Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  On a dark and evil night in January, 1932, Wild Bill Davison the trumpet-player was driving Frank Teschemacher from work and the door flew open and Tesch fell clear out, right under a speeding taxi that killed him on the spot. That was a couple of months after Bix passed away in New York. When Wild Bill finally got over the shock all he could do was shake his head and say, “Where are we gonna get another sax player like Tesch?”

  He could have saved his breath. There was no sense asking the question by then. Sure, there weren’t any more fay sax men around with even a touch of the New Orleans style, but that was all right too. There wasn’t going to be much demand for hot sax men from then on. New Orleans was dead and buried by 1932. It was just a legend. Old Tesch’s death just put a period to the death-sentence of hot jazz, and to the whole saga of the Chicagoans, the last group of white musicians in this country who tried to keep even a little bit of the New Orleans spirit alive.

  ●

  In the Fall of 1927, when I ankled back to Chicago from my barnstorming and barn-burning tour of the West, we were still living in a fool’s paradise. What gave us a false feeling of security was that the hot man—and that meant mostly the cats in our gang, the Chicagoans who still looked to New Orleans for their inspiration—was really Mr. Kingpin in the music world. Straight musicians had worked up some real solid respect for us by then, because when one of us was shoved into a run-of-the-mill commercial band he electrified the whole group, having the same effect on it that a supercharger does on an airplane engine. So once in a while there was a demand for our services. We figured there’d always be a hambone or two around for us.

  It’s the same old story whenever the box-office boys, the strictly commercial big-business operators, take over any creative field and begin coining gold. First they try to buy up the serious, pure, really gifted artists in their field, the ones who stayed devoted and single-minded and never got dazzled by the Almighty Simolion. The uncommercial artists have prestige value, lend dignity to the phony package that’s put up for sale. In this money-mad high-pressure-salesmanship country especially, the real artist is always having tempting cash offers dangled in front of his nose, if he’ll only sign the papers and go commercial. Too often the guy, no matter how talented he is, is having too much trouble eating regular on the proceeds of his own creative work. He feels he’s not getting the recognition he deserves from the public, and while he’s knocking himself out the vulgarizers of his art go touring around town in limousines. Like as not, he’s a cinch to put his John Henry on the dotted line.

  I’m not saying that a jazz musician is a genius, or a remarkable fellow, or even that he deserves an extra pat on the back just because he stays honest and devoted, sticks with the original uncorrupted New Orleans style. Each guy has to go into a huddle with his own conscience to decide about that, and he doesn’t deserve any cheers if he wants to keep his hands clean. All I’m getting at is this: the “pure” musician has added prestige, and the entrepreneurs and promoters in the music world, who are a little ashamed of their being so mercenary, recognize that fact. The pure artist’s talents have been kept working, they’re not blunted. He’s traveling uphill all the time, but up, and he hits on all cylinders. He’s that special touch in any musical organization, the something-new-that’s-been-added. And the smart boys in the business realized early that he was an asset, and liked to inject him into a mechanical no-spirit big band for his hypodermic value.

  And they were right. A hot man gave any orchestra, and the dancers as well, a new spirit and a stimulating pulse. His tone would stand out clear, full and firm, and his hard attack and phrasing added new inspiration to the saggy-souled men around him. As soon as he took off on a solo the whole band seemed to scramble out of its stupor, shook off the sleeping sickness, snapped back into alertness and showed some real sparkle for once. Listen hard to the first recordings Bix made with Paul Whiteman, when he still had some of the riverboat spirit left in him, see how his force and drive push the whole band along in spite of their straitjacket arrangements, and you’ll dig what I mean. I swear, one good hot man was a tonic, a shot-in-the-arm, a musical hotfoot to fifteen knocked-out slaves with their noses buried in written music. The minute a hot jazzman busted loose, all the guys who were resting would start to clap their hands and beat time with their feet and swing their bodies behind the soloist, swaying from side to side, really stirred into feeling and come-alive expression at last.

