Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  Ernest Borneman, the anthropologist and musicologist, got around to reviewing these records in The Record Changer, and it knocked me out when he said that the blues I recorded with Bechet, the same ones I thought up during my jail bit, went “back beyond Louis and beyond Bunk Johnson and beyond Buddy Bolden, to the very roots of the music, to the cane fields and the rice and the indigo and the worksongs and the slave ships and the dance music of the inland Ashanti and the canoe songs of the Wolof and Mandingo along the Senegal River.” That was plenty good enough for me. I had spent my whole life digging for those roots. Maybe I had found some of them at last, even though I didn’t know their names. Maybe, at last, I was a real jazz musician. . . . Sometimes now, when I play those records over and close my eyes and let those weary wails go through me, the tears start coming and I think to myself, Jack, maybe I got it, maybe I solid got it. I keep thinking, some day good old Pops, wonderful old Louis Armstrong, is going to hear this way-back music we made and he’ll understand how I kept fighting to get with him all these years and we’ll get back in the same old groove we were in long ago. I hope he digs these records some day, and reads this book too. They’ll tell him all the things I just couldn’t get my lips to say because I didn’t know the words then.

  When I wash away, don’t nobody mourn for me, and don’t nobody cart me out to Potters Field to dump me all in a heap with the other scorned and forgotten castaways. I don’t aim to have my fillings and bridgework picked out, to fatten the Bull Durham sack in some junkie’s or lushhead’s pocket. Uh, uh. Just take my body and shove it in one of them blast furnaces, and when I’m melted down good, scrape out the dust and mix it up with some shellac and press it into a record with a King Jazz label on it. Don’t stamp any “D.A.” on the label. Just mark down, “Here lies Mezz the Prezz, home at last.” And on one side press Gone Away Blues, and on the other Out of the Gallion, and then take it up to Harlem and give it to some raggedy kid on The Corner who hasn’t got the price of admission to see the stage show at the Apollo or a deuce of blips to buy himself a glass of foam. Let him play that record until it cracks or wears out, or until he gets tired of it, and then let him throw it away and that’s that. Just do that, and you’ll know I’ll be happy. That’s memorial enough for me.

  ●

  I’m playing in a jam session in a Village basement joint when in wanders this young white fellow who tells me he don’t know much about music, he’s a writer, but he likes my records fine—they’re a kind of jazz you don’t get much of any more. He’s figuring on maybe doing some kind of magazine article about me and what do I think of the idea? Right away he begins to pop more questions than a D.A.; and pretty soon I’m blabbing away like crazy, running my mouth for hours at a time, and him drinking it all in. I’m beginning to remember all the things that ever happened to me, and it kind of scares me, but under this guy’s cross-examination it all comes flooding out. Never saw a guy who got his ears bent so much without saying boo. Hell, he even seemed to like it. He must of been on one of them masochism kicks that are all the go today.

  He begins hanging around up in Harlem with me. Finally one night he comes out with it. “Listen Mezz,” he says, and I know there’s a hype coming. “You know you’ve got a pretty interesting story to tell—nobody could do justice to it in one lousy article, and besides, if we told the truth, no magazine in the country would dare to print it, they’d be so scared of corrupting the morals of the young. It needs a book, a hell of a long book, and you’ve got to write it. It’s more important than you think.”

  “Me write a book?” I say. “Hell, that’s like asking a bricklayer to take up embroidery for a hobby. Why man, the King’s English would never recover from the shock. I better keep on telling my story on my horn, and let it go at that.”

