Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  The explosion: This comes either at the end of the first eight bars of a 32-bar number, where the harmony has a tendency to modulate itself back to the beginning of the number; or at the end of the 16th bar of a 32-bar number where there is no release; or at the end of the release. The drum makes a cymbal crash and a heavy bass-drum beat on the fourth beat of the measure, giving the musicians a chance to catch their breath and get ready to start their collective improvisation again. They’re all poised now, ready to shove off into the next eight bars. With New Orleans, the explosion was an incidental cymbal and bass-drum beat accented behind whoever was speaking his piece on his horn—sort of an amen from the congregation. New Orleans drummers used this effect with faultless taste, just where it belonged; Chicago players sometimes just stuck it in because it was a thing to do, not because a musical progression, paced by a masterful drummer like Baby Dodds or Zutty Singleton, cried out for it, to keep the pulse going and call everybody home.

  The shuffle rhythm: Born out of doubling tempo, this beat is a lost art today. What novelty bands call shuffle rhythm nowadays doesn’t have anything in common with what the Chicagoans did. We played a more staccato style on the release, keeping it steady, without strong accents, except for the drums pointing the beat up; it was like the regular time-step of a good fast dancer. We got that rhythm from Baby Dodds and Jimmy Noone, and it was Dave Tough who hipped us to it. It came from Baby Dodds playing on the woodblock or the rims of his bass drums (when he couldn’t play the drums in the regular way during recordings) and from lower-register variations of Jimmy Noone. Dave and Bud Freeman used to walk around singing this rhythm to each other, and this more than anything else came to identify Chicago style. What makes the beat sound like it’s accented and syncopated is that when it’s played on the drum you play the first three beats from left hand to right hand or right to left as a pickup to the bar, and then one beat with the left hand and two more with the right hand, continuing for the rest of the measures until the explosion is reached, sort of a waltz beat against four-four time. As a matter of fact, we coined the term explosion first to describe the climax the shuffle rhythm builds up to.

  The break: This is a spot where the whole band lays back for two or four bars, and one musician steps forward to speak for himself. It was sort of a novelty effect invented by the colored boys to show off the versatility of the different instrumentalists, who never had to play the same thing twice. Sometimes the break even happened in a solo, with the harmony dropping away so the player is all by himself. The Chicagoans used this trick pretty well too, just as they did the shuffle rhythm, but they couldn’t often get off like the colored boys to take full advantage of the breaks—they weren’t usually as forceful, rich and novel in their inventions.

  Those are the main elements of Chicago style. The only thing we can claim to have developed at all was the shuffle rhythm. Everything else was taken pretty much as is right out of New Orleans. And our total effect was uneven. Of the whole gang, you’ll find that only three instruments, the drums, trombone, and cornet, were really near the Negro idiom. Gene and Floyd O’Brien and Muggsy came closer to the source than anyone else, including myself, on a couple of those early records. To this day Muggsy plays nearer to Louis Armstrong than any white cornet player, although he lacks Louis’ drive and inventive genius. And, as you can hear on the old records, Gene played some things on his snare and bass drum that few drummers, including the colored ones today, have captured. They’re a direct challenge to Gene’s own style today. More than any other white Floyd O’Brien mastered the real solid tailgate style of Kid Ory, and the plunger and growl of Tricky Sam Nanton, greatest trombone player who ever lived. Herman Foster played good blues guitar. Dave Tough and Whettling played drums like Baby Dodds and Tubby Hall, and Joe Sullivan’s chordal inflections on the piano (he played correct inversions, with his left hand beating out tenths and keeping the bass moving) showed he was catching the New Orleans spirit, especially Earl Hines’. As for Tesch, he was going tangent to the colored man’s idiom more and more, thanks to his obsession with the modern-classical composers.

  The best way to bring this discussion down to earth is to take a good listen at some of the prize examples of Chicago style that have been preserved in wax. Let’s try to rip some of them open and look at their insides:

  I Found a New Baby, a straight 32-bar number with a release (or middle part), opens up without any introduction. The first chorus is ensemble and a little unorganized—Tesch has trouble finding a harmony pattern to weave and gets completely lost in the 23rd and 24th bars. The second chorus is a typical Tesch clarinet solo—he plays more of a fiddle style (the fiddle was his original instrument), and when he does use arpeggios as the colored clarinetists did they’re based on a melodic line without enough contrapuntal awareness to make it New Orleans. At the end of the release in his solo there’s a South Side inflection in the explosion. Right after Tesch’s chorus, in the first ending leading into Sullivan’s piano solo, Muggsy uses one of Louis Armstrong’s two-bar flares. Sullivan’s piano chorus defines his character at the time—he was a studious but timid musician, but he had two hands full of piano compared with the other white piano players of the day. At the end of the piano chorus, in the last two bars, Muggsy uses another flare in which only the last bar is Armstrong’s riff, the first being his own touch. The next chorus is mine; I open up with a rhythmic riff and go into a shuffle rhythm in the release, finishing with a typical Negroid inflection in the last two bars, before the first ending. This chorus is more in the blues than the jazz idiom, on account of my absorption of the blues in Pontiac and from Bessie Smith’s records; I hadn’t fully soaked up the New Orleans style of Jimmy Noone and Johnny Dodds. There’s another typical Armstrong flare by Muggsy at the end of my chorus, and we go into the fifth chorus, ensemble again. Here, in the eighth bar, I play what is known as a blue note, which demands an explosion, and Gene catches me with a hard bass-drum beat to accent it. (This is a good example of how important the drums are to this music, and how alert a drummer must be.) We go into another explosion at the end of the release, and we end the number with a two-bar break on the tenor sax, followed by a Charleston beat on the cowbell which I got from Armstrong. But this part was unfinished: there should have been two more bars to this break, but the fellows didn’t want to take the time to figure out the harmony parts, so they let it go at that.

