by Mezz Mezzrow
The opening was a bang-up success. Benny Goodman was at one table with Gene Krupa, Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton and some of his other musicians; Tommy Dorsey and his band were at another. The house really came down—it looked like maybe a new day was dawning, at least in one small branch of the entertainment world, and everybody was filled with a festive spirit and joy took over. The hit of our floor show was the lindyhoppers’ finale, when they came flying onstage to the tune of Christopher Columbus, played in a real frantic tempo. As soon as they hit the floor pandemonium broke loose in the place, because nothing like this had ever been seen on Broadway before. The dancers screamed at the band, and one little jumping-jack of a girl in particular, a cute chick named Ann, really had fits, yelling “Yeah Zutty, play it!” while others shouted “Ooowww!” and “Do it Poppa Mezz!” clapping their hands in time with the music and throwing their bodies about convulsively. How we enjoyed playing for them, and how the applause roared through the place when they finished. That routine closed the floor show like no other act I have ever seen in all the days of my life. It was phenomenal. Hearts beat a mile a minute, and from the waiters to the checkroom girls, from the spectators to the musicians, everybody was beaming, flushed, keyed-up and delighted.
The papers were wonderful to us, and what publicity we got. “MIXED BAND BOWS ON BROADWAY,” a full-page headline in Billboard proclaimed—“Mezzrow Takes Sepia & Ofay Swingsters Out in the Open.” The article went on to say: “Picking his personnel on the basis of good musicianship rather than skin coloration, Mezzrow makes his bid for a top position in the swing music heap. Not just a trio or quartet for the refreshing swing interludes as one gets it from [Benny] Goodman at the Hotel Pennsylvania. But a white leader fronting a bandstand that will show 15 musical swing stars culled from both the Caucasian and Negroid races. . . . Since music recognizes no language save its own and the swing motif knows no race but its own rhythm, since there is no color line in the playing of swing music and followers are representative of every race, Mezzrow has aptly christened his new combo the ‘Disciples of Swing.’ ” And The Orchestra World shouted in its headlines: “OFAY-SEPIA ‘DISCIPLES OF SWING’ SHATTER BIG TOWN TRADITIONS.” And John Hammond, in Tempo, wrote that the “news of the month” was “the formation of the first genuine black and white band in America, headed by the celebrated Mezz Mezzrow (Milton Mesirow to the ecstatic and worshipful French who consider him our greatest living clarinetist). In the band are some of the genuinely great American musicians. . . . The band is young and rough, but I can assure you that it has one of the best brass sections in the country and a vitality that the Casa Loma and Tommy Dorsey [bands] might do well to emulate. . . .” Our press was great everywhere. It looked good.
A couple of wonderful weeks trillied by, the house jammed every night, critics giving us rave notices, everybody in the show putting all his heart into it. Then one morning a messenger came to my house, sent by Jay Faggin. “You’d better come right down to the Uproar House,” he said. “Something terrible has happened.” He wouldn’t say anything more, so I dressed and rushed downtown, my heart in my mouth.
It was worse than anything I could have dreamed up. When I got to the place there was a big crowd of cops and reporters, flash bulbs exploding all over and everybody looking tense and upset. The first thing I noticed was that a large framed display poster in the lobby, quoting Billboard’s write-up, had been smeared with a hell of a big swastika in bright blue paint. I ran downstairs. There was a gang of people standing on the dance floor, looking at a great big swastika painted right across it. My library was strewn all over the place, all the chairs and tables were overturned, the place was a mess. Looked like somebody sure took offense at the idea of a mixed band. Jay was talking to a police captain and some detectives. “Ain’t this a fine how-d’ya-do?” he said glumly. I couldn’t speak.
That night the place was packed, partly on account of the publicity, I guess, and the boys all took it in their stride and put on a wonderful show, making the customers stomp and howl all over the place. It was like that on the following nights too. Until the night when we came to work and found the marquee lights out, and a sheriff at the padlocked door, and a poster tacked up informing whom it may concern that the creditors had gotten a court order and closed the place up. It seemed that the creditors had been wanting to appoint another trustee and ease Faggin out, but he’d put up a fight and this was the result.
