Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  Before they even collared their diplomas at Austin High they had all been swept up and carried away by the tidal wave of hot music that was searing and singeing its way from the Gulf of Mexico up to the Great Lakes, cutting the country right up the middle with a smoky belt of jazz. These juvenile cats were gone with it; they meant to pave the way for that flood from the Mississippi delta and speed it on to glory. Out of the belly spasms of this frenzy-jammed country a brand-new voice sang out to them, rumbling and rolling answers to all their questions, and they liked what it said. It was the voice of jazz, making itself heard above the rattle of machine guns and the clink of whisky bottles. That lowdown call came hammering at their ears all the way from New Orleans, wrapped in a wail and a husky lament, and it hit them just like it did me a few years earlier. They listened hard, and naturally, they got restless. At night, instead of hugging the fireside and boning up on algebra and Louie the Fourteenth, they snuck out and beat it into town to tour the South Side, studying its flicker and frolic. There they got a liberal education that lowrated all the book-learning and Sunday-school sermons they had thrown at them out where the pretty lawns got a weekly finger-wave.

  They heard the real jazz too, coming up from the South Side like a heartbeat. Joe Oliver taught them how to cut their musical eye-teeth; Jimmy Noone and Johnny Dodds helped them dig their gutbucket ABC’s; Louis Armstrong rifled and scatted them through many an after-hours lesson in night school, until they were all honor students. Their greedy ears drank in the music like suction pumps. The sprawling outside world, they found, was raw and bubbling, crude, brutal, unscrubbed behind the ears but jim-jam-jumping with vital spirits; its collar might be grimy and tattered, but it was popping with life and lusty energy, ready for anything and everything, with a gusto you couldn’t down. And jazz, the real jazz, was its theme song. These kids went for that unwashed, untidy world, and they made up their minds to learn its unwashed, untidy music.

  As they roamed around town in their knee-britches, sniffing for signs of life like a scavenger snagging cigarette butts, they bumped into other defiant, music-starved kids like themselves—Floyd O’Brien, Muggsy Spanier, Eddie Condon, Gene Krupa, Joe Sullivan, Herman Foster. From time to time they came across up-and-coming young musicians just starting out full of pound and pep, guys like Bix Beiderbecke, Joe Marsala, Bill Davison, Danny Polo, Jack Teagarden, Jess Stacy, Pee Wee Russell; and they sat funnel-eared and google-eyed at the feet of older, more seasoned music-makers like Leon Rappolo and the other white cats in the New Orleans Rhythm Kings.

  All these different strands of music kept snaking around in their heads, and these kids finally began to weave them together, working out their own styles and techniques as a blend of everything they heard. They started to play hot music themselves, stuttering towards a language that would let them speak out what was on their whirlpool minds. They got the ingredients a little mixed up, sure; some of their music was spotty and fumbling, reaching out in too many directions at once, each note ready to bust with a dozen different ideas stuffed in it. But they were headed right, and the spirit was in them. That was plenty for a starter.

  While they were still messing with their schoolbooks they got together a high-school jazz band called the Austin Blue Friars (in honor of the Rhythm Kings who were featured at the Friars Inn), and they played their skullbusting music, mixed in with limp-as-lard pop tunes, at Parent-Teacher-Association dances and open-air affairs in the local park, and once in a while a gig at a small café that their mothers never knew about. After they graduated from school, or got thrown out on their ears, the Austin High Gang stuck together. Finally they organized a professional outfit called Husk O’Hare’s Wolverines—this time lifting the name from Bix’s old band. Then they were on their way.

  Who were these frantic kids? Their ringleaders, the ones who really went places afterwards, were Frank Teschemacher, first alto sax and clarinet; Jimmy MacPartland, cornet, and his brother Dick on guitar; Dave North, piano; Jim Lannigan, bass; Dave Tough, drums; and Lawrence “Bud” Freeman on tenor sax. Another Chicago youngster, Floyd O’Brien, was added on the trombone to fill out the band, and later on, when I joined up with them, I made the third sax. I first met up with the whole crowd when I breezed back from Detroit. Most of the kids were still in their teens, but the South Side had already tattooed its special mark all over them. I had started to think that the South Side was my own personal property, and that no other white musicians, except for a tiny handful, would ever vibrate to its tune the way I did. Those kids made my homecoming a red-letter day in the Mezzrow calendar.

