Open Microphone

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 901, 9 November 1956, Page 20

Open Microphone

NEWS OF BROADCASTERS ON AND OFF THE RECORD

GIANT OF JAZZ

OT long ago, a jazz critic, Ernest Borneman, writing about Sidney Bechet (above), classed him with Ellington and Morton as a composer "who invariably has something to say. This giant of jazz, he said, has a

gift of inventing tunes which are not trite and derivative nor dependent on novel chord sequences.

Bechet is not, of course, famous only as a composer, for he is one of the finest soprano clarinet-

tists in the™ world. Born seven years before the turn of the century in New Orleanscertainly the right birthplace for the sort of musician he was to be-come-Bechet is in the tradition of great cosmopolitan jazzmen. Before he was very old he had graduated from playing, as a 10-year-old, in some of the seedier parts of his home town to more socially acceptable engagements in ~ London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin and Moscow. When he went to Europe with the Southern Syncopated Orchestra in 1919 it was one of the first coloured bands London had seen. He was back in England in 1926. Bechet’s grandparents on his mother’s side were French. and

Bechet himself settled in Paris about seven years ago. There, says a recent report, he _ generally plays in a Left Bank _ hide-out called Club de Vieux Colombier. His teal money, however, which makes it possible for him to sport impeccably pin-striped suits, flashine diamond rings

and a_ specially-built emerald green coupé, comes from his concerts-as many as 100 a year-and from recordings. As a clarinettist, Bechet is a remarkably effortless player-completely relaxed and in control of his instrument.

He has an exceptional sense of timing and an extraordinary ability to create rhythmic excitement in his personal manner of using cut-offs, the effect of using as part of the architecture of sound. His peculiar vibrato has been criticised, and once when he was asked what it was due to he replied: "Senility, my boy." But collectors will tell you that this characteristic is clearly audible in records he made as far back as 1921. In his long career Bechet has been associated with most of the giants of jazz, from Clarence William in 1923 to the famous clarinettist Mezz Mezzrow in 1945-46. His sessions with Mezzrow have been described as object lessons in how to revive New Orleans jazz without actually being a revivalist. is

al EWS that will bring a_ nostalgic glow to many an aged heart reaches us from England. Apparently indestructible, Billy Bunter, Harry Wharton, Frank Nugent, Hurree Singh and the rest from Greyfriars School, are entertaining still another generation of English children-on BBC television. Now well into his ‘eighties, their creator, Frank Richards, is pounding his typewriter as industriously as ever. Richards, whose réal name is. Charles Hamilton, sent off his first story when he was 17, and kept going under one pen-

name or another through five reigns and two world wars. One estimate says he wrote no fewer than 10,000 stories about the boys of Greyfriars. Two of his principal markets- Magnet and Gem-were crippled by paper shortages during the war.