Right away, naturally, some people who wanted it that way began to say I-told-you-so, it just proves the American public won’t stand for a mixed band, etc. Well, for the sake of the record, let me say that band was one of the biggest successes Broadway has ever seen, and the creditors were so amazed at the business we were drawing that they were all set to invest plenty of thousands more in the joint, and I know because I’d had a meeting with them and they told me so. It was that legal squabble between Faggin and these other guys that closed the place down, in spite of the band’s sensational success. And maybe those swastikas made the creditors a little jittery too; I don’t know.
Well, the sheriff let us in to get our instruments and music, and downstairs we found Jay wandering around cussing out the creditors, looking like a drowned rat. For once, at least, we didn’t get paid off in Long Island ducklings. No, indeedy. This time we carted off all the wine and whisky left in the liquor cellar. I guess that was progress. . . . The Disciples of Swing got booked, right after that, into the Savoy Ballroom, but in the meantime Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey were dickering for some of the white guys in the band, and I began to lose my men to them, so we had to cancel that engagement and the disciples scattered to the four Jim-Crow winds again. . . .
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Another year of swimming in dishwater: playing one-nighters now and then, pushing reefer, oblivion. Plenty of time to do some hard thinking about the jinx that seemed to dog me around in the music world. No doubt about it, it really looked like Old Lady Luck had crossed me off her list for good: no sooner do I fall in with a bunch of cats who go for my kind of music than they cut out from Chicago, leaving me behind; then when I get a radio-network band together, the guys do a disappearing act before we even get started; and now the Disciples of Swing begin doing their discipling for everybody but me. But when I put my mind on it I could see it wasn’t anybody’s fault in particular—not the fault of the musicians for sure.
One thing about musicians: they like to go where they can play music. Musicians follow their noses to where there’s a job, where some eating money is to be had, and all the contracts and paper deals in the world won’t stop them. The oldtime Negro jazzmen sometimes were funny in a way—they played just for the love of it, just for kicks, and when they didn’t get a chance to play the one kind of music they craved, why, they just went to shining shoes or walloping crates on the dock, and that was that. The white boys are more used to eating regular, and so they’ll traipse off to make music for Tommy Dorsey or Benny Goodman because the big bands are all the go and can provide them with their scoff. If I got a band together, plenty of my old pals would join it because they loved to play our brand of music. But when hard times fell on us, they had to scuffle in another alley. I knew that would always be happening to me, long as I tried to bust into the big-band field—a few miss-meal weeks and the band would be just a fond memory, because the musicians from our school were just too good and plenty offers from the top bands would get dangled in their chops fast.
It was the same old bout with economics, and I’d wind up on the losing end every time. A guy with my kind of monomania, who wouldn’t load up his library with short-histe ballads and simpy show tunes, had two strikes against him in the popular-band field right from the start. Wasn’t nobody to blame, except maybe the guy who invented the belly-cramp. . . .
It was a fraughty issue, Jack. But then came some wonderful news—Hugues Panassié writes in the Fall of 1938, saying he’s dying to come over here and what do I think? Right quick I cabled him to come, and i
t didn’t take long before he was galloping down the gangplank over in Hoboken, while Benny Carter, Zutty Singleton, my wife and me screamed hello to him. He rushed up to us and grabbed each one in turn, kissing us with great big smacks on both cheeks, which made me feel very queer because I never got that kind of affection from that direction before. Zutty and Benny fell out, and we dashed right over to Harlem. I moved into an apartment on 126th Street, Hugues came to live with me, and the house began to jump, so many things were going on. Hugues had brought a lot of money with him to record the musicians he liked, and we started to round them up. The first guy he asked about was Tommy Ladnier, a great New Orleans trumpet player who’d been completely lost from sight for years. It was a mad scramble, but we finally tracked him down in a two-bit cabaret somewhere outside of Buffalo, playing with a trio for coffee and cake.
