Klarinet Archive - Posting 000005.txt from 2007/05

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Sidney Bechet
Date: Wed, 02 May 2007 09:46:19 -0400


While eating our Chicken Melamine for dinner last night, my husband and I
watched a 1997 documentary, "Sidney Bechet: Treat It Gentle," on the
Ovation cable channel. Since Ovation re-runs things over and over, there's
a good chance of a re-airing soon, and the program is well worth watching.
Bechet, a clarinet and soprano sax jazz man from New Orleans, is less well
known to audiences in his native country than many of his contemporaries,
because he spent most of his career in France. In the first half of the
20th century, an African American musician got more respect and a better
income over there than over here.

The documentary includes many clips of Bechet playing. His shrill tone
competes well with the brasses (including Louis Armstrong's trumpet--those
two had mixed feelings about each other...). Bechet influenced other
clarinet players in jazz to emphasize projection and move away from the
mellower, Big Band sound. From looking at him strain, I get the impression
he must have played on brutally hard reed. Sometimes there's too much
banshee squeal or too much billy-goat vibrato in Bechet's sound for my
personal taste, but it's an exciting sound in its rightful context, and the
man could play.

One clip in particular shows him holding a note so long he'd almost have to
be circular breathing--except he looks as if he's playing that whole
stretched-out, loud, high-pitched wail on one breath. The clips that
startle me the most, in the context of Bechet's tremendous breath control,
show him smoking cigarettes!

Lelia Loban

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