  Come to think of it, that’s how the word “swing” was coined among us. When we talked about a musician who played hot, we would say he could swing or he couldn’t swing, meaning what kind of effect did he have on the band. This word was cooked up after the unhip public took over the expression “hot” and made it corny by getting up in front of a band and snapping their fingers in a childish way, yelling “Get hot! Yeah man, get hot!” like a bunch of kids at the ringside yelling instructions to Joe Louis on how to use his right. That happened all the time, and it got us embarrassed and irritated all at once. It used to grate on our nerves because it was usually slung in our faces when we were playing our hottest numbers. Things got so bad, after a while, that when the squares yelled “hot” to us we turned cold on them right away. That’s the reason we hot musicians are always making up new lingo for ourselves. Whenever the outsiders pick up the jazzman’s colloquialisms they kick them around until the words lose all their real fresh meaning. Just look at what’s happened to the word “swing” in the last fifteen years, if you want an example. Now the term is slapped on any corn you want to sell to the unsuspecting public. It’s a gaudy label to plaster on an inferior, adulterated product, and there sure ought to be a pure-music law to regulate its use and abuse.

  Well, like I say, things looked good. Didn’t take no time at all, after I hit town, before a trumpet player named Leo Schuken came up to me at union headquarters and popped the usual question—“Milton, are you doing anything?” When I answered no he asked did I want to go into the Rendezvous, a gaudy highclass joint at Clark and Diversey Boulevard, with a new band. The place was owned by Leo’s uncle, and Leo wanted me to round up the men for the band, which was to be called The Immigrants, because he knew I was in with the real hot contingent. I asked him what type of band did he have in mind. “Sweet and hot,” he answered.

  As soon as I heard that he wanted some hot men I started on a manhunt, and before long I had a pretty good line-up: Tesch on tenor sax and clarinet, Floyd O’Brien on trombone, Herman Foster on guitar, Leo Schuken on trumpet and his brother Phil on third alto and flute, and myself on first alto and clarinet. Then Eddie Condon tipped us off that he had come across a bright and studious kid with real big hands, who had all the makings of a good pianist if we took him under our wing, and that was how we got Joe Sullivan on the ivories. Joe had a good classical schooling on the piano, but he was green to our idiom. I used to go over to his house a lot, bringing him Bessie Smith records so he could dig the piano accompaniments of Fletcher Henderson and James P. Johnson, and he studied hard.

  Now all that was missing was a drummer. Seemed like every cat I went after just then was out of town or already tied up, but finally I got the phone number of a kid who was supposed to be cleancut, intelligent, and very ambitious, and who could make a fine drummer if he was given a chance. They told me he needed a little coaching; he had a gang of talent and it could be brought out easy. His name was Gene Krupa.

  Sure enough, when I finally tracked the kid down he was thrilled at the opportunity to play with this band, because he knew all about the other guys in it and had plenty of respect for them. He was a neat, well-dressed, very good-looking youngster, hardly more than seventeen at the time; never talked much, shy and serious, and we liked him fine. We took him in hand right away, and not just to be nice—we needed a drummer bad. He wasn’t in our idiom at all, but that was just because he’d never had any real hot-jazz schooling, and he was so eager to learn he could hardly sit still. I made it my business to stick with him as much as possi
ble; the two of us ate, drank and breathed South Side jazz twenty-four hours a day. Dave Tough had made me promise never to show jazz drumming secrets to another living soul, but I still felt hot about the way he left me when he cut out for Paris, so I started to show Gene everything I knew.

  There were still some great colored drummers of the old school to be heard around town: Tubby Hall was at the Sunset then with Louis Armstrong; Ollie Powell was with Jimmy Noone at the Nest; and Zutty Singleton was at Ethel Waters’ cabaret, the Café de Paris (called the Lincoln Gardens in the days when Joe Oliver played there, and after that the Royal Gardens). Gene and Herman Foster and me made up a trio of walking delegates, touring the South Side spots every night. Gene ate it up, and so did Herman.

