Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

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  The Martinique was right on the highway between Gary and Chicago, so we used to get a lot of transient trade and college kids from South Bend dropping in, besides the local guzzlers. Not long after we opened, a fine youngster named Fats Morris started to come around. He was a student at Notre Dame, a robust Joe-College kind of kid, husky and tall and always dressed in plus-four knickers. Fats seemed to be well off and he had only one passion in life, jazz music. He used to bring along a gang of college kids who just sat around drinking and listening to the band with expressions that showed how much they were wrapped up and down with it. It never struck us funny that these youngsters didn’t bring any girls with them, even though they were a pretty manly bunch of guys. Like practically all jazz disciples they really came to listen, not to dance or gumbeat around the table.

  That kind of single-minded attitude always strikes a gong in us musicians. A guy who’s really serious about his music likes to take it straight, without getting it all tangled up with sex. One thing at a time, as they say. The musicians I worked and ran with never fooled with women either, not enough to amount to anything. When we saw one of our buddies blowing his top over some chicken dinner we pitied him for going tangent and we hoped he’d get himself straight soon. You can’t mix up the sweet talk and high-pressure fruiting with blowing jazz music out of your guts. I know, because I’ve tried it.

  One night Fats invited me to have a drink at his table, and he asked me did I ever hear a kid named Beiderbecke play the cornet. He was surprised when I told him I had heard some of the Wolverines’ records but never met Bix, because the only musicians I knew personally and cared much about were Joe Oliver, Sidney Bechet, Jimmy Noone, Baby Dodds and guys like that. “You’ve got to hear this boy,” Fats said. “He’s playing not far from here, at Gary Beach.”

  I didn’t pay this talk much mind, but it led to my meeting with a cat that became one of my best friends later on. A few nights later Fats walked into the Martinique with Leon Bismarck “Bix” Beiderbecke.

  Musicians get keyed-up and complexy when a brother of the same school drops in to hear them get off. Whether you know the visitor or not, you can dig him just by looking at him; you know right away that this cat is hip and that one isn’t. When somebody solid is present and makes you know it, it sets all the performers on edge and sometimes they render a very sad solo trying to send him. The night Bix came in that’s what happened. I dug right away that this big overgrown kid, who looked like he’d been snatched out of a cradle in the cornfields, knew what the score was.

  We were playing when he came in, and he took a seat with Fats in front of the bandstand. When we looked down at him he just smiled in a friendly way, to show he appreciated what we were doing, and went on watching us, his chin resting in one hand and a glass of beer snuggled in the other like it was a second thumb. There was a dead-serious, concentrated look on his face that I got to know later as his trademark—I’ve never seen such an intense, searching expression on anybody else. With that pokerface mask of his and his left eye half closed, he looked like a jeweler squinting at a diamond to find out whether it’s phony or not. He seemed to be looking right through us.

  Bix was a rawboned, husky, farmboy kind of kid, a little above average height and still growing. His frog-eyes popped out of a ruddy face and he had light brown hair that always looked like it was trying to go someplace else. In those days he had an air of cynicism and boredom about most things, just sitting around lazy-like with his legs crossed and his body drooping, but it wasn’t an act with him. Even in his teens he had worked out the special tastes and interests that he carried all through his short life—his shying-away from things showed that what got most people worked up left him completely cold.

  Not that he was dull or sluggish; nothing like that. That kid could get as lively and hopped-up as anybody you ever saw, but it took something really stirring, something really good, to get a rise out of him. Music is what did it mostly. When something got him all tense and aroused he would keep chuckling “Ha! Ha! Ha!” deep down in his throat and his arms would fly around like a windmill. Music was the one thing that really brought him to life. Not even whisky could do it, and he gave it every chance. The kid must have been born with a hollow leg, the way he gulped the stuff down. But he always had a tight grip on himself, until some music came along that made him want to relax and let go.

  When I met Bix he was a star member of the Wolverines, and that little white band had already made some recordings that cause record collectors to foam at the mouth today. The music they were turning out, thanks to Bix’s head arrangements, was ten years ahead of its time, and two of their recordings, Copenhagen and Riverboat Shuffle, were already on their way to becoming classics. Bix’s horn work in those numbers was amazing for a kid of schoolboy age.

  That night, as soon as we finished the number we were playing for an entertainer, I called Royal Garden Blues, our old standby. We had a trick way of playing the breaks in the interlude following the verse and this time we gave it all we had, for Bix’s benefit. He sat there like a mummy, not moving a muscle. Then, just as we finished the first break, he jumped to his feet, his face all lit up, grabbed his horn and hopped on the bandstand.

  Bix played a cornet that he carried without a case, a short, stubby, silver-plated horn that looked like it came from the junkpile and should never have left there. He stood facing me as he played, because we were the two lead instruments, and the whisky fumes that he blew out of that beat-up old cornet almost gassed me. The music that came out, pickled in alcohol, hit me even harder. I noticed that some of his inflections were like Joe Oliver’s and Freddie Keppard’s—what he tried to do was to play Joe’s half-valve inflections with Freddie’s hard drive. All in all, it was more a polished riverboat style than anything else. That style was second nature to Bix because he’d grown up in Davenport, Iowa, and always hung around the waterfront.