Tommy, one of the greatest jazz musicians in the world, was a small and wiry cat, beginner brown in complexion, with sharp features and a very high forehead; a wonderful guy, philosophical and very sincere, and nobody understood him. He’d gotten so fed up playing corny commercial music in New York that he’d beat it to the sticks with this trio because he could play like he wanted up there. He saw eye to eye with us right away; we all agreed on the bad turn jazz had taken when it hit the East and fell into the hands of the promoters. He always wore a cap, cocked to one side, and it wasn’t long before Hugues and I took up the fashion, so the three of us tramped around town like a trio of schoolkids and that’s just the way we felt, it was so good to be together.
Tommy had wonderful stories to tell, because he’d traveled to all parts of the world and had stayed in Russia for a long time. In 1929 he and Bechet were with Noble Sissle’s band in Europe, and when they got back to the States they formed their own band and called it the “New Orleans Feetwarmers,” which played the Savoy Ballroom for a few weeks but didn’t make much of a splash because the East had gone modern by then. During those weeks at the Savoy, though, the Feetwarmers had made some records for Victor—I Want You Tonight, Lay Your Racket, Sweetie Dear, Maple Leaf Rag, I Found a New Baby, and Shag—wonderful records that made Tommy’s name, and Bechet’s too, a password all around the globe wherever there are jazz lovers. Tommy had been born right outside of New Orleans in 1900 and had learned to play trumpet from Joe Oliver, and he was crazy about Bessie Smith and that other great singer, Lovey Austin, and used to run with both of them in Chicago. He was always lounging around at home smoking a pipe and listening to the oldtime blues singers on records. He had a wonderful sense of humor too, and was very relaxed. Tommy formed a club uptown that he called the Fish Club—he was the King Fish, I was Father Neptune, and Bechet was nicknamed the Flounder. Once I asked Bechet why Tommy called him that, and he said, “Well you see gate, all the rest of the fish swims kind of straight but I swims like this,” and he zigzagged with his hand to show how a flounder swims. We had some great old times together. Best of all, under Hugues’ auspices we rounded up some of the greatest musicians of them all, guys like Sidney Bechet and Tommy Ladnier and Pops Foster and Zutty Singleton and James P. Johnson, and we made a gang of records that soon caused a whole lot of stuff in the jazz world: Comin’ On with the Come On (Parts One and Two), Revolutionary Blues, Really the Blues, Jada, Weary Blues, When You and I Were Young Maggie, Everybody Loves My Baby, Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None of My Jetty Roll, Royal Garden Blues, If You See Me Comin’, Gettin’ Together.[1] I was really living again.
Panassié ran around like mad from the minute he hit the States, and he never stopped being amazed at Jim Crow, because he couldn’t see how such a thing could happen to such a wonderful people. The faction in the music world that resented the Negro’s leadership didn’t like Hugues living in Harlem, and especially with me. “You’ll lose all your prestige that way,” they told him. “It won’t do you any good sticking up in Harlem, and with that Mezzrow guy too. Why, Mezzrow’s the reefer king up there; you don’t want to be connected with him in any way.” Hugues came home boiling mad. “What kind of funny people do you have over here?” he said, stomping up and down, he was so agitated. “Merde alors, they don’t like Negroes!”
We were all invited to Jimmy Lunceford’s opening at a new downtown club, and when we walked in with my wife, the whole place began to buzz—there wasn’t another colored guest in the joint. They wouldn’t let us near the ringside table that Jimmy had reserved for us, but stuck us way back near the door where we wouldn’t be conspicuous. When the band finished playing their set they all came down to say hello, and we stood up to greet them, while the waiter served the drinks we had ordered. When we sat down again I happened to change seats with Johnnie Mae. Just before that I had noticed the waiter and the bartender and the owner putting their heads together over in the corner, but I paid it no mind.
