Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  For the very first time in my life, you see, I had fallen all the way into the groove and I was playing real authentic jazz, and it was right—not Chicago, not Dixieland, not swing or jump or Debussy or Ravel, but jazz, primitive, solid, rocking and weaving. All my life I’d been yearning to play this way, and all my life I’d been so scared I couldn’t do it (even during those Panassié recordings) that I’d kept running off into sidestreets and detours to avoid trying and failing—and all my misery and frustration and going tangent came from that fear and that running away. Now I was no more afraid. All the rambling years behind suddenly began to make sense, fitted into the picture: the prison days, the miss-meal blues, the hophead oblivion, the jangled nerves, the reefer flights, the underworld meemies. They were all part of my education, had gone into my make-up until I was battered and bruised enough to stumble into the New Orleans idiom and have something to say in it. Those twenty years of striving and failing had all gone down into my fingertips, so that now, all of a sudden, I could tickle the clarinet keys and squeeze out the only language in the whole wide world that would let me speak my piece.

  And you know what my piece was? A very simple story: Life is good, it’s great to be alive! No matter how many times you go hungry, how many times you get a boot in your backside and a club over your head—no matter how tough the scuffle is, it’s great to be alive, brother! I had to get my knocks, plenty of them, before I could understand that. The colored people, fresh up out of three hundred years of slavery, still the despised pariahs of the country in spite of their “liberation,” had understood it all along, and finally, forty, fifty years ago, had roared out a revolutionary new music to shout that message to the world. That was what New Orleans was really saying—it was a celebration of life, of breathing, of muscle-flexing, of eye-blinking, of licking-the-chops, in spite of everything the world might do to you. It was a defiance of the undertaker. It was a refusal to go under, a stubborn hanging on, a shout of praise to the circulatory system, hosannas for the sweat-glands, hymns to the guts that ache when they’re hollow. Glory be, brother! Hallelujah, the sun’s shining! Praise be the almighty pulse! Ain’t nobody going to wash us away. We here, and we going to stay put—don’t recognize no eviction notices from the good green earth. Spirit’s still in us, and it sure must got to jump. We going to tell ’bout all that in this fine music of ours. . . . I knew exactly what there was to say on my horn now; knew all the words in the New Orleans idiom, and how to express them. Jimmy Noone and Johnny Dodds and Sidney Bechet, they’d known all along, and now they were inside my skin, making my fingers work right so I could speak my piece.

  Yes, right then and there I busted out of my spiritual gallion and came home, and my burden melted away. The rest of my life spread out in front of me smooth and serene, because I not only knew what I had to do, I knew I could do it. I could do it. I was with it Jim, really with it. The millennium was on me—a small-size, strictly one-man millennium, but still a millennium. It told this green man something.

  ●

  Once, not long before they sprung me, I was lolling around in the dormitory, listening to the radio. We had a record program tuned on, and they began to play a recording of Sidney Bechet’s, The Blues of Bechet, and then they turned it over and played the other side, The Sheik of Araby. I had never heard those two recordings before—they must have been made while I was in jail—and I sat there trembling all over, unable to believe my ears.

  There are six instruments used on both sides: clarinet, soprano sax, tenor sax, piano, bass, and drums. And all six are played by Bechet! It was an engineering stunt, of course: he’d record one instrument, then add another while the previous disc was played back, until he built up a complete six-piece band. But if you think it was just a gag and not wonderful music-making, better than almost any group of five musicians could have done with Bechet, listen to what the critics said later in The Jazz Record Book: “Demonstrating the versatility of this self-taught genius, this disc is also an interesting experiment in unity of style. It produces an amazing and uncanny sensation when one hears all the parts played with the intonation and intense vibrato characteristic of Bechet.”

  Unity of style is right, brother. I sat there full of flutters and quakes over that unity of style. Those two unbelievable records are two of the greatest New Orleans jazz performances ever recorded, with a perfect blend and balance between all six pieces, and it had to be done by Bechet single-handed! That was the final and most eloquent comment on the level to which our jazz had sunk, in this mechanical swing-band age of jump, organ-grinder riffs, mop-mop and rip-bop; there were so few musicians left around who were still inspired with that New Orleans love of rich melodious invention, spirited teamwork, and weaving counterpoint, that when Bechet wanted a full harmonic and rhythmic background for his preaching, why, he had to supply it himself. Every jazz musician alive ought to hang his head in shame, I thought, to see the great genius of Bechet so isolated that it has to provide its own musical environment, its own lush context.

