A Tale of Two Sidneys

Sidney Bechet at Jimmy Ryan's Club
in New York City, 1947 

Sidney Chambers, the troubled vicar of Grantchester in the PBS Mystery series that bears the name of this actual Cambridgeshire village, is fond of jazz music. So every now and then when Sidney is in a reflective mood, viewers are treated to a few snatches, which often happily feature the unmistakable trembling soprano sax tones of the incomparable Sidney Bechet.

I cannot recall when I discovered Bechet; it seems as though his special sound has always resided at least at the edge of memory whenever I’m not actually listening to one of his recordings.

The improbably handsome actor James Norton portrays the 30-something Anglican priest, a Cambridge graduate and former Scots Guards officer assigned to pastor Grantchester. But Sidney Chambers is hardly a simple country vicar, as the plots of these stories invariably revolve around the complex Reverend Chambers’ involvement in some crime or other. Bechet’s alternatingly poignant and playful sound complements the often fraught character of Sidney Chambers.

The series is set in the 1950s. When Sidney spins a Bechet LP on his turntable, lights up a cigarette, and leans back in his study chair with a tumbler of amber liquor, he listens to the jazz artist in his prime. New Orleans-born Sidney Bechet (1897-1959) was largely self-taught and was recognized fairly early in his career as perhaps the first notable jazz saxophonist, although he played several instruments.

Bechet played mainly clarinet professionally in New Orleans and elsewhere during the Teens and then about 1920 traveled to London, where he discovered the straight soprano sax. The instrument would be used to produce his signature sound. Critics called it “emotional,” “reckless,” and “large.” His sound featured a broad vibrato, a technique common to some New Orleans clarinetists at the time.

Bechet’s reckless, erratic behavior was career limiting. For example, he was imprisoned in London for several days in 1922, having been convicted of assaulting a woman, and was subsequently deported back to the United States. Consequently Bechet did not truly rise to fame until the 1940s. After performing at the Paris Jazz Festival, he moved permanently to France in 1950, and his popularity surged there. The next year he married Elisabeth Ziegler in Antibes.

Sadly, Sidney Bechet died of lung cancer in Garches, near Paris, on May 14, 1959, his sixty-second birthday. Fortunately his recordings live on so that we, like Grantchester’s other Sidney, Reverend Chambers, can still get lost in the trembling tones of Bechet’s sax. I recommend “Petite Fleur,” Bechet’s own composition, which he recorded In 1952: http://youtu.be/wMwckuWpxDs. You will fall in love with the sound.