Well, we drank up our drinks and told Jimmy we wouldn’t stay because we didn’t want to cause him any trouble on opening night, and on the way uptown in a cab Hugues and his secretary, Madeleine Gautier, began to rage about the treatment they gave our mixed party. “What nerve!” Madeleine said. “They make their money through the colored band they feature, and yet they don’t want any colored people in the place, it doesn’t make sense!” At just that moment, as we were cutting through Central Park, I suddenly got violently sick and all my insides started to erupt and I just fell flat on the floor of the cab, heaving. I finally realized, as I was turning inside out, that for the first time in my life I had met up with a great old American institution, the Mickey Finn. Of course, the drink had been meant for Johnnie Mae. “So this is the land of the free,” Hugues murmured when they had carried me upstairs and put me to bed. I had no answer for him.
Right after the Frankie Newton date, Hugues took sick with a streptococcus infection of the throat, and he would have died if it hadn’t been for the fast thinking of a fine colored doctor, Dr. Samuel C. McKinney, who lived in the same building with us. One morning he woke up gagging, unable to catch his breath, his throat was so clogged up, and I could see there wasn’t any time to lose so I rushed him right downstairs to Doc McKinney’s office, him making terrible rasping noises all the way. The doc took one look at Hugues and whispered to me, “Mezz, this is serious—stand by, I may need your help.” While he was taking his coat off Hugues fell into a chair and started saying “Aaahhh,” waving his arms wildly, to tell us he couldn’t breathe. His face was turning purple, right before my eyes.
Well, the doc stuck his fingers down Hugues’ throat and pulled out a thick string of phlegm that was as long as a footrule, I swear. When he yanked it out Hugues gave the biggest and longest gasp for air that I have ever heard; it sounded like he kept sucking in for five minutes. Then we got a cab and rushed him to the Harlem Eye & Ear Hospital, with the doctor holding all his scalpels and other surgical instruments ready in his lap and praying he wouldn’t have to cut Hugues’ throat open for a tracheotomy before we got there. We carried him in, and two white staff doctors took one gander down his throat and looked as scared as he did. Doc McKinney put in a hurry call to a friend of his, another colored specialist who had studied in Vienna, and he came and shook his head too after one quick look. Doc McKinney got all excited and angry when the others said how hopeless they all felt. “Don’t worry, Mezz,” he said to me, “I’ll take care of this myself.”
He shimmied out of his coat and dug in his bag, coming up with some pills. “This is a new drug called sulphanilimide, that I’m very much interested in,” he explained. “The other doctors are afraid to use it and have declared themselves out, but I’m going to administer it by mouth on my own responsibility, because I’ve got a lot of confidence in it and I can’t get the serum I need in New York. This might do the job until the serum arrives.” We sat around for a whole week, watching Hugues’ fever chart go up and down, our hearts jumping with it—and then one fine day it come down to about 100 and the danger was over, thanks to Doc McKinney.
Hugues stayed with us until the end of February, 1939, when,
at the doctor’s suggestion, he went back to his chateau in France for a long rest, because for a man as sensitive as him the pace over here was much too tough. Just before he climbed up the gangplank, he embraced me and said, “Mezz, I owe my life to a fine man and a superb and brilliant doctor whom a lot of your countrymen wouldn’t allow at their dinner table because of the color of his skin. This is a strange, strange country.”
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All my luck disappeared up that gangplank with Hugues. His illness, and then his leaving, left me all tense and neurotic, and Johnnie Mae’s nerves were on edge too, so we quarreled and she went home for a time to momma, down in Aiken, South Carolina, taking our son with her. Then there wasn’t much doing in the music field, so I took a gamble and went into the music publishing game. But I didn’t exactly make a fortune overnight out of the Gem Music Publishing Company, or even much eating money. And then Tommy Ladnier got to feeling so low about Hugues’ going away that he went on a terrible King Kong kick, and I had my hands full trying to straighten him out. I made him move in with me, and he promised to stop drinking. We started to rehearse a small band (Zutty on drums, Pops Foster on bass, Happy Cauldwell on tenor sax, Cliff Jackson on piano, Tommy and me), and played a few gigs around town, but that’s as far as we got because, as usual, swing had all the go. On May 28th we celebrated Tommy’s thirty-ninth birthday. He boasted to me about how the doctors ten years ago had told him he wouldn’t live five more years if he didn’t give up playing.