by Mezz Mezzrow
“Ten times must thou laugh during the day, and be cheerful; otherwise thy stomach, the father of affliction, will disturb thee in the night.” That’s what the wise man said to Zarathustra. I thought about those lines a lot—I sure had forgotten how to laugh, and my stomach was on the blink too, and maybe there was some connection. Well, the doctors couldn’t give me any prescription for breaking out in smiles, but they at least might be able to set my stomach straight.
Tommy Dorsey sent me around to see his physician, Dr. Irving Grad, and he wanted to pump my stomach, but I couldn’t see that at all. “Well,” he told me, “you’ve got to get your system cleaned out somehow, so if you don’t want to use a pump why don’t you take an ocean trip? In your condition you’re bound to get seasick, and Nature will do the job for you.” I couldn’t think of anywhere to go, that was the trouble. I didn’t feel like taking one of them ocean jaunts; I just wanted to dig a hole in the ground and crawl way down into it and pull it in after me. I told him I would think it over.
The doc told me to take long walks and get as much fresh air as I could, so every day I would totter over to the Bronx Zoo, which was a little ways down Fordham Road from where I lived. Once I stopped by the seal pond and stood there for a long time, watching a big black glistening seal go jack-knifing through his tricks. It got me in a trance. All of a sudden it hit me that this high-spirited animal, that was so graceful it made me want to cry, really had the secret, and nobody suspected it. “And to me also, who appreciate life,” said Nietzsche, “the butterflies, and soapbubbles, and whatever is like them amongst us, seem most to enjoy happiness.” With those moustaches and that bright, clear-eyed look of his, this seal struck me as being a gentle and wise old man, digging the whole world and at peace with it. He belonged to the world of butterflies and soapbubbles. While all us two-legged ounce-brains jittered around real frantic outside his bars, cutting our throats and bumping each other off, he just kept diving and leapfrogging through the water with that heartbreaking ease and sureness, one tight beautiful unit from head to tail—sunning himself, knowing his natural strength and his ability to use it, taking a gang of delight in his sleek supple body, just coasting along without tension or nerve-knotting worry. That fine animal never suffered from nervous indigestion a day in his life; thy stomach, the father of affliction, never broke up his solid sleep. He laughed ten times a day every day at us strutting simps. It became very important to me to study every flick and ripple of his body, to try and dig his marvelous control, the secret of his ease.
Goddamn if that animal wasn’t so anxious to help me out, he started romping around just for my benefit. He would dive and then go through his wriggles slow-motion, right at the surface of the pond so I could follow him. Then he would climb right up in front of me and look straight in my eyes and I knew he was saying to me, Well brother, you see how it’s done, watch close now—all you got to do is relax and take it easy and use yourself the way Nature intended you to, and then you’ll be happy just like all us seals, you’ll live forever and you’ll never need a Seidlitz powder. He was pointing his wise old snout straight at the millennium, and wanted me to follow him there. We understood each other so perfectly, I got self-conscious. Pretty soon I hurried away because other people were drifting near and I didn’t want any square outsiders standing around while that seal and I spoke to each other. They wouldn’t have understood.
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Well, on January 23rd, 1929, I got a cablegram from Dave Tough in Paris saying, HAVE GOOD JOB COME AT ONCE BRING RECORDS AND MUSIC WIRE IMMEDIATELY. Right away I thought of Doc Grad’s advice about a sea voyage. Here was the answer, dropped right in my lap.
Now all I had to do was raise money for my passage. As luck would have it, Gil Rodin, who was playing with Ben Pollack’s band just then at the Park Central Grille, was going to have his tonsils out and asked would I take his place for a couple of weeks. So I played there, alongside Benny Goodman and his brother Harry, Jimmy MacPartland, Glenn Miller, Jack Teagarden and Ray Bauduc. Even though we played all show tunes and dreamy dance music, things sometimes began to happen when Jack Teagarden, taking his trombone apart and playing with just the slide and a water glass like the colored boys sometimes did, would start off the blues in a major key, then change to the minor, same as he does on Makin’ Friends. Jack could really get in the jazz idiom, and he did a lot to make this job bearable to me.
