Jazz Articles about Sidney Bechet

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Sidney Bechet: Mosaic Select 23

by Robert R. Calder
March 31, 2007

Sidney Bechet Mosaic Select 23: Sidney Bechet Mosaic Records 2006

In August 2004, in a back street in the German town of Konstanz, I heard his music played by an itinerant Italian clarinetist. Days later in Spain, in front of Barcelona cathedral, I heard a different clarinetist and a different Bechet tune. Back in Germany a year later, another Italian and more Bechet.

These guys weren't even jazz musicians, unlike Evan Christopher, ...

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Sidney Bechet: Mosaic Select

by Ken Dryden
April 14, 2006

Sidney Bechet was one of the first jazz virtuosos, dominating nearly every recording session in which he took part. Though his Blue Note and RCA Victor recordings are better known due to frequent reissues, there is a lot of rare, valuable material here. This limited-edition compilation collects many of his recordings (plus fourteen previously unissued selections) under the Sony music umbrella, including tracks made for Columbia, Okeh, Variety and Vocalion, all with greatly improved remastering. Disc one ...

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Sidney Bechet: Sidney Bechet, 1938-1952

by Joel Roberts
May 4, 2005

New Orleans jazz legend Sidney Bechet was all the rage in Paris in the late '40s and early '50s, when he recorded the sides included on disc one of this new two-CD package. After some lean years in the US, when he temporarily dropped out of the music business to run a tailor shop in Harlem, Bechet journeyed to Paris, where his blend of traditional jazz and full-bodied swing made him the toast of the town. He'd live out the ...

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Sidney Bechet: Up a Lazy River

by Robert Spencer
December 1, 1999

Sidney Bechet was the first master of the soprano saxophone, and indeed, the father of all the others: when the instrument was almost forgotten, Steve Lacy heard Bechet play Duke Ellington's “The Mooche." Then John Coltrane was somehow (there are different versions of the story) introduced to the soprano by Lacy. And the rest is history.

But Bechet's work still remains among the foremost explications of the possibilities of the soprano saxophone, for no one since has approached his ocean-wide ...