  The South Side drummers gave Gene an entirely new slant on his instrument and showed him what a wide range of effects you could get with it. He was so loaded with inspiration, he set up his drums in the parlor of his house and began studying day and night. Once, when we were staying out kind of late, I asked him what would his mother think about his keeping such hours and he said, “Oh, it’ll be all right, Milton, as long as I’m with you. Momma thinks you’re a genius and anything I do with you is O.K.” That struck me funny because I’d never met Mrs. Krupa, although I’d talked with her over the phone and Gene had told me she was a schoolteacher and what a wonderful person she was. Gene explained, “You see, Milton, ever since I’ve been going around with you I’ve been practising all day and all night—I’m really serious about the music and I’m with it all the time, and Momma thinks it’s all your influence.” That was the first time anybody’s mother ever figured I was any other kind of influence but the kind you throw in the county jail. I sure wished my own mother appreciated me half as much.

  The two of us practically crawled inside Gene’s drums to study all their fine points. One important thing we worked out was the difference between starting a roll or a sequence of beats with the left hand or the right hand, how the tone and inflection changed entirely when you shifted hands. We’d sit for hours in my car while I pounded on the steering wheel, starting first with one hand and then with the other, trying to figure out the subtle differences in the effect. Then we went to work on the tomtoms, trying to get them in tune and studying the right times to use them; we kept punching holes in them with an icepick until they were pitched just right. (These were the old-style Chinese tomtoms with no tuning device.) Next, remembering more of the things I’d learned from Zutty and Baby Dodds, I showed Gene how to keep the bass and the snare drum in tune, and to get cymbals that rung in tune and were pitched in certain keys. After that we got to the cowbell and the woodblock, messing with them until we got them pitched in tune with the right keys. The way we sweated over that set of drums, you would have thought we were a couple of engineers tuning up a delicate aviation motor.

  All the time we had our heads together, puzzling over the tricky points of the hide-beating art, we looked at the drums, not as just instruments to pound a monotone beat out of, but as having a broad range of tonal variations, so they could be played to fit into a harmonic pattern as well as a rhythmic one. To this day, Gene has kept some of that feeling about the drums with him, and that’s why he can get effects that are much richer and more meaningful musically than a lot of these pounders in commercial bands, who sound like they got their musical schooling with a pneumatic drill on some asphalt pavement. Gene’s mother was so tickled with the progress he was making that when I suggested it to her she bought him a set of kettle drums, gold tympanies that were tuned by a foot pedal, and a chromium-plated set of electric vibraphones. When Gene got enthroned behind all these trimmings he looked like a one-man band, and almost sounded like it too.

  Gene lived way out on the far end of the South Side, and it took him more than an hour to get home by the streetcar or the El. His mother wanted him to stick with us as much as possible, and she bought him a car so we could get together easier. Night after night, after a visit to one of the South Side cabarets, we’d drive under the viaduct of Wacker Drive along the Chicago River and sit there talking until the squares began to come to their before-Abes. The subject that we kept coming back to, over and over, was this—How in hell could people be so stupid that they overlooked the wonderful things the Negro had to offer us? The same thing was happening inside Gene’s head that happened inside mine years before. He’d started out being thunderstruck by the genius the colored people had for music. But when he got to thinking about it, he began to see that their music was only an expression of something that ran much deeper. Their wonderful music just reflected their whole make-up, their refreshing outlook and philosophy of living. You start out with just a technical interest in their music-making, but soon as you begin analyzing it you wind up trying to dig how they live and think and feel.

  Everything the Negro did, we agreed, had a swing to it; he talked in rhythm, his tonal expression had a pleasing lilt to the ear, his movements were graceful. Was it this quality in him that made the white Southerners resent him so much, and was this why they kept him oppressed? Were they afraid that if the Negro was really set free he would make us all look sick with his genius for relaxed, high-spirited, unburdened living? We wondered about that. We could see that every move he made was as easy and neatly timed as anything Mother Nature had put down on this earth. His laughter was real and from way down inside. His whole manner and bearing was simple and natural. He could out-dance and out-sing anybody, in sports he could out-fight and out-run most all the competition, and when it comes to basketball don’t say a word, just listen.

