by Mezz Mezzrow
I think the term “jam session” originated right in that cellar. Long before that, of course, the colored boys used to get together and play for kicks, but those were mostly private sessions, strictly for professional musicians, and the idea was usually to try and cut each other, each one trying to outdo the others and prove himself best. Those impromptu concerts of theirs were generally known as “cuttin’ contests.” Our idea, when we got going at The Deuces, was to play together, to make our improvisation really collective, using an organ background behind the one taking a solo, to see could we fit together and arrive at a climax all at once. Down in that basement concert hall, somebody was always yelling over to me, “Hey Jelly, what you gonna do?”—they gave me that nickname, or sometimes called me Roll, because I always wanted to play Clarence Williams’ classic, Jelly Roll—and almost every time I’d cap them with, “Jelly’s gonna jam some now,” just as a kind of play on words. We always used the word “session” a lot, and I think the expression “jam session” grew up out of this playful yelling back and forth. At least I don’t rightly remember ever hearing it before those sessions at The Deuces.
It was good kicks for us—about the last real spurt of collective improvisation the Chicagoans were to have before they were scattered all over the map. It was the hot swan-song of Chicago jazz that we busted out with, night after night, surrounded by cobwebs and flaky whitewash. The bosses, being an enterprising bunch of guys, soon put some tables and chairs down in the cellar, and before we knew it a small cabaret was going full blast. We started holding our first jam sessions for the public here. Everybody came around. Ben Pollack was sometimes on hand to beat the drums, and Jimmy MacPartland and Bix often played trumpet, while Tesch took off on his clarinet. As often as not, Bix would knock himself out on the piano when he wasn’t taking a chorus on his horn. Jimmy was working with Ben Pollack’s band at the Southmore Hotel then, along with Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, and a few times he brought both those guys with him. Gene Krupa became a fixture in the place, always with his drums, and Eddie Condon was never without his banjo. I usually acted as master of ceremonies and I guess I made out all right because the audience never threw anything at me. What a time we had. We were always real gay.
It was at The Deuces that Red McKenzie first caught up with us. Red was a stocky, bowlegged cat, with a mop of danger-signal hair that would have made a bull with the rheumatiz begin pawing and prancing; he’d started out as a jockey but he fell off a horse and got hurt, so he quit riding. How he got into the music field is a funny story. He’d been working as a bellhop in the Claridge Hotel in St. Louis, and across the street, in a joint where a guy named Dick Slevin worked, there was a phonograph going all the time and a little colored shoeshine boy used to beat time on the shoes. Red liked the rhythm the kid made, and he used to join in by blowing into a comb that had a sheet of tissue paper wrapped around it. Slevin played a kazoo, because he had a ticklish mouth and the vibrations from the paper on the comb were too fuzzy. Well, one day Slevin ran into a guy named Jack Bland, who owned a banjo. They started playing together, and then got hold of Red. So there was a trio: comb, kazoo, and banjo. The name they took for themselves was the Mound City Blue Blowers, and later on it became a foursome when they added Eddie Lang on guitar. In 1924 they were brought into the Friars Inn in Chicago, and Isham Jones, who was around at the time, arranged a recording date at Brunswick for them. The two records they made then, Arkansas Blues and Blue Blues, sold way over a million copies. Soon after that they played the Palace in New York, then made a European tour on which they played for the Prince of Wales, and finally Red showed up in Chicago again. That was when we got to know him.
Red wasn’t really in our idiom at all, although he kind of went for New Orleans music when he heard it. The reason his early Blue Blowers records swept the country was that they were such a novelty, and in those crazy Twenties the sensation-hungry public was ready for a new fad every twenty-four hours.
