I told you about this friend of mine, John Reid. Well I was 
up at his house one day, around 1941 it must have been, and 
he had an idea. There was a symphony orchestra that had 
recorded a piece, and when they heard the play-back there 
was something, there was a hole in it for about a second. 
And they couldn't figure what was wrong, so they called the 
conductor, called him up for to listen. He listened to it and 
then he got the score and found out that it was the oboe 
player who hadn't played his part. So rather than make the 
whole record over again, they made a trick record. They 
played ther record beside another recording record and the 
oboe player sat there with a pair of earphones on. So he 
listened and when he got to the part he played his oboe, and 
the recording record had recorded him with the oboe and the 
record with the symphony orchestra, and this way it was 
complete. So this gave John Reid the idea for me to make a 
one-man-band record.

I had a couple of instruments up there at his house, my 
saxophone and a tenor, and he had a piano. So I played the 
piano first and he recorded that and then he recorded that 
again with my soprano, and that worked all right so he said I 
should make the record. I was kind of afraid of the thing 
because it got on my nerves. But finally I said O.K. and he 
made the date.

So I started out; I played "The Sheik of Araby" and I played 
the whole six instruments. I started first with the piano, and 
then I got the drums and my soprano. I meant to play all the 
rhythm instruments first, you know, but I got all mixed up and 
I grabbed hold of the bass and then I got the tenor, and I had 
these earphones on as the company did for this oboe player, 
and finally I recorded with the six instruments. And then I 
played a blues, but I was really outdone and I couldn't do 
more than four instruments on that other side. Oh, it was a 
great story for the newspaper men, and they raised so much 
hell that the union made the company pay me for seven men, 
and it was forbidden to do it again! But the funny part was 
right after that I met Fats Waller going into the theatre; he 
was playing at the Polo. So he said to me, 'Bechet, I'm telling 
you, boy, you certainly did make that one man band record!' 
And I said, 'It would have been all right if we would have had 
a rehearsal before,' meaning the engineer and myself, you 
know. But Fats, he laughed and said, 'Man, how the hell you 
going to have a rehearsal with yourself?'

[From "Treat It Gentle", by Sidney Bechet, pages 179-180]