  They were a high-spirited, eager, try-anything bunch of kids, these teen-age refugees from the sunny suburbs, as frisky as a herd of prancing fillies, yet and still they had their dead-serious side, pledged body and soul to the gospel of jazz, and they formed the nucleus of a great crew of jazzmen who have gone down in history as the Chicagoans. The Austin High Gang had among its charter members some of the finest and most dedicated white artists this country has ever coughed up. They may have been a drag and a headache to their mothers, but they were sure a jumping joy to me.

  ●

  “Hey, Mezzrow!”

  I gunned the kid—I’d never seen him before in my life. He was a tall blond good-looking youngblood, with dimples and a frame that might have hopped out of a physical-culture magazine. He got in my face just as I stepped into the lobby from the elevator at union headquarters.

  “You’re Milton Mezzrow, aren’t you?” He seemed too honest for a bill-collector or a process-server, so I admitted it. “Just the one I want to see,” he said with a big grin. “Are you doing anything? I’ve heard a lot about you and I know the fellows would be glad to have you play in our band.” The band was Husk O’Hare’s Wolverines and they were working for the summer out at White City, a roller-coaster amusement park out on the far South Side.

  It looked like my press-agent Mr. Grapevine was on the job again for me, and it didn’t hurt my ego none. I didn’t mind copping a slave just then because I could use the gold, and besides, the kid laid his racket so smooth that I warmed up to him. His name was Jimmy MacPartland, the cornet player who later became famous for his work on the Chicagoans’ recording of Nobody’s Sweetheart. This was really my first job with another band, because up to then I always got my own units together, but it made me feel sort of biggity to be hired that way. I told him yes.

  The first night I showed up for work they threw a Frank Black arrangement of Kamenoi Ostrow at me and I knew I was going to have plenty trouble trying to play the notes the way they were written down. I figured this was just another wood-sawing dance band where the musicians kept their noses buried in cornfed stock arrangements, so I decided to try and play it as is to keep them happy. I had made up my mind in advance that these cats weren’t from doodlely-squat.

  Well, I had another think coming. The next minute it was like I was hearing things—a little old half-pint kid was squatted behind the big bass drum, with just his head sticking up, knocking out the rhythm of Baby Dodds! He was a cat named Dave Tough, and he was the only white drummer I ever heard, outside of Ray Eisel, who had mastered that South Side beat. My mouth flew open wider than a trapdoor and Dave, bobbing up and down like a piston, rocking and rolling with a rhythm that wouldn’t quit, grinned back at me. The way they swung that arrangement sent me so much that when I took my chorus I forgot all about the written music and really ran wild.

  Could it be true? Here was a bunch of strange kids, and white ones at that, playing the music I loved, music I thought nobody knew except a chosen few. When we finished the arrangement I was all red in the face because I had made so many mistakes, but Bud Freeman had messed it up some too and that made me feel a little better. Tesch was the boy who could really read. He had studied the violin when he was young and had such a legitimate schooling, he would even read a fly-speck if it got on the paper. He played first alto and clarinet; Bud played tenor, and I played third alto. I didn’t bring my clarinet a
nd soprano sax along because Jimmy had raved so much about Tesch’s clarinet playing, and I could see why. Tesch had a big forceful tone on the alto, too, and he really could lead a sax section.

