"The definitive work on Bechet. This is one of those rare books that once started you have difficulty putting down."--Jazz Journal Fifty years after hearing Sidney Bechet (1897-1959) in 1923, Duke Ellington recalled, "I have never forgotten the power and...
Sidney Bechet was truly a giant of jazz, who ranks with Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke as one of the supreme jazz soloists and improvisors of the 1920s. Duke Ellington called him "the very epitome of jazz," and the great Swiss conductor Ernst Ansermet described him as "an...