The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia Page B

music had come back into favor with jazz fans. His celebrated 1939 recording of “Summertime” is a case in point. Playing soprano saxophone—an instrument that in the hands of many others has an all too limited expressive range and a disconcerting tendency to veer out of tune—Bechet employs his full arsenal: growls, moans, plaintive calls, luminous high tones, whispered asides, even a sly quote from an opera aria.
    Bechet returned to Europe in May 1949, for the first time in almost twenty years, to participate in a Paris jazz festival. The event was a success, and Bechet came back to France in the fall for more performances, followed by a trip to England. In a move that many later American jazz musicians would emulate, Bechet decided to settle permanently overseas; it was not a departure from his roots, he explained, since it brought him “closer to Africa.” In the Old World, he received the adulation, financial security, and social acceptance that no black jazz musician could find in the music’s native country. Performing and recording dates were abundant, as were a whole range of other artistic opportunities; these years found Bechet entertaining capacity audiences at nightclubs and concert halls, and also involved in ballet and cinema projects. Shortly before his death in 1959 he even turned litterateur , completing his autobiography Treat It Gentle , a plainspoken work that many of his fans cherish almost as much as his legacy of recordings.
    THE HOT FIVES AND HOT SEVENS
    Several months before leaving for New York, Armstrong married his colleague in the Oliver band, pianist Lil Hardin. This was the second marriage for both the twenty-three-year-old Armstrong (in his teens he had tied the knot with Daisy Parker, from whom he soon was separated and eventually divorced) and for twenty-six-year-old Hardin. College educated, sophisticated, ambitious: Hardin possessed many of the qualities that Armstrong lacked. Most accounts agree that her aspirations for his career, not Armstrong’s, were responsible for his break with Oliver and his decision to join Fletcher Henderson.
    Similarly, Hardin served as the reason for Armstrong’s return to Chicago in the latter part of 1925. The stint with Henderson in New York and an ensuing tour with the band had meant an enforced separation for the pair. Several motives now drove Hardin to seek his return: like any newlywed, she was appropriately anxious to have her husband closer at hand; in addition, she may have suspected Armstrong’s dalliances (which ultimately capsized their marriage); she may have also seen opportunities for advancing Armstrong’s career in Chicago; and clearly she could benefit from his presence in her own band, now set for an engagement at Chicago’s Dreamland Cafe. With some misgivings, Armstrong left the Henderson ensemble, yet took consolation in the leader’s promise to rehire him if he decided to return to New York.
    If duties as a husband and opportunities as a sideman brought Armstrong back to Chicago, it was work as a recording star that eventually proved decisive during this period. On November 12, 1925, Armstrong entered a makeshift studio—the OKeh label’s portable recording equipment was in Chicago only a few months out of the year—to undertake his first session as a leader. This date initiated a period of fertile music making, one that would establish Armstrong as the dominant jazz instrumentalist of his generation, perhaps of all time. Surely no other body of work in the jazz idiom has been so loved and admired as the results of these celebrated sessions, the immortal Hot Fives and Hot Sevens. In historical importance and sheer visionary grandeur, only a handful of other recordings—the Ellington band work of the early 1940s, the Charlie Parker Savoy and Dial sessions, the Miles Davis recordings of the late 1950s come to mind—can compare with them. Certainly none can surpass them. It was a rare, felicitous instance of an artist