  But this guy is persistent; he’s always talking to me about writers I never heard of, André Gide, B. Traven, Céline, Henry Miller and guys like that, and reading parts of their books to me. He says, “Mezz, you’ve got a story to tell just like those writers did, and it deserves to get down on paper. Look: you’ve been lying flat on your back for a quarter of a century, almost, watching the screwy kaleidoscope of American life jiggle and squirm over your head. Not very many people have gotten a good look at their country from that bottom-of-the-pit angle before, seen the slimy underside of the rock—at least, they haven’t put it down for other people to read. It’s a chunk of Americana, as they say, and it should get written. It’s a real American success story, upside down: Horatio Alger standing on his head. Of course, it’s not the cute kind of folklore that hammy poets write sloganizing verse plays out of, not one of those epic, synthetic, soap-opera fantasies about the land of the free, down-to-earth with a thump by the sound-effects man. It couldn’t be intoned over the radio on patriotic occasions, for the edification of the young citizenry. Maybe it would even be too raw to sell very well as a book, so you couldn’t count on much of a commercial success. You can’t quite picture the book clubs dishing it out to the middle classes for week-end titillation in a hammock.”

  He’s always drifting off like that, using tongue-twisting words at the drop of a hat, this literary pal of mine.

  “But,” he goes on, soon as he gets his wind back, “your story would have this virtue: it’s true, authentic. Things happen, in this country especially, the way you’ve told them to me, not the way they’re pictured in the soap-operas and the flag-waving verse plays for narrator and star-spangled chorus. In a real sense, Mezz, your story is the plight of the creative artist in the U.S.A.—to borrow a phrase from Henry Miller, that writer I told you about. It’s the odyssey of an individualist, through a land where the population is manufactured by the system of interchangeable parts. It’s the saga of a guy who wanted to make friends, in a jungle where everybody was too busy making money and dodging his own shadow. It’s that, and plenty of other things, and if you don’t write it yourself you’ve got to sit down and write it with me.”

  I sure never suspected I was living a saga and an odyssey, during all those frantic years. I thought I was just trying to keep my head above water, and feed my breadbasket now and then, and maybe chase a butterfly and a soapbubble or two. Now it turns out I was significant! Man oh man, it looks like you got to watch every move you make; you can’t be too careful. If I’d known I was being significant, instead of just hungry and beat, I sure would have changed my ways.

  I wasn’t convinced, but this guy was such a gab-artist, damn if he didn’t talk me into it. We put our heads together hard, with a crack that jolted both of us right down to our socks, and we kept them together for two solid years, and we finally wrote that book, losing several tons of weight and a few decades of sleep in the process. This is the book. If it got in your mouth, don’t fault me. Like I said, it’s a story that happened in the U.S. of A.

  APPENDICES

  Appendix One

  NEW ORLEANS AND CHICAGO: THE ROOT AND THE BRANCH

  WHAT IS “CHICAGO STYLE”?

  The whole Chicago school was an offshoot from New Orleans. Now, the typical New Orleans jazz band had six or seven pieces in it: a rocking rhythm section in the background, made up of piano sometimes, banjo, bass fiddle or tuba, and drums, with two or three wind instruments romping out in front, weaving together around the melody, the trumpet or cornet, the clarinet, and the trombone. The rhythm instruments just provided a solid, steady beat, never trying to fight their way into the lead as solo instruments. The trumpet played a kind of lead on a harmony part, paving the way and setting the pace, laying down the basic riffs of the improvised melody. The trombone played more of a bass part, or, say, a bass and a sort of baritone mixed, which gave a solid foundation for the clarinet to keep weaving in and out, contrapuntally filling in the gaps. The banjo was strummed in a steady four-four, sometimes accentuating the afterbeat and in some cases using an afterbeat by itself, and the bass, drums and piano kept right in step. Those oldtime colored musicians who played the piano or banjo followed common harm
ony sequences with the correct inversions, using triads of the chords and adding the dominant seventh at the right time, so the various instrumentalists were given freedom to invent as they wanted.