  I thought a lot about Bechet that night, especially about the thrill I got when I recorded with him and Tommy Ladnier. I started to pace up and down that dormitory, dreaming up musical ideas that we could work up together once I got out of this place. I wanted to play and record with him so much, at that moment, the need was gnawing away in my guts like an ache. He and I were striving for the same thing, the same rich and meaningful patterns, the same soul-satisfying blends; we would have to get together again, I knew it, and this time I would do better. Then I remembered my Gone Away Blues. There, right off the bat, was one thing we could do together—we’d record those blues of mine with never a solo, never a trace of musical egotism from either one of us, moaning our way through it in perfect teamwork! It was a natural for us—I was more convinced of it than ever. I got all excited, thinking about it. Old Sidney Bechet was my natural musical mate, if only he would have me.

  I remembered a story Sidney had once told me, about the time he was playing with a band in Paris. He had been fighting with the other guys for weeks, trying to get them to work up one big beat and make vibrant organ chords in the background so he wouldn’t be alone in his playing, there’d be a real collective spirit. That was the deepest need of his whole being, a musical collectivity; he kept screaming for it, it was an obsession with him. And one night the argument got so violent, one of the guys whom Sidney had been yelling at went and got a gun and came back and took some potshots at him, missing him but winging some innocent bystanders. Both guys were shoved in the Bastille for that, and stayed there for eleven months; Sidney’s hair turned completely white in that dungeon. . . .

  The story began to mean a hell of a lot to me, as I thought about it now. Teamwork, collective spirit, rich blending harmony—that was Sidney Bechet’s whole life. He had to fight for it if it killed him. He needed it so bad, that as an act of desperation and a gesture to show his own integrity, he finally sat down and did it all by himself, on those two incredible records. What a terrific moral was buried in that virtuoso exhibition! It meant: Life gets neurotic and bestial when people can’t be at peace with each other, say amen to each other, chime in with each other’s feeling and personality; and if discord is going to rule the world, with each guy at the next guy’s throat, all harmony gone—why, the only thing for a man to do, if he wants to survive, if he won’t get evil like all the other beasts in the jungle, is to make that harmony inside himself, be at peace with himself, unify his own insides while the snarling world gets pulverized. If the harmonic environment was gone, well, Sidney could still manage. He carried his own environment around inside him, for emergencies. It was kind of a parable for the world.

  There was the great secret of Sidney’s genius, and of all our music, in one concentrated capsule. Sidney was the supreme example of a man at peace with himself, all his parts in harmony—in three-part harmony, to be exact, with the pulse of his heart and guts and nervous system bouncing along underneath to provide a three-piece
rhythm section for it. That was how you had to be if you wanted to play this great music. Let yourself get blown into a thousand jagged fragments, like the world around you, and you can’t pour harmonious New Orleans music out of your soul—that serene exaltation is gone. If you let yourself get all split up and pulverized inside, maybe you can make “modern” music, the music of tics, the swing and jump and rip-bop. That’s the musical mania of the blowtops, the running-amuck musk of guys wrastling with themselves, rolling around on the ground and having fits while their broken-up souls carry on a war inside them. Modern swing and jump is frantic, savage, frenzied, berserk—it’s the agony of the split, hacked-up personality. It’s got nothing at all in common with New Orleans, which by contrast is dignified, balanced, deeply harmonious, high-spirited but pervaded all through with a mysterious calm and placidity—the music of a personality that hasn’t exploded like a fragmentation bomb.

  Yes, you had to be integrated and harmonized yourself, all your parts running along side by side, never tripping each other up, locking arms and keeping in step all the way. Because that was the whole spirit of our music, of collective improvisation, and you had to have it in you, in every molecule, before you could blow it into a horn or beat it out on a drum. Get together is the slogan for our music. Get yourself together is the personal slogan for all the guys who want to make this great music. New Orleans, first and foremost, is nothing but fellowship in music, fraternity, brotherhood, mutual aid. Get unified yourself, and then you can work with the other guys. And then, if you don’t find the other guys to work with, you can even do it all on your own—like the great Louis Armstrong adding runs on the end of his phrases to fill out the harmony missing in his background, like the great Sidney Bechet making a whole goddamned band out of his great harmonious soul.

