Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  What knocked me out, as I followed this kid’s career, was to see how his ideas about the music kept pushing in the same direction as mine did, fighting their way back to the real jazz. At first he couldn’t lay his hands on many of the original Negro records, few as they were anyhow, so naturally he heard a lot more Chicago-style white jazz than he did genuine New Orleans. That’s why in his first book he kind of went off the deep end about the white jazzmen grouped around the Chicagoans. I did that myself, as I was growing up in Chicago. A lot of guys have gotten that far in their education, at the halfway mark, and then closed their minds up and stopped growing altogether. But not Hugues. The more he heard of the authentic colored man’s music, the more it grew on him, and his eyes were opened to the difference between the original and the derived, between the solid sturdy trunk and the feeble, crooked, stunted branches. So he reversed himself in his second book, this time giving the Negro his full due.

  Some simps gave him the horse laugh when his trend of thought shifted like that, but for my dough it took plenty of guts, and he was more honest than these muddle-headed critics who talk up all this commercial slop as “real art” and rake in plenty of profits for doing it. All on his ownsome, separated by an ocean from the battle-field of jazz, he punched his way straight back to the good and solid source, just like I was trying to do in my playing and preaching. In some of the dark hours that fell on me later, the only thing that kept me going was to remember how this fine friend across the Atlantic was struggling to find the right answers, beating his way against the whole “modern” and “progressive” current to get where he had to go. Today too many pencil-pushers, who find the artistic score in a bankbook, put their stamp of approval on any music that’s fashionable and flashy; but Hugues built up a tradition in the field of jazz criticism of always looking for lasting merit instead of frantic fads. He always listened hard, with real historical perspective, instead of eyeballing the box-office to decide whether somebody’s music was good or bad.

  The millennium that he was reaching for, it was the same place I had to find too. We finally got there, each traveling his own way. I made a real friend in young Hugues Panassié.

  ●

  Rue Auber; fly little chick gets stranglehold on my lapel, tries to cruise me up to her apartment, me mumbling all the time, “No, no, no comprenez, baby.” Down she reaches and yanks my pants open and yells, “Now you unnerstan’, eh?” Gotcha. Cop across the street, instead of making his pinch, holds onto his big fat belly and roars. . . . Creaky old two-wheel wine cart clattering down Rue Pigalle, side-swipes shiny new Renault sedan. Jabber jabber: big crowd gathers, gang of babbling and hands start flying. Hell of a traffic jam. Along comes traffic cop, muscling his way in. Crowd hauls him up and dumps him right back in the middle of the crossing, where he belongs. Three things a Frenchman hates; clergyman, soldier, and copper. . . . Tearing along through Latin Quarter, big hurry, appointment to keep. Cab driver eases over to curb and pulls a fade-out; I wait and wait, gunning him while he polishes off a couple of fines in a bistro. Back he comes, smacking his chops and grunting, drives off again without a word. . . . In the café where we swill Martell’s and Courvoisier all night long after work, chicks from dance-hall next to Hotel Victor Massé drooping around tables, one of them sets her peepers on me. Stumble into my dommy one night and there she is, stretched out on the framer in a long black lace negligée, bottle of cognac within easy reaching distance on side-table. Can’t speak a word of English; smiles. I thumb through my conversational phrase-book with the jive about ouvrez la fenêtre and quelle heure est-il madame, then I throw it away and slide out my muta and we light up. Discover we got a common language, after all. . . . House of All Nations, looks like picture gallery and dicty embassy combined, but it’s a brothel. Madame Fifi makes chicks parade around in fine silk kimonos, waltzing in samples from the four corners of the globe till you decide what corner you want to hang out on tonight. Twenty francs, no cover charge. . . . Pigall’s Tabac—wonderful breakfasts for the price of a cup of Java, bleary-eyed dames who keep whining, “You pay me drink, pay me leedle drink?” . . . Lady attendant in men’s room at the Hermitage, bored, handing out towels; nothing to see there she ain’t seen before, and better. Wonderful feasts with Rigikoff, the boss; mountains of cotelettes Kievsky and blinis pirojskis and sweet-and-sour bortche cacha and chachlik Caucasien and gourievskaia cacha, served up in gleaming gold-lined silver platters and washed down with 1926 vintage of Mumm’s or some fifty-year-old Napoleon brandy. Wonderful smells everywhere. No burnt rags, no scorched steel. Bouquets of rich savory sauces. Fine aroma of even the ordinary soaps. Walking down the street, glimming the cute kittens trillying along, head snapping from side to side while your sniffer sucks in the perfumes. Easygoing relaxed faces all around, everything fine and mellow. Musicians considered artists, treated like royalty—separate Artists’ Room at the Hermitage, full of plush-covered sofas, and when your friends come around asking for you they don’t get thrown out by the bouncer for not spending enough loot but they’re ushered into this private room and told to take it easy, monsieur. Nobody carves up your Adam’s apple. . . . Your insides stop galloping in that town, slow down to a lazy stroll. Everybody taking it easy, doing no more work than they need to get by, laughing ten times every hour and soothing thy breadbasket, affliction’s old man, with fine brandies and saucy dishes and a gang of living. Everybody living hard, and sleeping easy. . . .