During this period I sat in on a recording date with the Pollack band, just a couple hours after I’d had a gang of teeth yanked, because my biters were going bad along with all my other parts. It turned out that the piano player had had a tooth pulled that morning too, so we sat with a spittoon between us and took turns spitting blood between choruses. Then there was another date, under the title of “Eddie Condon And His Foot Warmers,” where a band made up mostly of Chicagoans recorded Makin’ Friends and I’m Sorry I Made You Cry for Okeh. Then we got together for Victor, under the title of “Eddie Condon’s Hot Shots,” and made two more sides, I’m Gonna Stomp Mr. Henry Lee and That’s a Mighty Serious Thing. (On this date we had one of the first mixed groups that ever recorded—besides three colored boys from Harlem, there were Teagarden, Sullivan, Condon, and me.) Jimmy Dorsey asked me to substitute for him for a couple of weeks in the pit orchestra at the “Rain and Shine” show. Finally I had enough loot for the trip.
I wrote home for a birth certificate, which I needed to get my passport, and my dad sent it to me along with a note. “Go anywhere you wish son,” he wrote, “but always remember, sei a mensch.” That’s the Yiddish for “be a human being.” Then I booked passage for a second-class stateroom on the île de France. Nobody knew I was leaving except my wife. Close to midnight on March the 2nd, 1929, I drove down to Pier 54, Bonnie coming along with me because I was so hopped-up she didn’t dare let me go alone. All the taxis honking and the porters yelling drove me near crazy; I had to chew on my tongue to keep from screaming. Until the whistle tooted its last phlegmy good-bye and the boat started to creep down the Hudson I was in steady fear. I couldn’t stop shaking.
Weaving from side to side like a lushhead, I groped my way to my stateroom. My stomach was churning worse than a volcano. I felt like I wouldn’t live through the night. I crawled into my cubby and found I had a roommate, no butterfly or soapbubble exactly, but a suave and oily continental guy, who was counting a tremendous roll of hundred-dollar bills. He informed me cheerfully that he had strangled one man in Europe for raping his sister, stabbed another to death in a gambling fracas, and was now beating it from the States because of a third murder rap.
11. VO-DO-DE-O AND A MINSKY PIZZICATO
POPPA NEPTUNE WAS HAVING HIMSELF AN EPILEPTIC FIT—FOR SIX days and nights he kept foaming at the mouth. We tossed in a sea of nausea until our faces were green as go-signs, and the traffic was all one way, outward bound. Not one mouthful of food did I swallow that whole trip. My dreambox kept spinning in circles, my stomach practised the loop-the-loop. I was one miserable cat. In my nightmares the throbbing ship, the whirlpool waves and the belching skies all began to look like parts of a diabolic machine, one hell of a big stomach pump. . . . Somewhere along in mid-ocean I heard a rasping bellow, far-off, like Jupiter was bowing a gutbucket bass fiddle to announce the Second Flood. I was delirious, but I started to crawl on all fours, and when I made the porthole and looked out I saw the lights of a ship in the distance, heading for the States. Dave Tough was on it.
We inched and wabbled our way into Le Havre ten hours late, where they let us know we’d had one of the worst voyages in twenty-five years. The île de France was laid up for two weeks after, for repairs, with her stern bashed in about eight feet. Nobody thought to measure how deep my gut was bashed in.
When the train pulled into the Paris station I tangled with a walrus parading as a porter—I kept handing him fifteen cents, all the change I had, and he kept throwing it on the ground and snorting “Merde alors” while the handlebars of his moustache beat up a breeze. Finally a Th
omas Cook guide took pity on me and led me, more dead than alive, to a pleasant little pension, and when I tottered into the small vestibule and saw a little gray-haired lady standing there, smiling and greeting me in French, I knew I was a safe man. My stomach started to unwind. In English that was not only broken but mashed too, the landlady told me she knew all about the terrible crossing we had, and she made me sit down while she scooted off to fetch some brandy. I was scared about touching the stuff—I remembered too well how all the buildings in Manhattan got the shakes every time I downed a shot. But she handed me some three-star Martell’s, and when I sipped that wonderful gut-warming manna all my insides began to purr. I tingled all over. Damn if I didn’t break out with a smile. I tried it on again, for size, and it fitted. I laughed. Then I knew I was cured—Doc Grad sure knew what he was talking about when he told me my stomach would be straightened out by Old Lady Nature, and not spelled backwards either, or even sideways. To this day I have never been troubled with nervous indigestion any more. Thy stomach never fathered another lick of affliction in me.