  I’ll never forget the night I heard those two records. It was another terrific moment of revelation. It put the final touches to my education, in music and a whole gang of other things.

  ●

  September 28th, 1942: they bring me into an office where there’s a guy from a New York Local Draft Board. It’s the day before my release. He asks me some questions, then hands me my draft card: “Milton Mezzrow; Height, 5’10”; Weight, 165; Race, Negro. . . .” Next day I climbed on board the ferry, waved good-bye to all the guys on the dock, and sailed across the river to Manhattan. No doubts or hesitations this trip; Poppa Hamlet had been dispossessed from my skull for good. Straight back into Harlem I headed, said hello to all the boys and girls, and settled down and unpacked my clarinet. Talk about rehabilitation. I was rehabilitated so good that for months the taste of real butter nauseated me, and one whiff of perfume made my stomach rise up like a balloon. . . .

  I did some more work on Gone Away Blues; I wrote Out of the Gallion, and a gang of blues and other numbers. Right away I started to play—in pick-up bands, on one-night gigs, in jam sessions on 52nd Street and down in Greenwich Village, in little night-clubs and dancehalls. I travelled to Harvard, up to Montreal and Toronto, to Philly, to Washington, all over; I played for the Turkish Ambassador’s son in his fancy embassy, at the National Press Club in Washington, for a fraternity house in Cambridge, for Newspaper Guild parties, in high-school auditoriums during assemblies, for everybody, everywhere. Mostly I played with colored guys from Harlem, sometimes with white guys close to the New Orleans idiom. If I made a lot of money, all right—but there were times when I was flat broke, and that was all right too, I wasn’t brought down. If you can’t make money, make friends. I made friends.

  I found that I was making friends everywhere, thanks to my earlier records mostly, especially the Panassié ones. Wherever I went, merchant seamen, soldiers and sailors from many different countries, and writers and critics and artists and students and fellow musicians too, would drop around to say hello, tell me they’d picked up some of those records I made with Bechet and Tommy Ladnier in some far corner of the earth, let me know how much they liked them. How I wished that Tommy could have been with me now, to enjoy the little fame that he deserved so much and was just now beginning to get. . . . The Thirties hadn’t been a great big blank in my life after all; I’d tried to pull myself together a few times during those years, at least to make some records, and the effort was beginning to pay dividends. I got many friendly letters from different countries—from Australia, from England, from South Africa and Java and Morocco and the Belgian Congo, from jazz enthusiasts in the underground in France and Belgium and Holland and Norway. They’d started to trickle in even before the war. “Dear Mezz!” one guy had written from Zürich back in ’39, “All the Hot Club of Zürich has been out of this world by hearing this afternoon at a great record session the first time your two wonderful records which you have recorded for ‘Swing.’ We all are hoping, if Hitler and Mussolini will not loose their nerves and destroy in a beastical way our good old Europa, that we can make coming also the other fourteen sides, made under your leadership, from Paris to us. . . . A great fan of good jazz, like Armstrong, Bechet and you do it, sends you his most sincerely greetings and wishes. . . .” All these kids kept up their interest in the music, and their letters began to arrive more and more often, partly, I guess, on account of Panassié and Madeleine Gautier getting them to write so I wouldn’t be too blue after my months in prison. “Dear Milton,” a nineteen-year-old British student wrote from Switzerland while I was still in jail, “I just got your ‘new address’ from Hugues and thought I might write to you just to let you know that the greatest white musician of all time hasn’t been forgotten in spite of everything. . . .” Then I got a whole gang of letters from other guys in Hot Clubs all over the world, like the one which said: “From my dear friend, Hugues Panassié, I’ve learned your address, and I’m anxious to tell you all the admiration I have for you. Most of your records are my strongest favourites and I don’t think there was ever a white musician who is able to play the right kind of jazz (before all, the blues) with such sincerity and inspiration as you do. . . .” The letters kept on coming. I knew their praise for me was much much too lavish, but I appreciated their gestures of friendship. I began to get a picture of the hot-jazz fraternity as a kind of global network, a real one-world organization without manifestos or declarations of principle, and there was a place for me in it, a satisfying place, where I could play and be in touch with a gang of regular guys, guys who talked my language. All in all, I felt good.