  Man, how I loved that town; it just grabbed a hold of my fancy and never let go. But now that I was patched up I had to get with my music again, and it wasn’t to be found around here. The guys I wanted to play with and listen to were all on the other side of the drink. Time to get moving. Some bigtime impresario offered me a fine deal, heading a band to tour all through Africa and the Near East, so I thought maybe I’d fly back home and see couldn’t I round up the gang to come back with me. I took one last fond look around, inhaled one last lungful of those fine Paris smells, got smacked on both checks by Panassié, shook hands with Madame Fifi and the symphony first-strings and the uncrowned heads and the shoeshine boy, and hopped on the Aquitania just before it sailed in April. No seasickness this trip. My stomach cooed and chirped all the way over, and at every meal I scoffed back double helpings and yelled for more.

  ●

  Ten minutes after I made home-sweet-home and laid some Chanel Number Five and some fine handmade underwear on my old lady, I mushed her and cut out for the Riverside Towers, on the West Side overlooking the Hudson, where the gang dommied. They were all cooking up some jive with Red Nichols just then—it being prom-time, they were going to tour the Eastern colleges under Red’s neurotic baton, and there was a spot for me in the band. This was almost the last time any real group of Chicagoans were together, and it was frantic. . . . Dig you later, Paris old gal. Keep on wriggling your saucy duster and smelling sweet. We were off to Dartmouth, Brown, Harvard, Cornell and the White Mountains, on the Vo-de-o-do Special. Get hot. Yeah man. Swing it, right from the rafters.

  That was a bunch of wild men Red Nichols got together; besides a couple of foreigners from California on trumpet and trombone, there was a sax section of Pee Wee Russell, Bud Freeman and me; Dave Tough on drums, Eddie Condon on banjo, Joe Sullivan on piano, and little Max Kaminsky on the cornet. We had always thought Nichols stunk, with or without his corny Dixieland Five Pennies, but the boys had got an overdose of being troubled with the shorts and they figured to clean up some money fast with this good old college try and have a good time.

  Our bass player, a little sixteen-year-old named Sammy, practically had to stand on tiptoe to reach the bridge of his instrument, but he was supposed to be a genius, and Red saw a commercial angle in his age and size, so along he came. Well, we set up headquarters in Boston and took off to rock New England, traveling around in two seven-passenger touring cars, and little Sammy just came along for the ride because he sure never got to play that bass much. We tried tying the big fiddle to the roof of a car
but it kept sliding around so much, poking its nose down into the window every few minutes, that we decided to ship it by American Express. Now American Express, in its own quiet way, is a real friend to hot jazz. Regular as clockwork, that bass showed up in each town on our itinerary the morning after we left, dogging us round just one day late. Little Sammy fiddled with his tie and plucked his suspenders.