  They all looked at me when we stopped, to see how I liked it, and I said “Whew, I’ll have to woodshed this thing awhile so I can get straight with you all.” Then, maybe for my benefit, Jimmy called Dinah, which was right in my alley. This was strictly a head arrangement and we began to jam awhile. Pretty soon Jimmy gave me a chorus, and when I began to play Dave Tough fell right in with me and we took the place over. What a difference there was playing this way, instead of crawling across a line of man-made fly-specks. I let myself go on this one—it was one of those great moments, when the walls between you and other people suddenly melt away and you all fuse together. Bud Freeman and Frank Teschemacher kept their eyes pinned on me, shaking their heads as if they didn’t believe it, and that made me blow even more. Before a word was spoken it was understood that we were all going to be great friends. A mutual-assistance pact was signed and sealed between us before we even sat down at the conference table and brought out the fountain pen. Each man laid down another riff for his signature. Every note we blew added another clause to the agreement.

  When we finished the first set Bud jumped up and yelled, “Hey, did you hear that—he plays just like the colored boys!” Tesch flashed me a big grin, and I began to swell up with joy. This was the first time in my life that a whole group of white musicians had ever cheered me for sticking to the pure Negro jazz style. What knocked me out was that by this time the Austin High Gang had practically moved into the South Side and were schooled so good they could identify almost every riff and trick break I threw at them. Tesch couldn’t get over it when I told him how Bix used to come and sit in with our band at the Martinique, because Bix was his god, mentor and all-round idol. “Yeah, yeah,” he kept saying, with his eyes open wide as camera shutters and shining through his thick hornrimmed glasses, “I want to meet that guy some day.”

  Tesch and Dave were the two that attracted me most, because their music was heading for the real jazz idiom and their temperaments fitted mine like the bark does a tree. Jimmy MacPartland could get on the beam too—he had a subtle tone that showed he had listened hard to Bix, and some of his passages were straight from Louis Armstrong. Then there was Floyd O’Brien, whose New Orleans trombone was really in there. Man, ’tain’t no crack but a solid fact—these kids from Austin, some of them still wet behind the ears, had latched on to the spirit of hot jazz so good, you would have thought sometimes that they came out of the gallion instead of Chicago’s manicured and well-groomed suburbs.

  Dave Tough was my boy. He was a little bit of a guy, no chubbier than a dime and as lean as hard times, with a mop of dark hair, high cheekbones, and a nose ground fine as a razor blade, and he popped with spirit till he couldn’t sit still. It always hit me to see that keyed-up peanut crawl behind the drums, looking like a mouse huddled behind a elephant, and cut loose with the solid rhythm he had picked up from the great colored drummers—the beat really moved him and he jumped from head to toe, then back again. Once some of the Austin boys were invited out to a society dame’s salon to put on a show for her distinguished guests, and Dave beat his tubs so hard and threw himself around with so much pep that the hostess came trotting over, glared down at him over her lorgnette, and snorted, “Take—that—cannibal—out—of—here!” Dave and I got to be bosom pals.

  It was little Dave who gave me a knockdown to George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken, two guys who could mess with the King’s English too. Dave used to read The American Mercury from cover to cover, especially the section called “Americana” where all the bluenoses, bigots, and two-faced killjoys in this land-of-the-free got a going-over they never forgot. That Mercury really got to be the Austin High Gang’s Bible. It looked to us like Mencken was yelling the same message in his magazine that we were trying to get across in our music; his words were practically lyrics to our hot jazz. I dug him all the way, because The Mercury gave you the same straight-seeing perspective that muta does—to me that hard-cutting magazine was a load of literary muggles.

  Tesch, a medium-sized, sober-pussed, studious cat with eyes barricaded behind thick glasses, was the most philosophical member of the gang. He almost became a lushhound but I put him on muta, and it was he who coined the phrase, “everything gets in your mouth,” that got so popular among viper jazzmen. Tesch was very cynical and downhearted about our music; he always thought we’d go to our graves without being appreciated, and he kept telling me about all the great composers and musical trail-blazers who never got recognized until after they were dead. “What’s the use, Milton?” he’d ask me, his face as long as a sigh and just as mournful. “You knock yourself out making a great new music for the people, and they treat you like some kind of plague or blight, like you were offering them leprosy instead of art, and you wind up in the poor-house or the asylum. That’s always the way it goes with a real artist who won’t put his talents on the auction-block to be sold to the highest bidder.” In spite of his gloomy slant, though, Tesch was all wrapped up in his music, and never let himself get sidetracked. He went around for months at a time in one raggedy old suit, looking like a ragpicker on vacation, and he wouldn’t wear a hat even in a hurricane.

