King Jazz

 “Really the Blues,”by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, 1946

This is a book by and about a Jewish hepcat born in Chicago who boarded the blues and jazz train for a lifetime.  It is written in a 'jive' slang style, proving slang can be classic.  He’s first a wannabe Negro slumming in the working class area around Chicago’s Division and Western avenues.  Mezzrow became an average be-bop and swing clarinetist and sax player according to many.  At the same time, he and Wolfe are interesting writers.  They tell the intimate tale of the jazz world in Chicago’s Southside, cities around the Big Windy and then New York and Harlem from the late 1910s to the 1940s -  the musicians Mezz met, heard and played with, the joints he visited, the joy numbers played, the life. 

Learning music and Jim Crow in the Pontiac Boys reformatory in the late 1910s, Milton Mezzrow cements his fascination with African-American culture. He thought being a Jewish Yid was like being half-black, so he was ‘the missing link’ between whites and blacks.  In stir a few more times, he eventually leaves home in the early 1920s for the hot music life after his sister insults the ‘aints.  He works in various spots in and around Chicago, legally and illegally, as its Prohibition.  Booze and music go together, cash tying them like a tether.

This book’s a dandy hop, working like a cyclo’ of old-time jive-talkin'.  It’s old timey but rhymey, a polyglot patois.  Later, Mezzrow calls it "the new poetry of the proletariat." The text sounds like music sometimes, especially his description of playing without sheet music, only feel.  This is something every popular musician can relate to.  His description of intuitive playing while on mariuana (or grass or tea or gauge or hay or grefa or muggles or muta as he calls it) is excellent.  Then he’s introduced to opium and becomes a hop head for 5 years later in the book. 

Mezzrow hears New Orleans’ King Oliver, banters with Al Capone and becomes a good early music friend with Bix Biederbecke.  He listens to Bessie Smith sing the holy blues and Louis Armstrong invent scat on the Southside. He joins up with ‘white’ compadres in the Austin High Chicagoans to make music and live the jazz life, doing some recording as the "Chicago Sound." He mentors a young Gene Krupa on drums.  He thinks his group of guys, including Biederbecke and Krupa, invented the public ‘jam session’ one night in the basement of The Deuces club.  All in the pursuit of what Mezzrow wanted - ‘Negro style.’

Mezzrow is there to see the loose, jumping, intuitive New Orleans jazz style taken over by rigid big band orchestration and commercialism.  And then the advent of the Great Depression in 1929 and into the 30s.  In 1928 the band members split without Mezzrow, moving to New York.  They hoped to ride the $Dough Ray Me$ Tin Pan Alley gravy train there.  Mezzrow’s gigs in Chicago dry up after they leave.  The gang's last night in Chicago the leaving band members hear a ‘preaching’ blues done to their faces by Jimmy Noone’s ‘colored’ band at The Nest club.  The vocalist puts down their commercial move to New York while backing Mezzrow’s style. A big, sad night for Mezz.  The lyrics printed in the book of the Preaching blues sure read like early rap to me.  

After some blue times, Mezzrow leaves his wife again (he seems to be a frequently absent husband) and also heads to New York to follow King Jazz.  His closeness with Armstrong, being the top mariuana dealer in Harlem, kicking opium, integrating big band jazz in New York, getting locked up in Rikers - all to come.

That is a taste.  Buy the book and check out the rest.

P.S. – Bernard Wolfe, the co-author, was a prolific author.  He wrote for the SWP’s The Militant, then worked as Trotsky’s secretary and bodyguard in Mexico for 8 months. While there he worked with the Dewey Commission’s investigation of the Moscow show trials and later published a novel of Trotsky’s assassination marred by bourgeois psychologizing.

Prior blog reviews on music, use the blog search box, upper left:  “Music is Power,” “If it Sounds Good, It is Good,” “In Search of the Blues,” “Cool Town,” Kids”(Patti Smith); “Zappa,” “Laurel Canyon,” “Grateful Dead,” “Mississippi Delta,” “Life”(Keith Richards); “Janis Joplin,” “We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years,” "33 Revolutions Per Minute," "Searching for Sugarman," "Marie and Rosetta,” “The Blues – A Visual History,” “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “Echo in the Canyon,” “The Music Sell-Outs,” “Palmer’s Bar,” “Treme,” “Subculture,” “The Long Strange Trip.”

And I bought it at May Day Books music section!

Recommended by an older be-bop friend who plays his tinkle-box high on weed

The Kulture Kommissar

January 5, 2021