If you're coming to Bechet for the first time, the first thing that'll hit you is the vibrato. It's wide — almost operatic — and it divides people. Some find it old-fashioned, too much. But once it gets under your skin, you start hearing it as pure personality: a musician who refused to play anything quietly, who put himself into every note whether the song called for it or not. That's not a flaw. That's a style.

Bechet grew up in New Orleans in the thick of the music's earliest days, and he was already a serious clarinet player as a teenager. He was largely self-taught, which probably explains why he never sounded like anyone's student. By the time he hit Europe with Will Marion Cook's Southern Syncopated Orchestra around 1919, Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet heard him and wrote about him in terms that stopped people in their tracks — essentially calling him a genius before most of America had caught on. Bechet spent long stretches in Europe during the 1920s, and that restlessness — always moving, always in some new city — defined his early career.

The soprano saxophone is a tricky instrument. Most players who've tried it seriously end up describing it as unforgiving, prone to going sharp, hard to control in the upper register. Bechet made it sound easy, which is the most dishonest compliment you can pay a musician, because it wasn't easy — he'd just done the work so thoroughly that the struggle disappeared. His tone on soprano was thick and reedy, almost like a human voice with too much emotion to stay contained. Compare that to how John Coltrane later approached the same horn — precise, searching, cooler — and you get a sense of how wide the instrument's range of expression actually is.

His recordings with Louis Armstrong in the mid-1920s are worth seeking out, partly because you hear two enormous egos playing together and somehow making it work. They're not deferring to each other — they're both going for it, simultaneously — and the tension in that is genuinely exciting. Later, when Bechet settled more permanently in France after World War II, his records started selling in extraordinary numbers there. The French loved him in a way that Americans, frankly, had never quite managed. He became a celebrity in Paris, which suited him.

The records he made in the late 1940s and early 1950s — Blue Note recordings from that period(1949 era) and the sides he cut for various French labels — are where most people end up spending the most time. The playing is assured, the material often familiar, and there's a warmth in the production that matches the music. He never chased bebop, never tried to modernize in ways that didn't fit. He played the music he believed in, and at a certain point that kind of consistency stops being stubbornness and starts being its own kind of integrity.