REVIVING SIDNEY BECHET

“The musical score for Woody Allen’s unexpected 2011 hit, ‘Midnight in Paris,’ features songs intended, like the film itself, to evoke the spirit of the City of Lights in the 1920s. The musical performance that opens the movie is a jazz recording called ‘Si tu vois ma mère.’ It dates not from the interwar years but was instead cut in 1952 by a soprano saxophonist whose sound–huge, nasal, and piercing, with a startlingly wide vibrato–is as atypical of jazz as the French-flavored song itself. ‘Si tu vois ma mère’ (‘If you see my mother’) delights everyone who hears it, and the sublime mood in which it drenches ‘Midnight in Paris’ was partly responsible for the movie’s surprising success…”