Music: Along the Rue Bechet

At Paris’ Olympia music hall, vaudeville was in full flower. There were acrobats, unicyclists, a juggler, Mexican guitarists. But the attraction that filled the 2,000-seat house last week was strictly jazz, in the venerable person of Sidney Bechet, 57, Paris’ resident jazz professor and one of the city’s most famed citizens.

Backstage on opening night, Sidney’s white-thatched head was bent over in pain. “I can’t go on,” he moaned. “It’s my stomach. Get a doctor.” “But you’re on in ten minutes,” pleaded the manager. “I’ll never make it,” cried Sidney. Then the manager noticed a poster, understood the source of the jazzman’s distress: Bechet’s name was printed in small type, way down on the list of performers. Quickly he explained that it was all a mistake, and promised to get Sidney better billing. Bechet brightened. “Will I get a private dressing room, too?” “Absolument!” agreed the manager hurriedly. “Filled with flowers.”

Five minutes later, Sidney Bechet (rhymes with say-hey) was onstage, looking the man of distinction in his pinstripe suit and flashing diamond ring. He pointed the business end of his straight soprano saxophone at the rafters and let its penetrating tone wail out. With the unsophisticated beat of the born Dixie-lander and the heart-rending inflections of one who has known the blues, Bechet played favorite tunes, e.g., Sunny Side of the Street, My Man, Big Chief. The crowd roared approval and the critics agreed. “His accents . . . touched me deeply by their simple humanity, as if they came from the entrails,” wrote one. “Brutal joy,” added another.

The Real Money. U.S. jazzmen, and particularly Negro jazzmen, continue to find steady success in Paris cellars and bars. The famed Hot Club of Paris has its headquarters in a Pigalle courtyard with four walkways named Rue Armstrong, Rue Ellington, Rue Gillespie and, of course, Rue Bechet. Sidney, who set out on jazz street at ten playing the clarinet in some of the gayer New Orleans brothels, came to be regarded as one of the best jazzmen in the U.S., but never managed to make a steady living at it. Once he ran a pants-pressing establishment in Harlem and only made music after hours. “We done a helluva lot of pressing in the mornings,” he recollects. In 1949 he settled down in Paris. Ordinarily, he may be heard in a Left Bank boite called Club du Vieux Colombier, where beer comes high ($2 a bottle) and the inevitable French jitterbug couples in turtleneck sweaters make dancing perilous. Sidney’s real money rolls in from other sources: concerts and recordings.

He may play as many as 100 concerts a year throughout Europe. Last winter he toured through France’s eastern section, stopped in Geneva for a month’s dance-hall engagement, passed on to Turin, Brussels and The Netherlands.

Like a Gypsy. Records are expensive in France, but some of Bechet’s are top sellers at about 30,000-100,000 copies each. Among his titles: As-Tu le Cafard? (Have You Got the Blues?) and Mets ton Vieux Bonnet Gris (Put On Your Old Grey Bonnet).

For Sidney this means an estimated $40,000 a year, a little estate outside Paris, where he fishes in his private lake, and a specially built ($8,570), emerald-green Salmson coupe, which he likes to try out at 100 miles an hour. For the French it means that Sidney is American jazz in the flesh. Explained one French jazz buff: “A lot of jazz musicians are known to the French, but it’s Sidney who’s known to the average person. He plays jazz like a gypsy.”