Volume 35, Number 8 · May 12, 1988
The Caruso of Jazz
By E.J. Hobsbawm
Sidney Bechet: The Wizard of Jazz
by John Chilton
Oxford University Press, 331 pp., $24.95
Jazz Odyssey: The Autobiography of Joe Darensbourg
as told to Peter Vacher
Louisiana State University Press, 231 pp., $19.95
He was the first among the players of the barely baptized 'jazz' to be identified as 'an artist of genius.' Very few jazz musicians are as well known as Sidney Bechet, especially among people not particularly familiar with the music. No one has a voice more easily and immediately recognizable. Within months of his death in 1959 a statue of him was unveiled on the French Riviera and, thanks to the labors of his biographer, we now know that his face is on postage stamps of the republics of Chad and Gabon. The poet Philip Larkin wrote about him:
Review, 4106 words
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