  “You sure are right, Milton,” Gene told me. “The colored guys really get out in front and set the pace when they’re given half a chance. Why, look at how every white performer that ever aped the Negro became a headliner. Look at Sophie Tucker, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor and the rest—where’d they be without their blackface routines and corny coonshouting and mammy numbers? And in our own field too, it’s the musicians that tried to grasp a little of the Negro jazz idiom who’ve gotten to be famous.”

  More than anything, it was the Negro’s sense of time and rhythm that fascinated us. I would sit there with Gene for hours, just beating out the rhythms of Zutty Singleton or Johnny Wells until my hands were swole double. I’d show him the secret that Dave Tough had dug, that there was a tonal pattern of harmony to be followed and that what seemed like a steady beat was really a sequence of different sounds accented at the right intervals, with just the correct amount of vibrations coming from the snare and the bass so that the other musicians who were improvising got the foundation to carry on and be more inventive.

  Gene’s head kept nodding like he had the palsy—he agreed with everything I said about the music and the Negroes who made it up. The eagerness that shone in his eyes when I played the different rhythms for him made me feel so good that I stayed with him. He kept telling me how he’d always remember our studies in the South Side and our all-night sessions afterwards. “Don’t think I’ll ever forget what you taught me about the colored race, Milton,” he said later, “and some day I’ll prove it to you.”

  Gene was a good kid, flowing over with talent. He had plenty on the ball, and he was destined to go places. But some of the places he traveled to were far away. He did forget.

  ●

  Late in ’27 sometime, Bix suddenly fell into town. He was playing at the Chicago Theater with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, and soon as we got the news, Eddie Condon and I shot over to knock him some skin. He came out backstage with Bing Crosby (Bing was singing in Whiteman’s trio, The Rhythm Boys, with Harry Barris and Al Rinker). The first thing he said when he dug us was, “Come on, let’s go get a drink.” Down through the Loop he led us, along State Street, until just off of Lake Street we met up with a blackened-up old store that looked like it had been condemned before the Chicago fire. A peephole slid open, an eye appeared in the hole and gunned Bix; then the door swung open like a switch-blade. I guess the mug of that bottle-baby was kno
wn to every peephole attendant in the western hemisphere.

  From then on this fillmill became the hangout for all of Chicago’s hot men, and the home of the first jam sessions ever held in this country. The address was 222 North State Street, and after we hung out there awhile we named it the Three Deuces, parodying the name of the Four Deuces, one of the biggest syndicate whorehouses in town. Whenever we musicians wanted to get together with each other we’d say “Meet you at The Deuces tonight.” Years later, after prohibition was repealed, the name was officially adopted and hung up on a sign outside, and the spot turned into a legit hot-music center.

  It all started that night, after we had a few drinks and began to coax Bix to bring his horn with him after he finished up at the theater that night, so the boys could hear him play. “Where the hell we going to play?” Bix asked. Eddie said to just bring that horn around and we’d take care of the rest. We flew all around the town to hip the cats to what was going down, and finally we rounded up Tesch, Gene, Bud, Joe and Herman. Tesch’s eyes almost jumped out of his head when we laid the news on him, and he kept on saying, “Yeah, yeah, that’s the nuts,” as though he couldn’t believe it. He was crazy about Bix.

  By midnight The Deuces was jumping. We were busy as a tout on Derby Day, buzzing in each other’s ears, shaking hands and slapping backs, when all of a sudden Bud jumped up, eyes all shining like they were chromium-plated. “Milton,” he yelled, “come on, there’s a piano downstairs!” The colored porter in the place, digging our spiel about finding some place where we could play without having the cops on our necks, had gotten the okay from the bossman and tipped Bud off to the piano in the cellar. We all tore out for it, lugging our instruments with us, and in no time at all one of history’s greatest jam sessions was under way. Bing had the spirit too. He beat time all night with his hands, like he was at a Holy Rollers meeting. Under Bix’s spell, everybody was a genius that night.