Andy Fry | ‘Blues of Bechet’: Rehearing the One-Man Band Recordings

Event details

Speaker: Dr Andy Fry (King's College London)

Date: 18 January 2024

Time: 5.15 - 6.45pm.  

Venue: Alison House, Atrium (G10)

Abstract

Sidney Bechet’s One-Man Band (1941) challenged the collaborative spirit of jazz. Playing multiple instruments in turn, the celebrated New Orleans jazzman raised the ire of the American Federation of Musicians for monopolizing jobs. For fellow clarinettist Mezz Mezzrow (1946), however, Bechet had encapsulated the spirit of New Orleans music; he was a ‘man at peace with himself, all his parts in harmony’. Drawing on oral history, reception texts and private recordings, this paper re-examines the One-Man Band as a collaborative act. I locate Bechet’s first experiments with overdubbing in recordings among friends, and a later instance in his contrapuntal response to a homemade disc from old-time trumpeter Bunk Johnson. My work aims to reframe the first generation of jazz musicians, commonly regarded as objects of ethnographic attention, as subjects of media history. I revisit issues of liveness and community in jazz, while exploring technology’s role in the New Orleans revival.

Biography

Andy Fry teaches in the Music Department at King’s College London. His principal research areas are jazz (particularly pre-1960, race, gender, and historiography) and music in twentieth-century France; he is also interested in many forms of music theatre, and in music and film. Several of these interests came together in his book, Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920-1960, which won the American Musicological Society’s Lewis Lockwood Award. His current research concerns the mid-century revival of New Orleans jazz, as facilitated and shaped by the media industry, in the US and around the world.