  Red loved that old limelight. He would hardly ever give little Maxie Kaminsky a chorus until the college kids swarmed around one night and yelled right in his face, “Hey, put your horn down, we want to hear the kid play.” Red’s face got brighter than his hair, but he had to give it to Maxie after being mobbed like that. Maxie’s richer tone and intelligent phrasing inspired Dave Tough so much that the drums sounded entirely different, and so did the whole band, without Nichols on their necks. Red figured we were framing him. From then on he was an evil cat.

  One stormy night only a few couples came, and they must have arrived by boat. Red told Maxie to take charge, and as soon as he was out of sight I yelled “Let’s jam some.” Everybody was for it, and when we got going on Sweet Sue it was such a relief to shake Red’s arrangements out of our hair that we got in a pretty good groove. Just as we finished and laid back feeling happy, Red came tearing into the hall and jumped up on the stand. “The whole goddamned band’s fired,” he barked. “You’re all on two weeks’ notice.”

  Finally the remaining dates were cancelled. Back to New York we rolled, unemployed once more and no meal-ticket in sight. Sammy’s bass fiddle showed up in town about three weeks later, after it made the rounds slow and steady, just one day behind schedule, playing all the cancelled engagements by itself.

  ●

  Seems like a guy has to try everything once—next thing I knew I was sitting in the pit of a burlesque house. This was Minsky’s original look-but-don’t-grab emporium, the famous National Winter Garden on the sixth floor at the corner of Houston Street and Second Avenue. It was the Summer of 1929. Jack Levy was directing the pit orchestra then, and I was hired to play tenor sax and clarinet because Jack went for the hot style of playing. This band was nowhere, except in my hair. I never did hear the piano or the bass fiddle because they were a block away, on the other side of the pit, but with the other pieces I wasn’t so lucky. All the guys were wonderful to me, just like Johnny Powell had been, but they couldn’t play the note before note one. Every time I broke into a hot chorus Jack would bend way over his fiddle till his back was humped, plucking a pizzicato afterbeat on his strings that sounded like he was clopping behind me on a pogo stick, and the drummer got so inspired he started another afterbeat going on the cymbal, gaining time with his fidgety foot on the bass-drum pedal. We’d have two tempos gimping along at the same time, and then, to top it off, the trumpet would play a muted razzmatazz, but it wasn’t muted enough because I could still hear him. I would sit there in the pit chain-smoking reefers, but I couldn’t make myself drop dead. I began to wonder why, in this mechano-land where they dreamed up noiseless typewriters and engine mufflers and Maxim silencers, some friend of man didn’t invent a set of noiseless musical instruments for pit orchestras.

  The Minsky brothers, being specialists in sucker-bait, set up a loudspeaker under the marquee outside the theater, and they kept playing some corny phonograph records over the P.A. system. That gave me a wig-trig. There was a wonderful colored boy named Columbus Covington running one of the elevators in the theater, and when I told him we ought to play some hot records instead of those sweet-and-sour concoctions, he put it right up to the Minskys and they were game. Columbus had never heard my favorite musicians, but when that loudspeaker introduced him to Louis’ West End Blues and When You’re Smiling and also his record of Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’, he jumped for joy. Man, those records caused a traffic jam for blocks around. All day long the lobby was packed tight with little old bearded grandpas in long black pongee frock-coats and cupcake-shaped yomelkehs, rubbing their hands behind their backs and shaking their heads sadly at Louis’ moans, like they understood everything he had to say. “Boy, where’d you get them records?” Columbus said all in one breath. “Gee, that Armstrong guy can really blow that horn, and when he starts to sing, well, it’s just too much.” I felt as proud as if I had made those records myself. Columbus and I became great friends.