  I have never heard a tone like he got before or since. He played mostly open horn, every note full, big, rich and round, standing out like a pearl, loud but never irritating or jangling, with a powerful drive that few white musicians had in those days. Bix was too young for the soulful tone, full of oppression and misery, that the great Negro trumpeters get—too young and, maybe, too disciplined. His attack was more on the militaristic side, powerful and energetic, every note packing a solid punch, with his head always in full control over his heart. That attack was as surefooted as a mountain goat; every note was sharp as a rifle’s crack, incisive as a bite. Bix was a natural-born leader. He set the pace and the idiom, defined the style, wherever he played, and the other musicians just naturally fell into step.

  With his half-valve inflections he produced little quarter-tones, in glissandos that blended into just the right harmonies. He felt his way into those harmonies, groped his way towards them, with a judgment that never failed. In musical chords some notes are supposed to be sharp and some flat, and the whole secret of our music was that in our slurs we instinctively worked towards those notes, without knowing the ABC’s of musical theory. A lot of us, including Bix, never learned to read much music until later. Bix had the most perfect instincts of all. He was born with harmony in his soul, and chords instead of corpuscles.

  When we finished playing that set we all gathered around Bix and began to pop questions about his recordings. “Gee,” I said, “I’d sure like to learn Riverboat Shuffle.” Without a word he sat down at the piano and started to play it, while we stood around with our mouths hanging open. His touch knocked us all out, it was like his horn playing so much in metric pattern. To a man we forgot we were working. So far as we were concerned there was no such animal as a boss or an audience.

  “Get your horn,” Bix said to me, reaching for his own. Then he started to blow the introduction to Riverboat Shuffle. “You take this note and do this,” he told me, blowing the second harmony part. I played it back for him and he yelled, “That’s it! That’s it!” All worked up, he turned and
played Eddie Long a part on the piano, and one by one the pieces began to fit together like the parts of a jigsaw puzzle. Right then and there was one of the early examples of a real “head arrangement,” as the colored musicians call it, orchestrated not on paper but by ear. Everybody got their parts straight and Bix gave us a downbeat with his horn to his mouth. “Ha! Ha! Ha!” was all he said when we finished, and all he had to say. His eyes told us the rest.

  Monkey Pollack was climbing all over the stand by this time, hardly able to believe his ears. “This kid want a job, Milton?” he said. “Let him start Saturday night!”

  From then on Bix and I were pals. He played with us until closing and came back every chance he got. I never stopped being astounded by the things he could do on his horn; a favorite trick of his that always got me was to grab a sheet of music and hold it in front of his horn, flat up against the bell, to give him what we called a “buzz tone.” He’d picked up this twist from the colored boys on the South Side and the musicians on the riverboats.

  Playing with Bix was one of the great experiences in my life. The minute he started to blow I jumped with a flying leap into the harmony pattern like I was born to it, and never left the track for a moment. It was like slipping into a suit made to order for you by a fine tailor, silk-lined all through. When two musicians hit it off like that right from the start, a fine glow of ease and contentment creeps over them. They’ve reached a perfect understanding through their music; they’re friends, seeing eye to eye. Maybe there’s a parable here for the world. Two guys, complete strangers, face each other, and while one takes off on the lead the other feeds the accompaniment to him, helping him to render his solo and making the solo richer, spurring him on and encouraging him all the way. One feeds harmony while the other speaks his piece on his horn, telling the world what’s on his mind, supported every inch of the way by his pal. It’s like a congregation backing up the minister’s words with whispered “Amen’s” at the right places. The congregation never stands up and hollers “Shut up! You’re a liar!” while the minister’s preaching—that would be discord, the whole spell of being together and united in a common feeling would be broken. That’s how it is when you play music with a man you understand and who understands you. You preach to him with your horn and he answers back with his “Amen,” never contradicting you. You speak the same language, back each other up. Your message and his message fit together like pie and ice cream. When that happens, man, you know you’ve got a friend. You get that good feeling. You’re really sent.

  Even when we talked to each other it was the same way, each guy echoing the other. The words could have been dropped altogether; we might just as well have kept nodding at each other. Once in a while, when business was slow at the Martinique, I would knock off early and Bix and I would pile into a cab, bound for the South Side in Chicago to hear some of our favorite musicians. Bix always had a jug of raw corn with him, and while he guzzled we would talk back and forth.

  “What do you think about the longhaired musicians?” I asked him once, as we were riding along.

  “Most of them are corny,” he said, “but it’s the composers I like—that is, the modern ones.”

  “Boy,” he told me another time, “it’s such a relief to get to the South Side and hear Joe Oliver and Jimmy Noone and Bessie. I miss those old riverboat bands down around Davenport.” He got serious for a moment. “I wonder,” he said, thinking hard, “why white musicians are so corny? Hell, you even feel better physically when you get in a colored café. The people all seem to be enjoying everything in a real way. The band always has something that keeps your ear cocked all the time. The dancers all feel the music, and the expression on their faces when somebody takes off really gives me a lift. Goddamn, those people know how to live.”

