat down, and when Munn stood up again to solo Sidney stood up, and on it went. Later, Munn shot him in the back of the head with a water pistol, and I waited for lightning to strike, but Sidney only giggled. The truth is, I was scared to death of him the whole time I worked for him."

Bechet's autobiography [Treat It Gentle], done in France with the help of Joan Reid, Desmond Flower, and John Ciardi, was published the year after his death, in 1959. The first two-thirds of the book is remarkable. It opens with a long, mythlike account of the life and death of his grandfather, a freed slave named Omar. Omar becomes obsessed with a young slave girl on a nearby plantation, and one night he takes her to the edge of the bayou and makes love to her. But the girl's owner, also bewitched by her, follows them. He shoots Omar in the arm and takes the girl home. Then he spreads word that Omar has raped his daughter and search parties scour the bayou, where Omar hides. He sees the girl once more, at great peril, and is murdered by a slave seeking the reward. The girl has a baby, who becomes Bechet's father. It does not matter how much improvisation there is in the story. Bechet's language is dense and mysterious and poetical:

“All those trees there, they was standing like skeletons after the hide of the animal has disappeared. There was moonlight on their tops like blossoming, and there was the darkness under them, the light and the darkness somehow part of one thing that was darker than just plain dark, and all so still.”

The book is full of folk wisdom:

“So many people go at themselves like they was some book: they look back through themselves, they see this so and so chapter, they remember this one thing or another, but they don't go through the pages one after the other really finding out what they're about and who they are and where they are. They never count their whole story together.”

He talks of spirituals and the blues:

“In the spirituals the people clapped their hands—that was their rhythm. In the blues it was further down; they didn't need the clapping, but they remembered it ... And both of them, the spirituals and the blues, they was a prayer. One was praying to God and the other was praying to what's human. It's like one was saying, "Oh, God, let me go," and the other was saying, "Oh, Mister, let me be."”

Bechet's life in France appears to have fulfilled him. He married a German woman he had known in the twenties, and he kept a mistress, by whom he had a son. He made a lot of money, bought a small estate outside Paris, and drove a Salmson coupe at high speeds. In 1957, he recorded a tight, to-the-point collaboration with the modern French pianist Martial Solal. It is one of his best records. The next year, he played beautifully at the Brussels World's Fair. 

The impresario and pianist George Wein was in the band. "I never encountered the evil side of Bechet," Wein has said. "Two things that probably caused it were his stomach, which bothered him for years, and trumpet players who tried to grab the lead in bands he was in. I think he was kind to musicians who were his inferiors, and hard on musicians who were his equals. I filled in at a Bechet concert at the Academy of Music, in Philadelphia, in 1948, when James P. Johnson failed to show, and he made me feel like I was playing beautifully, even on 'Summertime,' which was his big number, and which I'd never played before. He was a great lyrical force, and he had great personal force. He filled a room when he came into it. I think he could have been as big as Louis Armstrong if he hadn't mistrusted all the bookers and managers. There was no reason for Bechet to come back from France after he settled there. He was happy and was worshipped. But he did come back a few times in the early fifties, and on one of his visits he played a gig at Storyville, my club in Boston. His stomach acted up, and we put him in Massachusetts General Hospital. They told him he had to have an operation, and what did he do? He went back to France and had the operation there. He trusted the French more than he did the Americans. Until the very end, that is. I was in France in 1959, and Charles Delaunay told me that Sidney was dying. I called him up at his house outside Paris and asked him what I could do. 'Come and see me,’ he said. I'm very bad at such visits, but I went, and Sidney told me he wanted to go home. I told him O.K., we'd try and make arrangements and such, but before anything could be done he was gone."”