The Arnold Shaw Popular Music Research Center presents Jessica Teague (UNLV, Department of English) in a jazz lecture titled "A Story in Sound: Sidney Bechet’s Music and Writing."

The New Orleans jazz musician Sidney Bechet is known as one of the early pioneers of the improvised solo on clarinet and soprano saxophone, and his autobiography Treat It Gentle (1960) is considered one of the best-written accounts of jazz’s early history. In this lecture, Teague will explore the narrative impulse of Bechet’s artistic output and consider what it might mean to call Bechet a writer. He was an improviser who told stories in song, but he was also a musician who imagined his music as part of a broader artistic project—one that was intrinsically narrative, dramatic, and multimodal. Through an exploration of dazzling archival finds and rare recordings brought from locales ranging from New Orleans to Paris, this lecture reveals the extent to which Bechet was committed to blending African American folklore, autobiography, and fiction into a story in sound.