Treat It Gentle Treat It Gentle by Sidney Bechet
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LIBRARY OF WELLESLEY COLLEGE Purchased From the Permanent Library Fund Established by Eben Norton Horsford Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries http://archive.org/details/treatitgentleOObech Treat It Gentle Treat It Gentle by Sidney Bechet Among those who helped record and edit the tapes on which this book is based are Joan Reid, Desmond Flower, and John Ciardi. Hill and Wang -New York © Twayne Publishers Inc. and Cassell & Company, Ltd. 1960 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-15935 6i3h The drawing ofSidney Bechet on the title-page is by David Stone Martin and is reproduced by courtesy of Folkways Records. Manufactured in tin- L'nited States of America Foreword by Desmond Flower Sidney Bechet was first persuaded to tell his story some years ago by Miss Joan Reid, who succeeded in getting a very considerable amount of material on to tape. All who read this book must be grateful to her for her successful initiative in bringing Sidney to the recording machine, and for the amount of very hard work which she put in. The task of putting Sidney's material into book form was later entrusted to me. I found the story to about 1936 com- plete; and that part of the book as it now appears, together with the final chapter, were passed by Sidney as being in the form in which he wished what he had to say to appear. Most of the story of the twenty years from 1936 also existed, but there were certain gaps. I therefore went to Paris, and Sidney recorded further material which enabled the remaining chapters to be completed. Sidney read and approved of these too, but said that there were some passages upon which he would like to enlarge, as he had more to say. He was not well, he said, but he would return to his tape-recorder as soon as his health permitted. Alas, that was not to be, for he was never again well enough to do what he intended. The whole of this book as it now appears, was therefore complete and in Sidney's hands before his death. But there are a few parts of the later narrative which are little more than a recital of facts and dates. It is, of course, to these that he Foreword intended to return had he been given the strength to do so. To have talked and worked with Sidney on this book was something for which I shall always be grateful. I first heard him play in 1931, but not until the preparation of this book did I have the pleasure of talking with him. He says of himself that he could sometimes be mean, and that he had his troubles, and his story does not belie this. But to meet him was an experience, for he was warm, wise, kind and gentle. vi Contents Chapter Foreword v 1 A Bend in the Road 1 2 Omar 6 3 My Father 45 4 The Second Line 61 5 Growing Up 77 6 I'm On My Way 95 7 The Road North 111 8 First Sight of Europe 125 9 Bessie and Duke 134 10 From Harlem to Europe 144 11 Trouble in Paris 149 12 Back in New York 157 13 Blues for Tommy 166 14 One Man's Band 179 15 Closer to Africa 191 16 It's the Music and It's the People 201 Catalogue of Recordings 221 Index 241 vii List of Illustrations Following page Sidney Bechet, 1900 86 Benny Peyton's band in London, 1919. Sidney Bechet is on the extreme right; Benny Peyton is to his im- mediate left The Ballets Negres, Paris, 1925. Sidney Bechet is second from the right Sidney Bechet, 1926 The Revue Negre, Paris, 1925. Sidney Bechet is immedi- ately behind Josephine Baker who is doing the splits 118 The Revue Negre, Paris, 1925 Haus Vaterland, Berlin, 1929, 1931 Sidney Bechet and Tommy Ladnier, 1938 Sidney Bechet and Sammy Price at Jimmy Ryan's, New York, 1949 Bill Reinhardt and Sidney Bechet at Chicago's Blue Note, 1948 182 Charlie Parker, Sidney Bechet, and Kenny Clarke en route to the Paris Jazz Festival, 1949 Sidney Bechet and the Claude Luter band, Vieux Colombier, Paris, 1950 Marriage, Juan-les-Pins, 1951 Sidney Bechet at a jam session, Paris, 1952. Claude Luter is immediately behind Sidney Bechet 214 The fingering Georges Baquet did not change Late in life 1. A Bend in the Road You know there's people, they got the wrong idea of Jazz. They think it's all that red-light business. But that's not so. And the real story I've got to tell, it's right there. It's Jazz. What it is—how it come to be what it is. People come up to me and they ask me, 'Are you going to play Tin Roof BluesV They ask me, 'What's be-bop?' or what do I think of some record Louis Armstrong put out. But if I was to answer that, I'd have to go back a long way. That's why I have to tell a lot more than people would expect. They come to tell me they like this record or that, and they ask me what I'm trying to do by my music. They ask me what's going to happen to Jazz? Where's it going? One night a man came to see me when I was playing in Paris; I'd known his son in New York. He came in with this party, and after the band had finished playing I got to talking with him. He started to tell me it meant a lot to him to hear me play; he'd had an experience he'd never had before. I told him I played like I always played. That's really all I can say. But he was in a kind of feeling he wanted to talk. He was coming to me because there was something he wanted to know. So he told me he wanted to tell me a story, how he hadn't planned on coming to this place, this Vieux Colombier. He'd been off somewhere, very happy; his people, they had been enjoying themselves. And then someone suggested they come to hear me, that's what he said. And this man, he'd heard me, and I was still playing the old music, I was still playing New — Treat It Gentle Orleans. That's what he told me. 'This music is your music,' he said. But, you know, no music is my music. It's everybody's who can feel it. You're here . well, if there's music, you feel it—then it's yours too. You got to be in the sun to feel the sun. It's that way with music too. But what that man said started me thinking. I began to think there's a whole lot of people, all they've been hearing is how ragtime got started in New Orleans, and as far as they know it just stopped there. They get to think in a memory kind of way all about this Jazz; but these people don't seem to know it's more than a memory thing. They don't seem to know it's happening right there where they're listening to it, just as much as it ever did in memory. This man that come to see me in the Vieux Colombier went on to tell me about the band, about the French kids. 'You gave them the spark,' he said. 'They didn't have it until you played.' And then he wanted to know what was going to happen to Jazz when people like me weren't around any more. But you know, Jazz isn't just me. It isn't just any one person who plays it. There'll always be Jazz. It doesn't stop with me, it doesn't stop anywhere. You take a melody . people can feel a melody ... as long as there's melody there's Jazz, there's rhythm. But this man didn't stop there; he went on to say it was me who made the music—me and the old bunch: Buddy Bolden, Kid Ory, La Rocca and all the others. That's where I tell him no. People's got an idea, I tell him, but it isn't like that; they think it started with one person Bolden, Oliver, someone—but it wasn't like that. I'm trying to explain it to this man, how it got started way back. I told him how my family beat time with their hands on drums . how that's Jazz too, how you can just beat on the table and it can be Jazz. But what that man was saying ... he was worried that if people like him don't hear about it, stumble on to it, just like he did that night when he was persuaded to come, it wasn't going to be around. 'Jazz comes out of an environment,' this man said. 'Something makes it. We don't have today what we — A Bend in the Road should have to make it and keep it going. All we have to go on is a lot of legends. We'll remember river boats and never know how they were. We'll read about all those early days, and all we'll have is some bigger mystery except for maybe getting together with some friends from time to time and playing over all the records.