  It was chamber music, Basin Street style, and it was good. The jazz band was made up out of the main instruments in the street bands, and they worked up ideas taken over from the blues and work-songs of the colored folks, plus the fast-stepping music of the marching societies. Into their improvisation, not thinking about it, just letting all the stored-up music in their skulls percolate around some, they wove the stomps and joys and hollers, the shouts and laments, the gavottes and quadrilles, all the different kinds of music that came from Creole string trios and Storyville whorehouse pianos, and from the levee and the riverboat and the picnic-grounds and the burial-grounds too. And the players had it seared into their bones how their people used to moan and wail their sorrows when they had the blues, and how they bubbled with laughter, and so they tried to get the same heartfelt sounds on their instruments when they played. They never had much training in the classical European school of music, so they weren’t taught to get a “pure” and untainted tone out of each instrument. Their wind instruments played the way that was most natural to them; grunted and growled, sobbed and laughed too, like human voices. They spoke on their horns. They got sounds out of those horns that the classical musicians said you never could get, because it was their souls speaking out full and frank. And all the time the rhythm section paced the way in the background, with a pulse that made it all rock. The horns played muted a whole lot, and the trumpet got different tonal effects by using plungers and other homemade devices. And they all played together, doing little or no solo work, strictly ensemble, each one adding another brick to the simple and sturdy structure of the music. They all came out of the same world and had the same story to tell, so they had a real collective brotherly feeling. They kept on speaking all together and bolstering each other. Some New Orleans trumpet players, in fact, took over the inflections of the preacher and actually “preached” on their horns to each other. Joe Oliver and Bubber Miley were famous for this effect. One trumpet player even got the nickname of “Preacher.”

  That’s how it was with New Orleans music. With each player trying to give the others a richer and fuller accompaniment, no musician ever had to accompany himself in taking a chorus like a lot of players do today, to fill out the harmony background. Listen to Louis Armstrong playing in front of a big band. His style is built solidly on New Orleans, but when he plays with a written accompaniment he gets the feeling that certain notes or sequences of notes are missing in the mechanical harmony. So when he finishes a melodic run he will wind up the phrase by adding a beautiful note or series of notes that belong to the harmony. He’s just accompanying himself, making up for the lacks in the arrangement and the composer’s ear. That’s how some of his most famous riffs got born—not as flourishes to dress up a melody, but to make the harmony fuller and add the most colorful sequences. That never happened in a real good New Orleans band. They gave you the needed background, rhythmically and harmonically; a real hard-packed foundation, without the sophistication that gets mechanical. It’s a funny thing, but the New Orleans drum patterns, the core of the band’s rhythm, were closest to “legitimate” music, because they came right out of the military beat of the march. Muskrat Ramble, like many New Orleans classics, is based entirely on the march idiom. Even in a New Orleans military band, a colored drummer would send you because each beat of his drum was clear; he just used a snare and he really got a tone out of his drums to fit in with the music being played, so when he laid down the rhythm all the other instruments just naturally fell in with him. And the harmonic color and flavor of the whole band came from the blues idiom and the spirituals, added to the marches. The major and the minor were combined: they gave you a dominant seventh with a minor third above it, producing the wailing moan that is characteristic of the blues and so vital to all New Orleans jazz.

  Now, about the Chicagoans. When they first started to play, what they followed mostly was the music of the white New Orleans Rhythm Kings and of Bix and the Wolverines, and they did what the Wolverines had done—they dropped the New Orleans tailgate trombone in favor of the tenor sax. So now, when the cornet or trumpet played the lead, the clarinet was voiced above it, stuck up near the musical ceiling, and the tenor sax played under it instead of a trombone. They lost a lot there. Now they got a different voicing and flavoring; the original thick sauce was watered down. With this changed harmony structure, the tenor sax couldn’t add anything but a third part harmony, couldn’t get bass effects as well as a lyrical quality like the trombone did, and the clarinet had to jump to that voicing always above the trumpet, instead of being free to use the unanchored arpeggio style, running over all the registers, for which the clarinet is best suited. Right here is one of the main reasons why Tesch didn’t sound so good on his Brunswick recordings.[1] (This is another point where New Orleans agreed with the classical teachings. Symphony clarinetists, and composers too, know that the instrument works out best with the arpeggio style of playing. I’ll bet ten dollars Johnny Dodds and Jimmy Noone never had to woodshed in any conservatory of music to learn that secret.) So, to begin with, the lack of that real deep, masculine, tailgate New Orleans trombone in the cellar threw the boys way off.

