One hundred eleven years ago today, Sidney Bechet was born in New Orleans, son of a Creole river man who was the first to arrange for black musicians to play on a Mississippi boat. White travelers, and musicians on a passing ship, knowing nothing about jazz music other than that it was evil, went into fits. The musicians just kept playing, though, and as Bechet told it, “They couldn’t stay mad. The music, it wasn’t mad … And so the white band, it played too, and the people, they gave in and pretty soon there was all kinds of dancing and hell-raising, everybody having a whole lot of fun, answering to all that rhythm.”

Bechet, a musical prodigy, would never play those boats; he had higher callings. A veteran of the most accomplished bands in New Orleans and Chicago by the time he was 21, he decamped for Europe at 22, where he bought a soprano saxophone, put the finishing touches on a style every bit as sweet, vicious, and inventive as that of his great rival, Louis Armstrong, and eventually settled there. In his great memoir, “Treat It Gentle,” Bechet never draws a direct line between exile and injustice, but in everything from the harrowing tale, with which he opens the book, of how his grandfather, a slave, escaped a lynching to his emphasis on the opportunities he had abroad — to choose his own bands, to play ballets, to be treated with the respect he was due — the line is inescapable.

From one angle, Bechet’s story is a tragedy, that of a man who wanted to be an artist and had to leave his native soil to do it. But from another, it’s the most American of stories, that of a man who made his own destiny, and of music that fulfilled all the promise of the first night of jazz on the Mississippi River.

All of this comes to mind because the story of black musicians under segregation is in some ways so similar to that of black ballplayers, to whom a tribute, announced last week, will be paid June 5 and 6 at baseball’s annual amateur draft. At a ceremonial draft, Major League teams will select living Negro League players, representing all those who never had a chance to play in the majors. Details, such as which players will participate and exactly how they’ll be honored, are still unsettled. But this is an example of central baseball, which gets too little credit for it, once again doing the right thing by honoring its past.

When baseball first announced the plan last week, in a story at MLB.com, I was a bit ambivalent toward it, though Ray Doswell, curator of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, assures me that the museum was happy to hear about it, which certainly trumps my ambivalence. The concern here was that this kind of tribute to the Negro Leagues, tinged as it can be with the idea of atonement, rubs up against the same seam that Bechet’s story does, one that defines history in terms of opportunities denied, rather than achievements. That leaves us with questions: How do we best pay tribute to the Negro Leagues? What were they, after all?

It can’t be emphasized enough that the central fact of the Negro Leagues was not injustice, but athletic prowess, joy, and individual skill. The games were real, the players were well paid, the championships counted, and in the good times the spectators cared every bit as much about their teams as New York fans do today about theirs. The major leagues may to this day be in some part defined by their refusal to admit players because of the color of their skin, but from legends such as Oscar Charleston, Josh Gibson, and Smokey Joe Williams down to the lowest journeyman, the veterans of the Negro Leagues are defined not by what they’re weren’t allowed to do, but what they actually did.

This, though, is exactly the point of the tribute, according to Hall of Famer Dave Winfield, who conceived the idea and worked with baseball executives such as Jimmie Lee Solomon to bring it about. “The important part of this,” he told me, “is that these guys were inventive and creative, and not just on the field. They were the first ones to have night baseball — lights. That wasn’t Cincinnati, that was the Kansas City Monarchs. They invented helmets. And most important, they’re a precursor to what business and baseball looks like now.”

As Winfield points out, the Negro Leagues, remembered today as segregated leagues, were nothing whatever of the sort. Clubs played all through Latin America, with black and brown players side-by-side both abroad and in America. (Hall of Famers Luis Tiant and Orlando Cepeda were the sons of Negro League veterans.) “They showed that the men could get along, showed that they had white women owning baseball clubs, championing civil rights. Baseball looked at this and saw not only successful baseball players, but successful businesses.”

Seen in this light, one that rightly casts the Negro Leagues as a laboratory for baseball’s future, the idea of bridging the past and present by accepting surviving Negro League veterans into the major leagues makes a great deal of sense. (Winfield would like to take it further and actually sign the veterans to full major league contracts, to fully accept them into the fraternity of the major leagues.) It’s symbolic, but symbols can have great power. The point isn’t to make up for injustices that can never be made up, but to honor men who deserve it, and to blur the artificial boundary between Major Leaguer and Negro Leaguer that leaves one always somehow lesser than the other. Ultimately, it’s a way for Major League Baseball to acknowledge its own past and the roots of its present success, which are as inextricably omniracial as those of jazz.

In Albert Murray’s brilliant treatise “Stomping the Blues,” there is a photograph of a young Louis Armstrong, beaming as a team of black ballplayers with “Armstrong” printed across the front of their jerseys poses for a team portrait. Murray notes, “The enthusiasm for baseball that has long been so widespread among blues musicians is remarkably in character with their involvement in rituals of elegant endeavor and perseverance in unfavorable circumstances.” If Sidney Bechet had a passion for the game, he left no record of it that I’m aware of, but I’d be surprised if he didn’t like it, and I think he would have had a good answer for the questions I raised before. In his memoir, he recounts how people used to come right up to him and ask what Negro music was. “‘What’s an American? What’s a Frenchman?'” he marveled. “How do you answer a thing like that?”

tmarchman@nysun.com