  Here was that phenomenon of jazz again. No matter who I played those records for—the Paris symphony or the Minsky house band, the turned-up noses in Park Avenue drawing rooms or the turned-down ones in the ghetto, the intelligentsia or the people who couldn’t even read—I got the same response. “Wonderful!” they all shouted, knocked out by the beauty of this music, its pulse, its romance and soulfulness. “Genius!” said the symphony. “Who in the hell is that?” said the layman unbelievingly. It taught me that all in all, what we got here is a real people’s music, that rings the bell in every walk of life where there’s any life left. It was a music that came out of the cellar, from the mangy bottomdogs, but its truth was so naked and it packed such a punch that it stunned even the pampered pedigreed poodles in the penthouses. I got my kicks from the way the Lower East Side took the colored man’s music to its heart, especially the blues. Guess it proves the language of the oppressed is universal, and hops right across those boundaries of nationality. But the biggest thrill of all was to see Columbus Covington tremble with emotion when Louis sang or played. He was almost in tears. More than anybody else, he knew what Louis was saying.

  Columbus and I started to hang out together. Nights, after the last show, we’d trail up to Harlem to hang around for hours at the great crossroads, the corner of 131st Street and Seventh Avenue. Between shows we’d ease across Second Avenue to the famous Moskowitz & Lupowitz restaurant and kill ourselves with two-inch steaks served on wooden platters. Columbus was so wrapped up in the music that I started to bring Eddie Condon, Joe Sullivan, Gene Krupa and Dave Tough down to meet him and dig the funky extravaganzas Minsky was putting on. The gang would line up in the front row during the show, and we’d giggle at how the audience ate up the corny Joe Miller routines. Often we’d sneak into one of the lodge halls in the building (Columbus had all the keys) and play the blues on the piano. Columbus had a little blues of his own that he played for us, and it was real pretty. Some day soon I’m going to write those fine blues down and make a record of them, and I’ll call them Lum’s Blues because Lum was Columbus’ nickname.

  For weeks I sulked in that pit, keeping alive on muta, staring up fuzzy-eyed at the stage while the chorus lumbered around like a herd of asthmatic cows. It made me feel bad to see any human beings trudge and dog-trot around so gawky, without a sign of the natural grace they should show to justify ever being put down on this earth. It was embarrassing to see humans clatter around like so many hunks of board; you don’t deserve to have a body unless you can use it with easy-flowing rhythms and smooth pleasing glides, like you were proud of it and treated it right. Night after night I sat there swathed in gloom, watching them shuffle and slump through their mechanical routines, and it grew on me that out of that whole chorus line there were only two girls whose spirits weren’t tied up in straitjackets. These two kids were just too much—every step they made breathed life and spirit; they took their breaks with real joy in the rhythmic use of their whole bodies, tapped delicately and with real animation where the others stumbled around heavy and listless as robots. Then it hit me. Goddamn, those girls were too good—they must be colored kids passing for white! I told Columbus about it right away, and he almost died. “Man,” he said, “how in the hell did you dig that? I been suspicioning the same thing myself.”

  These two fly chicks got up on their high-horse when we quizzed them about it—one insisted she was pure Spanish, and sported a crucifix right over the breastworks to prove it, and the other, who let us know she was a Hebrew with some kind of Arabian blood, had a star of David strung around her neck just as big. Columbus and I cooked up a plot between us, and one night, after wising up all the b
oys on 131st Street, we cruised these two chicks up to Harlem for some ribs. We sat in that rib joint all night, and our friends strolled in one by one and joined us, and the hype that was laid down that night was really a killer. Talking in a perfectly normal, casual way, as though they were just passing the time, all these cats slipped subtle hip phrases into the conversation, and added sly little innuendos in their special lingo, and these girls laughed in all the right places and dug little side-issues like no white girl could have done because this hipster’s language, a kind of a linguistic shorthand, is full of oblique and tangent cues never even heard by a white girl. That was a dead give-away to us. Finally the kids had to break down and confess, and when we came to take them home damn if they didn’t live right in Harlem, on 109th Street.