Word: clarinet
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Sidney Bechet (pronounced Be-shay), who looks like a sleepy Pullman porter, has been talking through a clarinet for more than 40 years. Last week, in a smoky joint called Jimmy Ryan's on Manhattan's brassy 52nd Street, Sidney was proving again that he is the best Dixieland two-beat jazzman anywhere on clarinet or soprano saxophone (which looks like an oversize clarinet...
...Little. When he was six, Sidney had just picked up a clarinet and started playing. Nobody told him how, and he still can't read music well. He played his first date in New Orleans' red-light district when he was 10. He says "If I couldn't find the notes in the proper place, I made 'em myself. If you want a soft mellow tone, you have to take it easy and pet it a little. But you take an awful chance, you may not get anything." He still uses his own unorthodox fingering...
...TIME'S critic listen again before passing judgment on one of Brahms's last and most mature works, the Second Clarinet Sonata [TIME, Nov. 25]. Far from banality, this, the greatest of all clarinet sonatas, has the warmth and depth that only a Brahms could give to Romantic music...
...Hall's retinue served a musical bill of fare Monday night the like of which hasn't been heard in the Savoy for many years. The stage, used to creaking under the weight of whole sections of braying saxophones, had to support only a trumpet, a trombone, and a clarinet beside the rhythm section, and this unique instrumentation, reminiscent of the old time marching bands of Edmond's younger days, evoked a warm, informal flavor which no amount of script arranging by pianist Charlie Bateman, seemed able to eradicate...
...obscurely at the very back center of the stage, the pained contortionings of his thin, mobile face and the adept drumstick twirling of his educated fingers got a great deal of attention from the audience. The drummer, the pianist, and the bass player, when they were functioning behind the clarinet, managed to build up a charged rhythmic setting which did fully as much for Edmond Hall as the tom toms used to do for Emperor Jones...