  Chicago style is an innocent style. It’s the playing of talented youngsters just learning their musical ABC’s, and New Orleans was its source, but you can’t expect any derivative to be as good as the source. New Orleans was simple, but not innocent. It vibrated with deep musical understanding; it showed a real grounding in fundamentals, an instinctive urge to fit together the right way. Art in its simplest form is always the most beautiful, and that’s why New Orleans was great. But in their innocence, wanting to outdo their elders and kind of show off how precocious they were, the Chicagoans lost their simplicity, the rightness of musical pattern. Trying to show how good they were, they got too fancy, sometimes, too ornate and over-elaborate, full of uncalled-for frills and ruffles. When they took over a lot of New Orleans effects, they sometimes used them mechanically, not building up to them so solidly that you felt they were needed by the whole logic of the music, but just reeling them off and pronouncing them too much. They got a lot of flash, musical fireworks; but the rightness wasn’t always there. New Orleans stayed close to fundamentals, relying on strong steady rhythm and real soulful interpretation by wind instruments, on rich tonal effects, to give it power, instead of on a lot of complicated chords and fancy musical patterns.

  The Chicagoans had trouble. They didn’t trust themselves to be inventive from start to finish, like the New Orleans musicians who started off with nothing but a beat from the drummer and made it up from then on, the leader not even tipping them off as to what key they were going to play in. (King Oliver always said, “Man, you’re a musician, ain’t you—what you got to know the key for?”) Feeling kind of uncertain, these youngsters needed some kind of musical anchor that would hold them all together, something they could all tie a lifeline to; and a musical springboard too, to get them started. So they usually picked on some published number they all knew, and followed the melody through, playing around it but never deserting it entirely in favor of their own melodic ideas. When I first met them all, they never played the blues at all, except for Muggsy Spanier. Maybe they were worried that if they didn’t have some known tune to guide them, their musical instincts wouldn’t be strong enough to lead them all into the right harmony patterns. The way Tesch sometimes drops back to the written melody when his invention falters, like a flier taxiing into the airfield again when his fuel gets low and his engine begins to sputter, is an example of this lack of assurance. They needed some signpost that would be in everybody’s sight all through. It was collective improvisation with them, maybe, but it was limited by the laid-down melody.

  They did take over a lot of New Orleans effects, but they were sometimes too self-conscious about th
eir use, instead of letting them always build up naturally. They got a lot of Negroid touches; some of them were good, some too pronounced. Some of these derived tricks later came to be identified with the Chicago school. Here are the main ones:

  The flare-up: At the first ending of a chorus, the band holds a chord and the Chicago drummer makes a break and hits his cymbal. This was a call to all the wandering sheep to come back to the fold, the signal for a musical reunion. A big chord and rhythm are built up at the same time; this is a meeting-place for all the instruments; they’ve been romping around and now they’re back together again, before they set out on their travels once more. It’s like a runway for a rocket ship to take off. This came straight from New Orleans (except that in New Orleans the trumpet alone usually holds the note), but it was sometimes a little artificial because there wasn’t enough running wild before it. In New Orleans, the flare’s punch comes from the fact that the improvising musicians have been tearing loose for real, so their coming together is spectacular—it’s kind of a bunching-up before a wild leap into the unknown again. But the Chicago boys, sticking with a written melody the way they did, couldn’t stray too far off, and so the flare-up doesn’t develop naturally all the time; there’s not always enough build-up for it. They laid back waiting for it and made it too pronounced. The funny thing is that Tin Pan Alley’s arrangers picked this trick up and still use it.