It’s the same story with Red as it was with The Original Dixieland Jazz Band that opened in New York at Reisenweber’s in 1917 and immediately became a sensation on two continents. They were really a corny outfit, and if they ever had a touch of New Orleans it was frail as a nail and twice as pale, strictly a white-man’s version. But they were fast and energetic and they had a gang of novelty effects that the public went wild about—jangling cowbells, honking automobile horns, barnyard imitations, noises that sounded like everything but music. (Remember, when I was just a kid, in Pontiac Reformatory, I was hit hard by the Dixieland Jazz Band’s recording of Livery Stable Blues, but what really got me was the tricky clarinet playing of Larry Shields, and Nick LaRocca’s trumpet that sounded kind of interesting but wasn’t as good as the playing of our cellmate, the colored boy Yellow.) The public didn’t know this wasn’t the real jazz; and they didn’t care. Pretty soon the Dixieland Jazz Band was the rage of the East, and of Europe as well, and “dixieland style” became the password of a lot of corny musicians, as it still is today.
Well, the Mound City Blue Blowers had the same kind of overnight success. They really didn’t play much music, but their toy instruments and novelty effects hit the public’s fancy and put them over. Red had a solid streak in him, and if he had sat down and mastered a professional instrument and spent a lot of time studying New Orleans music he could have come out all right. But the quick success put him in a commercial vein. Instead of woodshedding, he went out after the big money with the primitive equipment he had when he started. That’s the way it always goes: somebody blows his guts out creating a new and authentic art form, then the unhip boys with shrewd commercial instincts come along and begin exploiting it, without bothering to learn it first. The result is that the public hears only the bastard version and goes crazy about it, figuring it’s the real thing.
Red was very tough and guttural, always talking out of the corner of his mouth, giving you a kind of Southern-gangster impression because he tried to use Negro colloquialisms. He drank quite a lot, but he was a strict Catholic and was dead against the muta. He and Eddie Condon both had a smart business slant; they were practical, good managers and organizers, and they were always on the lookout for commercial possibilities. The rest of us, we were the artists, the boys with their heads in the clouds, scornful of keeping books and negotiating deals and adding up the give-and-take. It took somebody like Red or Eddie to make sure there was some money coming in at the end of the week. We really needed a business manager. But the history of our music might have been changed some if Red, who stepped in and took over the job, had been closer to the spirit of the music that obsessed us all.
Eddie Condon brought McKenzie around to The Deuces one night, and things began to happen fast. Red had it in mind to organize some recording dates for the Chicago boys, and he went to work hiring the musicians that very night. For that first date (four sides were made for Okeh, reissued later by Columbia), organized under the title of “McKenzie and Condon’s Chicagoans,” the line-up was: Jimmy MacPartland, cornet; Frank Teschemacher, clarinet; Bud Freeman, tenor sax; Joe Sullivan, piano; Eddie Condon, banjo; Jim Lannigan, bass and tuba; Gene Krupa, drums. Red seemed to sense that I was one of the charter members of the Chicago group, and didn’t feel so good about my being left out, because he called me aside and said, “Look, Mezzrow, we’re gonna take these kids and make some records, but we’ll have to leave you out on the date because Tesch plays clarinet and Bud plays tenor and we’re only gonna use seven men. I want you to know that I’m comin’ back in the Spring to make some more records and we’ll sure give you a break on the next dates.” I guess Red saw how Gene and some of the others were kind of under my wing, and he didn’t want me to feel bad about it. He asked me to come around to the studio anyhow and help supervise the recordings.
Before the date Tesch came over to my house and we wrote the introductions together, using some of Eddie Condon’s ideas and figuring out the right voicing by playing clarinet duets until it sounded good to us.
There was a week to go, so Tesch, Gene and I stuck close together, going out in my car every night and jamming. Then the day before the recording Eddie made me promise again that I would show up at the studio. That was right after we had closed at the Rendezvous, so my gold was getting scarce again, and when I went to check up on my assets I found I had $1.50 to my name. “Hell,” said Eddie, “you take a cab to the studio with that dough and I’ll pay you back.” So when the big day rolled around I spent my last chips on a taxi.
