ONE OF THE GREATEST OF THE EARLY NEW

I Orleans jazz musicians, Sidney Bechet (1897-

1959) was among those who left the city
around the time of World War I, bringing the ; !'
music to an international audience. Although
S.,. I
he performed on clarinet throughout his career,
he was also the first important player of the so- I d n e y " ,i
prano saxophone, which became his main in-
Bech t' strument. Bechet worked for Duke Ellington for e s
a few months in 1924 and his New Orleans
M .
I r
style had a great influence on Ellington's band. us I ca ;;
His fortunes declined during the 1930s, along .
with the "hot" style he ~~e~plified, but he be- p
hII0S0PhY i
came one of the beneficiaries of the New Or-
leans revival at the turn of the decade.
During the latter part of his life, Bechet
narrated his autobiography in a series of taped interviews, which were later tran-
scribed and edited.l These selections from the book that resulted, Treat It Gentle: An
Autobiography (1960), pertain to Bechet's musical philosophy and the heritage that
shaped it. Although it is in some sense a document of the 1950s, the book is ex-
cerpted here as a firsthand account of the earliest jazz "musicianers." Bechet makes
his story vivid and evocative by personifying the musical tradition to which he be-
longed, allowing him to present jazz as something that is experienced as deeply per-
sonal, yet shared socially and rooted historically.
M y story goes a long way back. It goes further back than I had any-
thing to do with. My music is like that. I got it from something in-
herited, just like the stories my father gave down to me. And those
stories are aU I know about some of the things bringing me to where I am.
And all my life I've been trying to explain about something, something I un-
derstand-the part of me that was there before I was. It was there waiting
to be me. It was there waiting to be the music. It's that part I've been trying
to explain to myself all my life.
There was a hell of a lot of fuss and confusion about the time my father
was growing up. It was right around Emancipation time. All the papers were
taking sides, running cartoons of apes and things, screaming blood and gun-
powder. A lot of people didn't want to lose the Negroes. The Negro, he was
three billion dollars worth of property, and here was a law coming that was
to take it all away. Who was to do the work then?
Source: Sidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography (London: Cassell, 1960), pp. 4,
47-48, 104, 203, 63, 176-77,209,201.
IThe extent to which Bechet's collaborators rewrote his memoirs is now hard to
determine. For an account of the complex process that produced Treat It Gentle,
see John Chilton, Sidney Bechet: The Wizard of jazz (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987), pp. 290-92. See also the thoughtful reviews by Nat Hentoff, "A Need
to be Moving," Metronome, March 1961, pp. 30-31, and Max Jones, "This Book Is
Bechet," Melody Maker, April 23, 1960, p. 5.
3
Well, they had the war, and it made a bitterness. A lot of people, they
never could climb so high again after the war and they had a whole lot to
say about that. It was a crime; it was all political; it was the end of America.
What would anyone want with a lot of black people being free, people who
couldn't even spell their names or read a book? And everything changed up-
side down. ..the soldiers being brought in to guard, sort of keep order,
and making more bitterness just by being there.
But the Negroes, it had made them free. They wouldn't be bought and
sold now,' not ever again. If they could find a piece of land somewheres it
would be theirs, they could work it for themselves-the ones anyway who
had heard that slavery was against the law. A lot of Negroes, especially in
back places, never did hear about it. But mostly there was this big change:
a different feeling had got started.
Go down Moses,
Way down in Egypt land;
Tell old Pharaoh,
Let my people go. ...
It was years they'd been singing that. And suddenly there was a differ-
ent way of singing it. You could feel a new way of happiness in the lines.
All that waiting, all that time when that song was far-off music, waiting mu-
sic, suffering music; and all at once it was there, it had arrived. It was joy
music now. It was Free Day. ..Emancipation.
