#5
Really The Blues
by Mezz Mezzrow & Bernard Wolfe
(Random House, 1946 / Signet, 1964)


“To all hipsters, hustlers and fly cats tipping along The Stroll.
(Keep scuffling.)
To all the cons in all the houses of many slammers, wrestling with chinches.
(Short Time, boys.)
To all the junkies and lushheads in two-bit scratchpads, and the hophouse grads in morgue iceboxes.
(R.I.P.)
To all the sweettalkers, the gumbeaters, the highjivers, out of the gallion of good and never going to take it low again.
(You got to make it, daddy.)
To Bessie Smith, Jimmy Noone, King Oliver, Louise Armstrong, Zutty Singleton, Johnny Dodds, Sidney Bechet and Tommy Ladnier.
(Grab a taste of the millennium, gate.)”

Talk about the birth of cool – Milton ‘Mezz’ Mezzrow was there and saw it happen - as music and life-styles began to drift across previously impassable race barriers, and the roots of everything we think of as ‘hip’ 20th century culture was first took shape in America. An incredibly important bit of cultural history and a ferocious, free-wheeling piece of writing that had no less a personage than Henry Miller singing its praises when it first appeared (he actually holds copyright on this revised ’64 edition), ‘Really The Blues’ is in some ways a bit too much of an ‘important’, ‘landmark’ type book for inclusion on this daft list, but the sheer eccentricity of Mezzrow’s rambling muse definitely puts it in the right ballpark, I feel.

Mezz first encountered the blues in a juvenile reform institute in about 1915, when he overheard black prisoners harmonising with each other between cells during the night. And after an enlightened music teacher allowed him to spend some after-class time covertly trading licks with some cats from New Orleans, there was no going back. Out on the streets of Chicago, he found himself packing crates of bootleg liqour for Al Capone, later getting one of his first paying music gigs at a club owned by Detroit’s notorious Purple Gang and (as his own account has it) having to flee to the sticks when Capone’s chief lady took a fancy to him. Subsequently, he played a pivotal role in the creation of one of the first ever artistically valid white jazz scenes, his version of the story describing how he painstakingly schooled his Chicago buddies (including such Trad luminaries as Gene Krupa, Eddie Condon and Frank Teschemacher) in the ways of Dixieland, bringing the joys of ‘hot’ jazz and reefer smoke to the uninitiated wherever he trod.

After a move to New York, the frustrations he encountered in trying to realise his dream of a mixed race band led him to concentrate more on his equally pioneering leisure time activities, becoming the first white dope-dealer in Harlem, with a garbled, proto-beatnik lexicon and wardrobe to match. What follows includes a close friendship with Louis Armstrong, descent into opium addiction (this being before heroin was even refined), a long prison stretch and rebirth as a kind of all-purpose crusader for the power of music (if, admittedly, a very specific TYPE of music) in healing the racial rifts in American society and creating a kind of flawlessly hip super-culture, or somesuch.

Considering ‘Really The Blues’ first appeared in 1946, Mezzrow’s digressive, conversational style and, uh, ‘frank’ approach to his subject matter is really something else, and the way-out lingo he casually throw in throughout – a beautiful kind of hipster patter coined long, long before such beat jive was established as an instant cliché, and otherwise lost to history – is a total joy.

“In those days,” he begins a paragraph, “if you plied the lid off my skull with a can-opener, you might have spotted some weird eels snaking through the whirlpool I lugged around under my hat”. At another point he talks about how his buddies PeeWee Russell and Bix Beiderbecke used to live in a filthy shack, letting piles of unopened milk bottles go rotten on the doorstep because they were too busy sitting around the piano composing. “Looks like no one thought to put a nix on the moo-juice”, he notes, and a whole universe of beatnik splendour is born.

Like most musicians who write great books, Mezzrow is cranky and egocentric as they come, and as the book goes on he unfortunately becomes prone to outbursts of musical conservatism that, though undoubtedly heartfelt, will seem absolutely mystifying to the modern reader. From dismissing his former friends again and again for the dread crime of incorporating ‘modernist’ elements into their music, to a lengthy passage in which he decries the introduction of the hi-hat as signalling the death of all legitimate drumming, his insistence that the New Orleans gospel be observed at all times is stubborn to the point of obsession. God only knows what he must’ve thought when Bird and Miles started to make the scene just as he was bowing out, but thankfully his views on the matter remain unrecorded here, and such grumpery is easy to put aside once you get into the swing of his prose, with his account of the epiphany he experienced leading his prison marching band across an open-field, literally walking over the graves of prisoners they’d helped bury, is simply one of the most moving accounts of the power of music ever set on paper.

When the New York Herald Tribune deemed this a “WALLOPING HUMAN DOCUMENT” is capital letters, they weren’t pissing around.

Labels: books, jazz, Mezz Mezzrow