During this period recording had taken a big step ahead, from the old acoustical method to the electrical system. In the old days the musicians had to blow into big wooden loudspeakers, but now they were beginning to use microphones and the engineers in the control room were earphones so they could hear what was going on and signal to the players to correct things that were going wrong. There was plenty of trouble that day. This was one of the first dates where a drummer was allowed to use a full set of drums on a recording, because the bass drum had a tendency to knock the needle right out of the groove or make it dig too deep a cut. We began to fool around with all kinds of experiments to muffle Gene’s big drum. The first thing we tried was to hang the bass drum cover over the front of the drum, but this wasn’t enough, so we finally wound up with all of our overcoats wrapped around it. That drum looked like a dead ringer for Admiral Byrd at the South Pole, but it finally recorded right. Then we found the cymbals weren’t coming through very clearly, so when we got ready to make a master I held the cymbals close to the mike and Gene reached over his bass drum to bang them.
Four sides were made that day: Nobody’s Sweetheart, China Boy, Sugar and Liza. Those records made history. When they were released, along with the ones we made a couple months later, and fell into the hands of jazz experts, especially in Europe, they caused a lot of comment and controversy, and before the critics were through yelling their praises a new term was born—“Chicago style.” These were the records that first defined that style.[1]
I sure didn’t have much right to be uppity in those days, but I guess I was, because I told the boys I liked some things about the records but all in all they weren’t so much to me. Tesch had a terrible hard reed that day, and Jimmy dragged pretty bad, and I had the feeling that nobody showed that old punch of Louis Armstrong’s. The guys got kind of sore at me for being so critical, because they all thought they outdid themselves. What I was trying to say, even though I didn’t have the right words for it and my ideas weren’t too straight yet, was this—they were coming along fine, they were latching on to the classic New Orleans style, but they still had a long way to go, we all did, and there was no use our patting ourselves on the back. We weren’t in the same class with the Armstrongs and the Bechets, the Noones and the Olivers, and we might as well admit it and keep on studying.
The boys weren’t all of one mind about that. Some of them were beginning to wonder if we could ever get in that A-1 class. Others were beginning to ask themselves if it was even worth trying. Maybe Chicago style was good enough—in a class by itself, worth sticking with and to hell with backgrounds and origins. My instincts kept telling me that Chicago style wasn’t a new school that could stand on its own two feet but only the style of a bunch of white youngsters with plenty of talent who were beginning to absorb the New Orleans idiom but hadn’t finished their schooling by a long shot. It was just an imperfect reflection, like you get in a distorting mirror, of the only real jazz, the colored man’s music. We couldn’t rest on our laurels, even if the unhip critics thought we had exploded with a brand-new kind of music. We had to recognize where we derived from, and try all the time to be more authentic, purer, closer to the source. That worked up some friction between us.
Oh, I want to remind Eddie Condon of a little debt he still has got on his books—he never did pay me back that $1.50. But I guess I’m still ahead because he loaned me fifty bucks towards a note on the car I lost in Kansas City. Hell, I should never have brought the subject up. Looks like I owe the guy $48.50.
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Somewhere under the surface, deep down, there was a disagreement, some kind of split in perspectives, between me and some of the other Chicago cats. It never came completely out in the open, and we couldn’t put our finger on any one thing and say that was it. We didn’t know enough about ourselves or our music in those days to figure it out. But it was there, and it was beginning to weigh on all our minds—the way we couldn’t see eye-to-eye about those recordings was just an example of it. That friction sure brought me down. Sometimes I’d even begin to wonder if there wasn’t something screwy about me, because I was almost in a minority of one.
Not long after we left the Rendezvous, Herman Foster got himself a job in a roadhouse outside Chicago, and one night Gene, Bud and I drove out to see him. I felt like jamming some that night, so when they asked me I climbed up and sat in with the band on tenor sax. I really got worked up in that session. I guess I was a little on the defensive, after all our arguing about the records, so I practically blew my windpipe inside out trying to play a strictly New Orleans, Armstrong-Noone-Oliver style. Every note I forced out was an answer to the rest of the Chicago boys in the running argument we were having about the music. Every time I blew a riff down into the faces of my buddies, it meant “See? This is what I mean! This is where we got to go, and keep on going!” I didn’t know exactly what was going on myself, but I sure knew I was trying to prove something that night.
