Sidney Bechet was truly a giant of jazz, who ranks with Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke as one of the supreme jazz soloists and improvisors of the 1920s. Duke Ellington called him "the very epitome of jazz," and the great Swiss conductor Ernst Ansermet described him as "an extraordinary carinet virtuoso," an "artist of genius." He also lived an extremely colorful life, and now the acclaimed jazz critic John Chilton offers the first full-length...