Sidney Joseph Bechet

Bechet spent most of his working life abroad. Born on May 14, 1897 to a middle-class Creole of color family, he taught himself clarinet and other instruments. In 1919 he joined Will Marion Cook's Syncopated Orchestra for its European tour, and in London he found the soprano saxophone. The Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet wrote that year one of the earliest tributes to him by a classical musician. Bechet served eleven months in a Paris prison in 1928 and was deported, then moved to France in 1951. He died in Garches, near Paris, on his 62nd birthday in 1959.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Congo Square — steps away
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 0.2 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.4 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.
• The Cabildo — 0.4 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.

More markers nearby

• Allison "Big Chief Tootie" Montana — steps away
• Congo Square — steps away
• Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong — steps away
• First Recording Studio of Cosimo Matassa — steps away