And New Orleans just bust wide open. A real time was had. They heard the
music, and the music told them about it. They heard that music from bands march-
ing up and down the streets and they knew what music it was. It was laughing
out loud up and down all the streets, laughing like two people just fmding out
about each other. ..like something that had found a short-cut after traveling
through all the distance there was. That ml,lsic, it wasn't spirituals or blues or rag-
time, but everything all at once, each one putting something over on the other.
Maybe that's not easy to understand. White people, they don't have the mem-
ory that needs to understand it. But that's what the music is ...a lost thing
fmding itself. It's like a man with no place of his own. He wanders the world
and he's a stranger wherever he is; he's a stranger right in the place where he
was born. But then something happens to him and he fmds a place, his place.
He stands in front of it and he crosses the door, going inside. That's where the
music was that day-it was taking him through the door; he was coming home.
All those people who had been slaves, they needed the music more than
ever now; it was like they were trying to find out in this music what they
were supposed to do with this freedom: playing the music and listening to
it-waiting for it to express what they needed to learn.
Sometimes when I was playing the music I knew what it was that I was
remembering. Other times, I was just being a kid, forgetting a thing almost
before it was over. Somehow it seems like I ;}lways understood more when
the music was playing and I was inside it, bringing it on out to itself.
There's a pride in it, too. The man sin~g it, the man playing it, he makes
a place. For as long as the song is being played, that's the place he's been look-
ing for. And when the piece is all played and he's back, it may be he's feeling
-
good; maybe he's making good money and getting good treatment and he's feel-
ing good-or maybe he starts missing the song. Maybe he starts wanting the place
he found while he was playing the song. Or maybe it just troubles back at him.
Sometimes we'd have what they called in those days "bucking contests";
that was long before they talked about "cutting contests." One band, it would
come right up in front of the other and play at it, and the first band it would
play right back, until finally one band just had to give in. And the one that
didn't give in, all the people, they'd rush up to it and give it drinks and food
and holler for more, wanting more, not having enough. There just couldn't
be enough for those people back there. And that band was best that played
the best together. No matter what kind of music it was, if the band could
keep it together, that made it the best. That band, it would know its num-
bers and know its foundation and it would know itself.
In the old days there wasn't no one so anxious to take someone else's
run. We were working together. Each person, he was the other person's mu-
sic: you could feel that really running through the band, making itself up and
coming out so new and strong. We played as a group then. ...I guess
just about the loneliest a musicianer can be is in not being able to find some-
one he can really play with that way.
Like I said before, you could ask me, "What's classical music?" I couldn't
answer that. It's not a thing that could be answered straight out. You have
to tell it the long way. You have to tell about the people who make it, what
they have inside them, what they're doing, what they're waiting for. Then
you can begin to have an understanding.
You come into life alone and you go out of it alone, and you're going
to be alone a lot of the time when you're on this earth-and what tells it all,
it's the music. You tell it to the music and the music tells it to you. And then
you know about it. You know what it was happened to you.
ONE OF THE EARLIEST PUBLISHED DISCUS-
2 sions of jazz appeared in the New York Sun
on August 5, 191 7. The author, Walter Kings-
ley ("the Great Authority on the Subject" ac-
cording to the Sun), was a press agent for "
Wh New York's Palace Theatre. The first section
of his article illustrates how writers frequently en ce
projected their fantasies onto the new music:
( 0 m e S here jazz is positioned midway between the
exoticism of the African jungle and the eclec-
J ~" ticism of New York's vaudeville and variety ass'
shows. Kingsley continues by quoting and .
summarizing (sometimes inaccurately) the
work of a certain Professor William Morrison
Patterson, who offers some perceptive com-
ments on rhythm, particularly syncopation.
Source: Walter Kingsley, "Whence Comes Jass? Facts From the Great Authority on the Subject,"
New York Sun, August 5, 1917, p. 3. Later summarized and quoted extensively in "The
Appeal of the Primitive Jazz," The Literary Digest, August 25, 1917, pp. 28-29.