AMG Review of Aristocrat of Jazz

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All Music Guide

Columbia's Yoyo Music label provides modest amounts of good music by great musicians at an affordable price. Yoyo's Sidney Bechet sampler lightly skims the middle of his career for 12 recordings originally released on the Bluebird, Blue Note, Columbia, and King Jazz imprints. Like Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet was one of the original virtuoso jazz musicians. His passionate intensity and formidable technique often transformed routine traditional jazz into something more along the lines of a therapeutic catharsis, as in his gooseflesh-inducing 1939 recording of "Summertime" and the beautiful "Blues in Thirds" he shared with Earl Hines in 1940. While the blues was a primal element in his entire musical Weltanschauung, Bechet was also a brilliant interpreter of standards and ballads like Cole Porter's "Love for Sale" and Johnny Mercer's "Laura." Yoyo Music's choice of the word "Aristocrat" is appropriate as Sidney Bechet was a dignified and majestic individual who nevertheless had to go to Europe to receive the respectful treatment he so richly deserved. While he was a citizen of the United States of America (as he candidly explained in his autobiography -Treat It Gentle) Sidney Bechet was often faced with the challenges inherent in his society's racially delineated caste system. The Parisians, on the other hand, showered Bechet with honors and even named a street after him. Life's incongruities, injustices, blessings, and rewards are wordlessly referenced in each Sidney Bechet performance. Even a superficial little budget album like this one conveys a substantial amount of his thunder and lightning, power and glory.