[Dixielandjazz] Sidney Bechet Society

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Some of us were members of the British-based  "Sidney Bechet Appreciation Society" long ago, presided over by Mal Collins,  nice man who sent me a tape of some then otherwise unavailable music and to whom I responded with a copy of the book DEEP SOUTH PIANO to inform him about the pianist Will Ezell, whose ten-inch LP he owned without sleevenotes.
 
I was briefly in Berlin in the year 2000, with a free Sunday afternoon, and when I saw the legend "Sidney's Blues"  in a WHAT'S ON section I proceeded to a bar in the Kreuzberg district and found a trumpetless clarinetless trad band, with everybody seated, and a soprano player up front delivering Bechet with great vigour.  At close quarters I could see him almost rolling the conical soprano on his thumbs, with minimal grip and a sort of extra resource for vibrato.  An afternoon well-spent, but alas I do not have this player's name.  As I wrote not long ago in an article one of my more curious experiences was of hearing an Italian itinerant musician playing a Bechet tune in one of the narrow streets of Konstanz, where I lived at the time, and then in Barcelona en route to an academic conference literally three days later there was a completely different individual delivering Bechet in front of the cathedral!!  That was only a few years back 
 (2003?  must check).
These days however I listen to Bechet on record in one or another room of my house.