In 1928 Paris, Sidney Bechet pulled a gun on a fellow musician over a chord change, missed, wounded a bystander, and served 11 months in prison before being deported. This deep dive explores how the man who was arguably the first great jazz soloist, recording “Wild Cat Blues” and “Kansas City Man Blues” in July 1923, months before Louis Armstrong’s recording debut, ended up less famous than his peers. Born in New Orleans in 1897 to a Creole of color family, he performed publicly at six, never learned to read music, and learned by ear from Bunk Johnson and King Oliver.

The episode follows his 1919 trip to London with Will Marion Cook’s orchestra, where he discovered the straight soprano saxophone and earned a landmark essay from Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet comparing him to Bach, his tours with Josephine Baker’s Revue Negre, his Depression-era tailor shop with Tommy Ladnier, early Latin-jazz experiments with Willie “The Lion” Smith, his 1941 one-man six-instrument recording of “The Sheik of Araby,” and his 1951 move to France, where “Petite Fleur” and a ballet score made him a superstar the existentialists called “Le Dieu” before his death on his 62nd birthday in 1959.

• Obbligatos and arpeggios: what he was actually doing instead of the written melody
• Why the soprano sax is so hard to control and how his breath control tamed it
• Trumpet players hated him because he drowned them out on stage
• The acetate-disc overdubbing process that predated multitrack tape
• Treat It Gentle versus Al Rose’s account: two very different portraits of the man