Right in the middle of a hot passage, when we were all knocking ourselves out, the colored chef came running out of the kitchen, togged in full cook’s regalia, fancy cupcake headgear and all. He came running right up to the stand and stood in front of me while I kept blowing away. His hands were on his hips and his feet were planted wide apart and his mouth was as open as it could get without surgery. Then suddenly he pointed at me, slapped the floor with his foot, and yelled in my face, “Boy, you is the saxophonest blowinest man I ever heard in all my born days. Where’d you come from poppa?”
Bud almost died, he was so delighted, and it sent a thrill through me like a high-powered electric current. I don’t know why, but it was just like I’d been in the toughest fight of my life, where everything I had and believed in was at stake, and doggone if I didn’t come out the winner. I felt fine the rest of the night.
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In the beginning of 1928 I took a band into the Purple Grackle, a beautiful modernistic Spanish-patio kind of roadhouse, lousy with heavy purple plush drapes all over the joint. It was about thirty miles out of Chicago on the road to Joliet, between Aurora and Elgin. There was a big sign out in front, reading “Milton Mezzrow and his Purple Grackle Orchestra,” and it puzzles me to this day because I still don’t know what in hell a purple or any other color grackle is. The job lasted for about three months, and it was the last job I ever did have around the Windy City. In the band were: Freddy Goodman (Benny’s brother) on trumpet, Floyd O’Brien on trombone, Pete Viera on piano, Herman Foster on guitar, Gene Krupa on drums, and myself on clarinet. The guy who ran the Grackle, a hot-jazz fan named Val, who was the first real record collector I ever knew, was crazy about Johnny Dodds and spent all his money going to Kelly’s Stables to hear his band and buying all his records. He recognized right away that Floyd and Gene and Herman and I had absorbed the Negro idiom, and that was why he hired us and gave us so much encouragement. His appreciation amazed us all, because all the café owners we ever knew were more familiar with machine guns than they were with music.
Those first months of ’28, when we were at the Grackle, were important to us because we made a gang of records then, the first ones I ever played on. Here’s how our three dates went:
First date: I Found a New Baby, There’ll Be Some Changes Made, and Baby Won’t You Please Come Home (this one wasn’t released until 1945), plus a fourth side that was never released. McKenzie and Condon got this date with Brunswick, and the records were made under the name of the “Chicago Rhythm Kings.” By this time Bud Freeman and Jimmy Ma
cPartland had joined Ben Pollack in New York, so they used Muggsie Spanier on cornet and me on tenor sax; the rest of the band was the same as on that earlier Okeh date. I had to make these sides with a strange sax that I borrowed somewhere because my own was in hock, and I had about as much lip for a tenor as a condemned man does for the judge that handed down the sentence. I’d been playing clarinet all the time at the Grackle, and the embouchure is entirely different on the two horns.
Second date: Friars Point Shuffle and Darktown Strutters Ball, with the same personnel as on the first date, except for George Wettling on drums instead of Gene, and McKenzie making the mistake of trying a vocal. These sides were made for Paramount under the name of “The Jungle Kings.”
Third date: Just one side, Jazz Me Blues, under the name of “Frank Teschemacher’s Chicagoans.” This recording, done for Paramount, wasn’t released until 1938 when Hugues Panassié, the French jazz critic, came over from Paris and convinced Milt Gabler, owner of the Commodore Record Shop in New York, to release it under the UHCA label (the letters stand for the United Hot Clubs of America). For this session we used two saxes and a clarinet in the front line, with four rhythm instruments, so the full personnel was: Tesch on clarinet, the late Rod Cless on alto sax, myself on tenor, Sullivan on piano, Condon on banjo, Lannigan on tuba, and Krupa on drums.
With these records, Chicago style was defined for all time, for better and for worse. A gang of myths has sprung up around them, but the one thing they really prove is that we were a plenty uneven and erratic bunch of performers even at the height of our Chicago careers, and that’s the truth—guys with a lot of talent, maybe, but not by a long shot a well-established and independent group. Our music was derived, that’s what these records show: we took some things over from the colored musicians (the flare-up, the explosion, shuffle rhythm, the break) and sometimes did them good; we drifted away from their pattern in places and fell down. The Chicago School was a turning-point along the line of march, a betwixt-and-between affair; it was a halfway-house. Play these records with some Armstrongs and Noones and Bechets, and see for yourself.[2]