Jazz Greats: Summertime (1996)
20 tracks, 63 minutes
Spotify playlist
When talking about Sidney Bechet, the album that you’re listening to is really neither here nor there. That’s because most of his best work was recorded in the 1930s and 40s, before albums were really a thing, so to get the most listening pleasure, you’re probably going to have a ‘Best Of’ album, like this one. As it happens, this particular album is from a long-defunct magazine called Jazz Greats, and features two bonus tracks on the end by Jimmie Noone and Duke Ellington, but there are hundreds of compilations out there. So instead of talking about this album specifically, I’m just gonna bang on for a bit about a few of the tracks and Bechet’s style in general.
Today, the most well-known musician of the Dixieland jazz era is Louis Armstrong – for good reason – but for my money, it is the clarinettist and soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet whose music is the more exciting. A lot of his repertoire was adaptations of songs, and this allowed him to show off the lyrical quality to his playing; he could play the breakneck lines of ragtime music excellently, but he could also play the slower, more emotional songs with such subtlety and nuance as to rival the best singers. His version of ‘Summertime’ is rightly remembered as a highlight of his career, and it’s probably my favourite version of the song that has been covered and adapted by basically everyone.
I know that Dixieland and ragtime jazz – or, as it’s called when they’re played nowadays, trad jazz – have a reputation within the jazz scene as being quite naff and the reserve of mouldy figs with no appetite for the adventurousness that came with later jazz styles, but that’s a bit of a mad position to hold when you listen to, for example, Sidney Bechet’s recording of ‘Weary Blues’. The leading trio of two clarinets and a trumpet (Bechet, Mezz Mezzrow and Tommy Ladnier, respectively) all play in that polyphonic way such as we were talking about the other day. None of the three are really playing the tune – they are all improvising in and around it so that the melody sounds obvious to us, even though it is basically only implied among this group improvisation. That is insane! The level of musicianship is such that they don’t even have to play the tune any more – instead they’re programming your brain so that it will play it instead. Amazing.
There’s also a track on this compilation that is really pioneering, even though you may not be able to tell on first hearing. While all of the other tracks here are Bechet playing with various ensembles of his own or others’ direction, his version of ‘The Sheik of Araby’ is different: it was recorded by the Sidney Bechet One Man Band in 1941. As far as I can tell, this is the first recording of a multitracked ‘one man band,’ with Bechet playing clarinet, soprano and tenor saxophones, piano, bass and drums all by himself by recording them all on separate masters and mixing them down together. The sound quality suffers a little due to the equipment available at the time, but the music is still tip-top. It actually freaked out the American Federation of Musicians enough that they banned their members from using this pioneering technique for years out of a fear that it would put musicians out of business.
So there you are, just a few semi-random musings on Sidney Bechet all from a free covermount CD from a magazine. The moral: take good music wherever you can find it!
Oh, actually, one more quick, half-formed musing: when the Sherman Brothers were writing ‘I Wanna Be Like You’ for The Jungle Book (released in 1967), I wonder if they were taking cues from Sidney Bechet and Muggsy Spanier’s ‘That’s a Plenty’, recorded in 1940. Give it a listen! Okay, I’m done now.
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