  Late at night Tesch and I would hop in my car and travel over to the outer drive in Grant Park, where we’d pull up in back of Soldier’s Field, near the water fountain. All night long we’d play clarinet duets in the style of Jimmy Noone and Doc Poston, getting high on gauge and blowing until we were blue in the face. One night, just after we parked and started our open-air concert, we saw a motorcycle cop driving towards us from the highway, and Tesch said pessimistically, with a I-told-you-so tone, “This is it, Milton. Will we ever have any peace and be able to play as we feel? Won’t they ever let us alone?” We both figured John Law was bearing down on us like a messenger from all the decent, respectable citizens who were home in bed having decent, respectable nightmares instead of braying through their horns at the stars. When the bloodhound got alongside our car, he parked his motorcycle and strolled over to us. “Go ahead, boys, keep on playing,” he said. “That sounded real good. A guy doesn’t get to hear much of that music on this beat.” He nodded his head approvingly, like an old concert-goer in the first row at Carnegie Hall.

  Ho! Ho! What you know—a bluecoat with the soul of an artist! Tesch and I almost fell through the floor of the car. A minute later, when we recovered from the shock, this music-lover from the Chicago Motorcycle Squad had the honor of hearing the world’s premier of Teschemacher’s and Mezzrow’s chamber music for two clarinets, interpreted by the composers themselves.

  After that we knew there was one safe place to go early in the morning when we wanted to jam for a while. Night after night Bud, Dave, Tesch and as many others as could squeeze in my car would broom over to this hide-out in Grant Park and blow our tops under the twinklers, shooting riffs at the moon through the courtesy of the Windy City Police Force. At least once in my life I met a copper who was a human being. That is a miracle that deserves to go down in history, like the waters parting for the Israelites or Lazarus rising from the dead, so right here and now I want to record for posterity that I saw it with my own two eyes, so help me God.

  ●

  In those days, if you pried 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. Maybe, for one thing, you would have scooped out some why-and-wherefore of the thick Southern accent I was developing. It’s a fact—I wasn’t putting my mind to it, but I’d started to use so many of the phrases and intonations of the Negro, I must have sounded like I was trying to pass for colored. Every word that rolled off my lips was soft and fuzzy, wrapped in a yawn, creeping with a slow-motion crawl. I was going on to twenty-seven, a Chicago-born Jew from Russian parents, and I’d hardly ever been south of the Capone district, but I soun
ded like I arrived from the levee last Juvember.

  Dave Tough, who tipped delicately over his words like they were thin ice, always used to lecture me on how important it was to keep your speech pure, pointing out that the French and people like that formed their vowels lovingly, shaping their lips just right when they spoke, while Americans spoke tough out of the corners of their mouths, clipping and crunching all the sounds. I always came back with the argument that the Negroes were one exception; their speech was full and rounded to my ears, and they never twisted their lips up like a gangster on an alum diet. I thought Dave’s careful way of talking was too precise and effeminate. He thought I was kind of illiterate, even though he admired my musical taste and knowledge. He was always making me conscious of the way I talked because he kept on parodying the slurs and colloquial kicks in my speech, saying that I was just trying to ape the colored man. That got me steamed up.

  “Dave,” I told him, “you know all the music we care anything about comes from the Negro, and if you want to dig our music you got to dig the guys who made it up. You can’t get to know what a people are like, can you, unless you really learn and know their language?” I tried to show him how I spent weeks studying Bessie Smith’s slaughter of the white man’s dictionary, analyzing all her glides and slippery elisions, before I could figure out the secret of her blues singing. It turned out, though, that Dave had never heard Bessie sing, so the gab-session wound up one night with our breezing over to the Paradise Gardens on 35th near Calumet, to listen to the queen of the blues pour her great heart out. She was featured there with Jimmy Noone’s band.