  It’s hard to put into words, but my friendship with Bix was one of the fine things in my life. It’s probably tough for anybody outside of the jazz world to latch on to its real meaning. When you’re a kid and your first millennium falls on you—when you get in a groove that you know is right for you, find a way of expressing something deep down and know it’s your way—it makes you bubble inside. But it’s hard to tell outsiders about it. It’s all locked up inside you, in a kind of mental prison. Then, once in a million years, somebody like Bix comes along and you know the same millennium is upon him too, it’s the same with him as it is with you. That gives you the courage of your convictions—all of a sudden you know you aren’t plodding around in circles in a wilderness. No wonder jazz musicians have an off-center perspective on the world. You can’t blame them for walking around with a superior air, partly because they’re plain lonely and partly because they know they’ve got hold of something good, a straight slant on things, and yet nobody understands it. A Bix Beiderbecke will. He knows where to put the “Amen’s.”

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  Monkey and all the boys piled into my car one day for a drive into Chicago, and when we came back towards evening we found the place sealed up tighter than a submarine, with padlocks on all the doors. There was an ugly rumor going around that Monkey had been dispensing alcoholic beverages at the Martinique, and the government got upset about it. While we were gone some Feds had swooped down on the place and shut it up.

  7. TEA DON’T DO YOU THAT WAY

  THE NEXT PLACE I WORKED IN, ON RANDOLPH STREET IN DOWN-town Chicago, was called the Deauville, pronounced Doughville. You had to pull up in a diamond-studded limousine, with solid gold fenders and ermine upholstery, before the doorman would even reach for the twister to your slammer. This new club was what the French call intime and we call a closet; there wasn’t enough room in it for a midget to swing an underfed kitten, or even for a flea to do the lindyhop, but it was full up with Parisian atmosphere, a telephone booth with French dressing. The owner nixed big crowds out; he never allowed more than five or six parties in the place at one time, and they had to be packed up with loot. Many a night we put on the whole floor show, chorus and all, for a party of six or eight, and they were usually too blind to see it.

  It wasn’t like the joint went broke for being so hincty. Even the smallest party couldn’t get out of there without dropping at least two grand for the night. The boss catered mostly to Indians who had struck oil on the reservation, beefy cattlemen who were sure to be milked, sugar daddies with their sable-sporting chicken dinners, and butter-and-egg men with plenty of bacon. He wasn’t exactly doing without. The Deauville was such a mint that he even considered making it smaller.

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  In this dicty corral I learned that the great American public likes nothing better than to be roped in, and the tighter you squeeze ’em the more you please ’em. The main attraction at the club was Frank Libuse, the famous vaudevillian, who gave the suckers a workout they never forgot. Frank used to pose as a waiter, with baggy pants falling down over his shoes, a Prince Albert coat six sizes too big, and a tablecloth folded over his arm for a napkin. When a party was lucky enough to pass the doorman, the head-waiter would lead them to a table and then Frank went to work. He’d pull the chair out from under some dignified dowager and catch her just before she went to fall on her daniel; leaning over to brush some crumbs off the table, he’d bump up against some pretty young frail with his rear end and send her flying; he spilled soup all over the table, poured drinks into the customers’ laps, mussed the ladies’ hair as he served them, dropped loaded trays on the floor, yanked the cigar out of some railroad magnate’s mouth and ducked it in an ashtray, snatched an uppity dame right up from her seat and waltzed her out on the dance floor, pince-nez and all. With his sunken cheeks, deadpan kisser and wig that looked like a Fuller brush, he used to give us hysterics up on the bandstand, but we had to sit through it pokerfaced and act like we weren’t hip. Finally, when the cash customers were hotter than a pussy with the pox, he would knock over the whole goddamn table, then jump out on the dance floor just in time to escape being washed away. Mabel Walzer, his partner, tipped out then, all dolled up like a little
girl, and sang some grand opera while Frank trilled delicate little runs offkey on his flute, butchering the aria.

  When the customers dug the comedy that had been put on at their expense—and I mean expense—they didn’t have guts enough to do anything about it, so they just grinned like a mule eating green tomatoes and tipped all the help heavy to show they were good sports. I guess the moral is that if you want to entertain an American audience good, just beat their brains out and they’ll always come back for more.

  I got this job in the Deauville from Irving Rothchild, the famous violin player who led Sophie Tucker’s band for so many years. The grapevine in the jazz world would make Western Union look like the pony express, and while I was at the Martinique word got around that I was a good “hot man,” with a real colored style. When I hit town again after Indiana Harbor I knocked around for a few months playing club dates, but one day Irving looked me up at union headquarters and said he’d heard about my playing and could I get a six-piece band together for this new club.

  I got some men together, including Murph Steinberg on the trumpet and a teen-age kid named Eddie Condon on the banjo. Eddie, or Slick, as we called him, never went near a campus but he was strictly the Joe-College type, togged in plus-fours and a polka-dot bow tie and sporting a crew haircut that was one step away from total baldness. Eddie thought the company was too fast for him, especially after he found out the job paid $115 a week, but I finally talked him into it and we got to be good friends after a while.