[Dixielandjazz] Bechet and Noone and Dodds

[Charles Suhor]

To quote Lou Costello (or wait, was it really Bud Abbott?): Who's on first?

Charlie

On Apr 13, 2015, at 12:19 PM, ROBERT R. CALDER wrote:

> I have no doubt that the conversation between Steve and Bechet took place exactly as Steve says. And that Eddie wasn't involved in that incident. 
> 
> I am also sure that for whatever reason Eddie Lambert told an audience in Glasgow the story of his asking Bechet why he no longer played clarinet, and reported a harrowing response. It's not as if anybody told me that Eddie had said what he said, I heard it with my own ears.  I appreciate that it presumably was startling for Steve to hear that Eddie had told of his (Eddie's) asking Bechet that question, but I can only report what I heard. As far as I recall, further, and I was an assiduous reader of Steve's pages in Jazz Journal, there was what I took to be an allusion to Eddie having asked that question. That was the only reason I mentioned Steve in the first of these postings. Obviously now Steve was referring to his own story, which I wasn't confusing with anything since I was unaware of it. 
> 
> 
> It seems very unlikely that no other young man apart from Steve asked Bechet the question, and quite possible that Bechet's response became "not again!" The incident I witnessed, in the Royal Stuart Hotel, Clyde Street, Glasgow, was one in which Eddie was asked did he have any idea why Bechet gave up on clarinet. Either Eddie had asked Bechet the question and received a scarifying reply, or if he hadn't he might have been asked the same question by other people, reported Steve's story, and been aghast to hear a response suggesting he had told a story against Steve. At the time it looked to me Eddie was reporing an encounter he didn't like to remember, and if anything telling that story against himself .
> In a parallel case Heather, the wife of a friend, how the wife of another friend had ejected from her house someone none of us had reason to like. Heather was outraged, "that was me", she said, unaware that I already knew that she had on an earlier occasion ejected the same man from her house. I said I knew that, and I was referring to the fact that yet another wife had done exactly the same. Two converging but not identical stories.
> 
>  Of course it is possible to think badly of young Americans in the 1960s interviewing the same bluesmen, and asking questions ever the same, and not much better than "where did you grow up, Mr. Bechet?" Unlike Bechet and the clarinet there were already published answers to what these guys were being asked again and again. 
> 
> What a pity nobody asked Don Byas to record James P. Johnson's "Over the Bars".
> 
> 
> May all of Steve's stories remain safe, and himself likewise. He can certainly be included in the general reference Ronnie Scott made to jazz as a repository of virtue.
> 
> Robert 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> ________________________________
>> From: Steve Voce <stevevoce at virginmedia.com>
>> 
>> May I tell you again, Robert, that this was a conversation betweenSidney Bechet and me. Eddie wasn't involved in the incident. 
>> I began by asking Bechet why, in 1948, he had given up playing the clarinet when we all liked his clarinet playing so much.
>> He said 'That's a very interesting question, and I'll answer it with another one. What the bloody hell has it got to do with you?' 
>> Thereupon he got up from the table and walked out of the room.
>> Eddie wasn't present at that concert.
>> Now, would you like me to tell you how Don Byas nearly threw Eddie over the bar?
>> 
>> 
>> 
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