Word: bechets
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...time they got the bottles swept up in Antibes and Juan-les-Pins last week, it was magnificently evident: the marriage of Sidney Bechet, Negro patriarch of New Orleans jazz, to his new white wife had turned into the gaudiest rout on the Riviera since Rita Hayworth married Aly Khan...
...Bechet ("I think I'm 60") and his bride, German-born Elizabeth Ziegler, 43, took their vows at the Antibes town hall. Then, while crowds along the way cheered and jitterbugged in the street, they rode in slow procession in an open carriage to Juan-les-Pins, two miles away, for the reception. Ten blaring jazz bands serenaded them along the way. After them came 400 wedding guests, including Music Hall Star Mistinguett and U.S. Vice Consul William Bates. Other celebrators: French army Senegalese, local fishermen, long-haired existentialists from Paris, two men carrying a twelve-foot clarinet, cagefuls...
...Riviera saw it all as an occasion of profound sentiment: Bechet and his new wife had been engaged before (in 1928); they had married others, been divorced, met again recently in Algiers, decided to keep their old engagement...
...pandemonium was saved for the old masters. Trumpeter Oran "Hot Lips" Page's "émotion authentique" blues soon had them breaking their hands for joy. Grizzled Sidney Bechet, who has been nozzling out New Orleans classics on clarinet and soprano sax since 1911, got a Toscanini's wild and respectful ovation, And when Yardbird Parker cut loose, puffing his tenor sax like a big cigar, the zazous drooled, twitched and finally screamed...
Louis listened to all of the Negro jazz pioneers: men like Clarinetists Alphonse Picou and Sidney Bechet, Trombonist Kid Ory, Pianist Jelly Roll Morton and Cornetist Bunk Johnson. But Cornetist Joe ("King") Oliver was his favorite: "Soon as I heard him I said 'there's mah man!'" At first, Louis just listened. He ran errands, hawked bananas, ground up old brick and sold it to prostitutes for scouring their front steps on Saturday mornings. When he was eleven, he also started a street quartet in which he sang tenor, picked up loose change by serenading through...