📍Seventh Ward, New Orleans, LA, USA
1897 – 1916“I was born in New Orleans in May 1897, the youngest of the large family of Omar Bechet, a shoemaker, and Josephine Michel, in the Seventh Ward, a proud Creole neighbourhood where we spoke French at home. Music was everywhere in our family; my brothers played instruments, and my parents loved music, though they wanted me to learn a respectable trade, like masonry, shoemaking or carpentry, as Creole families did. My older brother Leonard played the trombone, but he also kept a clarinet in his dresser drawer, and for months I sneaked it out and taught myself to play it. Then, at a party at our house, the band arrived without their clarinettist, George Baquet, and they heard someone playing clarinet in another room. It was me, a little boy, playing along. After that, Leonard gave me the clarinet, and it took the place of everything else, especially school. I took some lessons from the great Lorenzo Tio and from Big Eye Louis Nelson, but I broke all the rules of technique and played the way I felt. As a teenager I sat in with the best bands in the city, including the Eagle Band in Storyville, which scandalised my parents. In 1919 I went to Europe with Will Marion Cook's Southern Syncopated Orchestra, and in London I bought a soprano saxophone, which became my voice. I played with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, and in 1950 I made my home in France, where I became a star and wrote Petite Fleur. A mural in New Orleans honours me, and the Seventh Ward remembers the boy who stole his brother's clarinet.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today