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After sleeping like King Tut, I woke up frisky and frolicsome as a two-year-old, lined my flue with some fine chocolate and brioche dished out by this gay old lady, and flew down to American Express to find Dave. No trace of that cat. Well, where could I locate any American musicians in town? The man at the window figured there was a fellow countryman of mine downstairs who might straighten me out. Down the stairs I went, and before I reached the landing I heard the rhythmic slapping of a shoeshine rag just like it was talking to me. It was sweet music to my ears, that ragtime—I knew who must be behind it because I’d listened to many a concert like that on the South Side. “Do it poppa!” I shouted. The colored boy’s head shot around, and his face beamed a welcome to me. “Where in the hell did you come from?” he asked.
Poppa-stoppa, his friendly relaxed voice, and the easygoing lilt to his words, just gassed me. Soon as you leave the South Side or Harlem the pulse speeds up, gets jumpy and staccato, and the velvet harmony gives way to jangling discord, but you just coast along, drugged, and not till something like this goes down do you realize how wonderful it was to be lolling around with your friends back in those good old spots. Somebody lays a gentle, mellow phrase on you and it’s like your memory crooking its finger—all of a sudden you’re whisked back to that other life where you were always doused in a shower bath of warm bubbling emotions, where your nerves could stop vibrating and snap back in place.
We were strangers, yet we felt like we had known each other for years, and he was as glad to see me as I was to see him. We talked and smiled at each other for a while. Finally I asked did he know anything about Dave Tough. His eyes lit up. “You mean that little bit of something or other that beats all that hide? Do I know him? Does your maw know her children? Just go over to the Maison du Jazz in the Montmartre, on Rue Victor Massé, and they’ll tell you where he’s at.” At this Maison, a music store and hangout for jazzmen, I found out about Dave’s sailing for the States on that boat I’d passed—I’d forgotten to answer his cable, so he figured I wasn’t coming. But at least I was able to track down Jack O’Brien, the piano player who’d been working with Dave, and he no sooner got a look at me than he asked “Did you bring your horn?” That same afternoon, after checking in at Jack’s dommy, the Hotel Victor Massé, I started work at Le Grand Hermitage Muscovite, 24 Rue de Caumartin (Opéra), a café run by some White Russians who posed around like they were still having a ball in the Czar’s court.
What a staff they had: a jazz-loving Russian general’s son named Mischa Levendovsky was our chef d’orchestre, the headwaiter had been an admiral in the Czar’s navy, our waiters and bartenders were all counts or dukes, and the cab drivers squatting on the curb had once had the pick of Europe’s royal chicks for their mistresses. Even the lavatory attendants looked bored enough to have noble blood in them—they handed you a towel with such an elegant air you felt like you ought to salaam three times or at least curtsy. That Hermitage lobby was always loaded up with slick-haired gigolos who pranced the tango and the Charleston with American dowagers and collected their fees after each whirl like they’d just turned in an honest day’s work. On a typical night in that vodka pad you’d find titled Frenchmen rubbing elbows with Russians who still sported their well-polished Czarist decorations, all mixed up with Chinese, Swahili, turbanned Hindus, ramrod-spined Englishmen balancing monocles, swarthy cattlemen from the Argentine, sugar planters from Batavia, sabre-scarred Prussian officers, bullfighters from Madrid, college kids with crew haircuts from Wilkes-Barre and Des Moines, and a fair sprinkling of plain ordinary bums whose nationalities had been rubbed off, leaving them just citizens of the world or anyway the underworld. Our five-piece jazz band, which supplemented a gipsy orchestre under R. Volodarsky, a bunch of warblers called the Unique Quatour de Boyards, and a gang of other entertainers with jaw-busting names, caused a riot every time we came on. Royal Garden, Jelly Roll and all the old standbys made up our repertoire, and the crowd ate it up even more than they did Oche Chornia.
That gypsy orchestra really sent me. It was made up of five solo first-chair strings from the Paris Symphony Orchestra, and the real jazz got their curiosity jumping because of its soulful phrases and the harmony patterns with quarter-tones at the most interesting places. We all got to be good friends. It wasn’t long before I was giving alto-sax lessons to Francis Lucas, contrabasse solo de l’Orchestre de Paris, because he was wild about the blues and meant to learn them. Then there were two other cats whose genius knocked me out—Nitza Codolban, the world’s greatest gypsy cymbalist, and the pianist Constantinoff, a nineteen-year-old kid who played with the Symphony and had also gotten several compositions accepted by that longhair crowd. Nitza had been offered some fabulous sum to join up with Paul Whiteman but he loved Paris so much he wouldn’t budge. It was from these two great artists that I first heard collective improvisation in the classical world, because they would start fooling around while they were tuning up and then Nitza would knock out a rich chord progression and Constantinoff would pick it up quick and get off some riffs that always ended up on the note that was out of tune, and they were gone. What kicks I got when I loaned Constantinoff my records of Louis Armstrong’s West End Blues and Bix’s In a Mist, and in a few days he came back and played Earl Hines’ West End Blues piano solo note for note, of course with a slight European accent but still with perfect mastery, and that’s a plenty tough solo to play. About Bix’s number he said, “That shows talent and a liking for Ravel and Debussy, but this Earl Hines of yours, he is the one with tremendous inventive genius.” I felt like busting out all over—here was a genius in his own right, one of the real masters of the classical school, telling me exactly what I was coming to believe myself about the merits of the real authentic jazz. Louis Armstrong, this deep-digging kid told me, was without a doubt the greatest genius of them all.