  Finally I went into Jimmy Ryan’s on 52nd Street and stayed there for almost a full year, playing with a little trio. And one night a tall skinny young blond guy came in, and sat there for hours quietly, just listening to the music. I thought he might be some jazz-loving visitor from Harvard or Yale, but when we got to talking he told me his name was John van Beuren and he wasn’t a college kid at all but an electronics engineer specializing in radar and stuff like that, and he owned some kind of electronics manufacturing plant out in Jersey where he made radar measuring equipment for the government. He had all the records I made with Ladnier and Bechet too, and he said he thought they were fine and that I ought to record some more with guys like that.

  We talked for a long time. He was a rare bird, one of those scientists who can see way beyond a test tube. He told me he had a theory that you get the same kind of excitement and satisfaction from jazz, real collectively improvised jazz, that you do from solving a tough problem in mathematics, and it made sense the way he put it. “When you take off on a number, it sounds as though you never know where you’re going to come out, you just go flying off into musical space,” he said. “Then, almost by a miracle, you finally all come together and the tension is resolved. I imagine it’s the same kind of good feeling a mathematician gets when he digs into a problem, working blind, groping his way along, and then suddenly the right formula clicks and the whole thing resolves itself, and all the pieces fit together.” I had flunked algebra in high school so I couldn’t go very deep into the subject with him, but I liked this guy’s enthusiasm and his serious approach to t
he music. I began to see a lot of him and his wife Jane, visited their house often, gabbed all night long about what is jazz and what isn’t.

  And then, one night, he upped and said, “Mezz, you and I have the same ideas about this music—how about getting together with me and my partner Harry Houck and going into the record business? There’s a real need for a recording company that will concentrate on the best blues and New Orleans music, while the great oldtimers are still around to play it. . . .” Things began to happen in a dizzy whirl, after that; I remember saying “Yeah, sure,” and before I knew it I was sitting behind a desk in a midtown office, trying to look like an executive. Executive, hell: I was president of the corporation, and I had to be damned careful about not wearing socks with holes where they showed. King Jazz, Inc.; Milton Mezzrow, Prezz. I’ve got business cards to prove it, and I’ll be glad to let you have one if I can find any without fingerprint smudges on them. Why, I even got office hours. I hold auditions, I hire people. The Morris Plan thinks I’m so solid and substantial, they want to make me a loan. Pretty soon I’m going to be a home-owner, and I’ll be paying taxes like all solid citizens. I only hope they spell my name right in Who’s Who, and get the dates of my prison record straight, and don’t forget to say “Race, Negro.”

  We began to record like mad: during the first months of 1945 alone, we made over fifty sides. And who do you think I recorded with? A lot of wonderful guys who used to knock me out on the South Side of Chicago in the great days—Big Sid Catlett on drums, and Kaiser Marshall on drums too; and wonderful old Pops Foster on bass, the same guy I’d worshipped when he was in King Oliver’s historic band. Then we got Pappa Snow White on trumpet, and Jimmy Blythe, Jr., and Fitz Weston on piano, all solid musicians in the New Orleans idiom. And on soprano sax—Sidney Bechet! Sidney the one-man band, in person! One of the numbers I recorded with Bechet and the others was Gone Away Blues; then we did Out of the Gallion, and a gang of others that had terrific personal meaning for me. I was the only white man in the crowd. I walked on clouds all through those recording sessions. . . . We got hold of a great old vaudeville team, Sox Wilson and his wife Coot Grant, marvelous oldtime blues singers and composers who’d worked with Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet and Ma Rainy on the South Side, and they wrote some up-from-the-guts blues for us, and we got hold of Pleasant Joe, a blues singer three months out of New Orleans, to do the vocals for us, and it was good. The music we played together, not a note of it on paper, all of it welling up out of our enthusiasm and our warm feeling for each other, was New Orleans, some forty or fifty years old and always new. And that’s what we’re going to go on making and recording, for as long as we’ve still got a breath of wind left in our bodies and a solid beat left in our hearts.