Treat It Gentle at John G Shedd Institute for the Arts

"Bechet to me was the very epitome of jazz…everything he played in his whole life was completely original. I honestly think he was the most unique man ever to be in this music." -- Duke Ellington

Raised and trained as a clarinetist in New Orleans, legendary soprano saxophoist Sidney Bechet spent the mid-1910s touring the midwest before moving in 1919 to New York, where he joined Will Marrion Cook's Syncopated Orchestra, which soon after traveled to Europe. In London, Bechet discovered the instrument that would ever after be associated with his name and robust, facile approach to it (descirbed, variously, as "emotional" and "reckless" and characterized by a broad vibrato) soon established his reputation in Great Britain. This first European sojourn was cut short when, in 1922, he was imprisoned and then deported after an altercation with a prostitute....

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"Bechet to me was the very epitome of jazz…everything he played in his whole life was completely original. I honestly think he was the most unique man ever to be in this music." -- Duke Ellington

Raised and trained as a clarinetist in New Orleans, legendary soprano saxophoist Sidney Bechet spent the mid-1910s touring the midwest before moving in 1919 to New York, where he joined Will Marrion Cook's Syncopated Orchestra, which soon after traveled to Europe. In London, Bechet discovered the instrument that would ever after be associated with his name and robust, facile approach to it (descirbed, variously, as "emotional" and "reckless" and characterized by a broad vibrato) soon established his reputation in Great Britain. This first European sojourn was cut short when, in 1922, he was imprisoned and then deported after an altercation with a prostitute.

In 1925 Bechet returned to Europe, as a member of the orchestra of La revue negre, which propelled Joesphine Baker to stardom when it opened at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées that October. Subsequent touring throughout Europe for the next 2 years further established his reputation, and by 1928 he was back in Paris, leading his own band, engaged to a French woman, and ready to settle down. Unfortunately, he got into gunfight with another musician outside of Bricktop's in Montmartre where they were playing, wounded a passerby, wound up in prison for a year, and was deported.

Although he toured other parts of Europe in the early '30s, Bechet was not to return to France for almost 20 years. But when he did, in 1949 as a part of the Salle Pleyel Jazz Festival in Paris, it was a triumph, in part due to France's well-established "hot jazz" scene, articulated and championed by the Hot Club du France. He spent the following decade in France, where he died in 1959, as renowned in France and throughout Europe as Louis Armstrong enjoyed in the United States.

http://theshedd.org/divP/festival.aspx?series=2260&event=2268

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