Besides those two records I loaned Constantinoff, I also had with me Bessie Smith’s Empty Bed Blues, Joe Oliver’s Dipper Mouth, Louis’ Heebie Jeebies, and Ethel Waters’ Dinah, and they turned out to be my real passport to Paris, because they led to another fine friendship. One afternoon a studious young chap, all eyes and ears for our music, animated as a Disney cartoon, dropped in, and after digging the band for a while he came up and said, “I am very much interested in jazz, Monsieur Mezzrow, and I wonder if you could find time to show me some things on the saxophone?” His name was Hugues Panassié, and he came from a family that once owned a mess of radium mines in Russia, and his brother-in-law was something called Fondé de pouvoirs de la Direction-genérale de la Banque-Chinoise pour la Commerce et l’Industrie. I don’t rightly know what all that jive signifies but it sure brought on some bowing and scraping when I flashed a letter from him to help me get my work permit.
I liked this kid’s enthusiasm, so I went over to see him one day, lugging my records and horns along. I found him living in a great big house where he had a special st
udy lined with shelves and shelves of records. When he got straight on my version of My Blue Heaven I played the second harmony sax part along with him, and that got him steamed up some. Then I let him hear those records, and all excited, he ran into the foyer and shouted for his whole family to come down and listen. The question he asked made me ashamed to admit that I came from the good old U.S.A. “Why, Milton,” he wanted to know, “haven’t I ever heard any of these terrific records before? I never saw them in any of the record companies’ pamphlets.” That was when I realized how the record companies in those days were keeping this wonderful music from the world. The records of the great colored jazz artists were always listed under a separate heading, as “race records.” To a naïve guy like a Frenchman, who isn’t color-conscious because he didn’t grow up with Jim Crow, and a dark skin doesn’t make the word “race” jump up in his mind, that listing might have suggested horse races or auto races—almost anything but jazz.
I gave Hugues all those records because he loved them so much. His sincere, right-from-the-heart enthusiasm made me feel good. All inspired, he went to work rounding up a lot of other records, “race” and otherwise, and the lessons I gave him on the saxophone tickled his appetite for the music still more. After developing into the world’s most fanatic record collector, he started to get his musical ideas in shape and put them down on paper, and that was how he became the first real scholar and critic of jazz, outside of Robert Goffin in Belgium. That youngster sure kept himself busy in the years that followed—writing a book called Le Jazz Hot, starting a monthly jazz review in Paris by the same name (it soon had dozens of rivals, in almost as many languages, all through Europe), and launching the Hot Clubs of France, which got to be a world-wide movement; then he supervised jazz recordings on both sides of the Atlantic, ran jazz programs on the radio, and wrote a second book that was published in this country as The Real Jazz. Practically every jazz critic that I know about today—Timmy Rosenkrantz, Harry Lim, Roger Kaye, Nesuhi Ertegun, John Hammond, Charles Edward Smith, Frederic Ramsey, Charles Delaunay, Walter Schaap, and even Leonard Feather—was discovered, or helped along, or in some way influenced by Hugues. Even the German occupation of France didn’t stop him any: he managed to keep a jazz radio program going in spite of the Germans’ hatred for “decadent” American music. When the German censor came hawk-shawing around to see what Hugues was doing on his program, he was shown a record labeled La Tristesse de St. Louis, and Hugues explained helpfully that it was a sad song written about poor Louie the Fourteenth, lousy with that old French tradition. What that Kultur-hound didn’t know was that underneath the phony label was a genuine Victor one, giving Louis Armstrong as the recording artist and stating the real name of the number—St. Louis Blues. And all during those bad years Hugues kept on writing his books and articles in private—they’re just now being published. Ever since that cat latched on to jazz, he’s been a one-man mass movement.