  There’ll Be Some Changes Made is a 32-bar number with a four-bar tag (a repeat of the last four bars), and no release, which is very characteristic of Clarence Williams’ song structure. (There’s no release in the blues pattern either.) It opens with a four-bar introduction with Tesch playing the lead, the bass drum making two beats in typical New Orleans fashion, and then it goes into the first chorus, collectively improvised, with Muggsy playing the lead kind of like Armstrong. There’s no flare at the wind-up, and Tesch is having trouble again in orienting himself harmonically; it’s a weak first ending but Muggsy plays a typical Armstrong riff in the 27th and 28th bars, full of vigor, one of Louis’ beautiful trademarks. For the second chorus McKenzie sings all out of time, in his St. Louis racetrack inflection without a trace of New Orleans spirit—and at that his vocal is better than most white singers of the day could do. At the end of the vocal there’s another Armstrong riff and flare by Muggsy. Then Tesch takes his solo, and here you’ll see him jumping back to the melody a few times because his ear and technique weren’t trained well enough in the New Orleans idiom, so he has trouble weaving through the chordal progressions. It’s this falling back on the melody, and dropping the roving New Orleans arpeggio style, that has led naïve critics to call Tesch’s style an economic, “few notes” one. The few notes come from a failure, not a special gift. At the end of this chorus there’s another Armstrong flare by Muggsy, which leads into the last ensemble chorus. Here again there’s a typical work-up into an explosion at the end of the 16th bar. In the 29th bar Tesch comes in on one of those rare occasions when he uses a real
Jimmy Noone riff, but it’s out of place here because Jimmy always used it to end a number. This misplaced New Orleans inflection drives Muggsy mad, because it derails him. Muggsy is so disgusted he doesn’t even finish his last two bars—he just stops blowing altogether. He was so hot when we ended that his face was real red and he ran over to the window and tried to throw his horn out, through the glass and all. Muggsy knew the New Orleans music better than anybody else, including myself, and it knocked him way off to find that Noone riff used so mechanically, in such a stereotyped fashion. The reason he stopped blowing was not what the myth says, that he “missed” his notes, but because he was consoling himself with the thought that this was just too sad and we would have to make the whole record over. When he saw that everybody was happy about the way the record went down, and the engineers signalling “okay” from the control room, that was when his disgust got too much for him and he went for the window. So if any more ladies want to write novels about jazz musicians where they make legends out of real incidents, let them get the facts straight first.

  Baby Won’t You Please Come Home, a 16-bar tune with a tag (another New Orleans pattern), is an abortion that deserves to be famous for its failures. It’s like a musical primer on what-not-to-do. In the introduction Condon “takes the window”—he comes in with a banjo-on-my-knee, strictly minstrel style, playing a loud riff that sounds like he’s stroking a tin can, and hitting the strings so hard with his pick it’s like he’s saying, “This is my date and I aim to be heard.” We do something pretty rare here, playing the verse of the number as well as the chorus (a New Orleans habit), and Muggsy plays it pretty nice. In the last part of the first chorus, where Muggsy is playing good, Tesch goes off again on some real bad harmony which like to ruined the lead. The same thing happens in the ensemble beginning of the second chorus. The third chorus is Eddie Condon’s vocal monstrosity, probably the worst singing effort in the whole history of recorded jazz. This miscarriage led Brunswick’s own critic, when he was writing the notes for a Tesch album in 1945, to say that this recording is “notable for one of the worst vocal choruses in the history of recording . . . [ending] with a fanciful flourish that is strictly out of a happily vanished era.” That is an understatement. In the next ensemble there’s a mechanical explosion, stuck in without any build-up—the number’s too slow to justify using it. The ending has one of Eddie’s corny Dixieland inflections: two notes rounding out the last bar that have no life at all and just sound like the victrola is running down. Tesch gets lost again near the ending. This is not a good record.

  Jazz Me Blues is by far Tesch’s best recording job: it shows him off to best advantage as a clarinet player and an orchestrator both. I helped him some with the voicing and phrasing, but most of the ideas were his. The number opens without an introduction, going right into the verse; then the first chorus on alto sax is by Tesch, and it reminds me of the way he used to play in the Midway Gardens with Muggsy and Jess Stacy—you can hear him groping for an idiom on the sax, patterning his style a little after his clarinet playing, doing an awful lot of tonguing. Tesch always used a stiff reed and got a peculiar tone because he had to force it, it was late coming out and had no resonance or flexibility. After the alto solo comes a four-bar piano break, then we go back to the verse ensemble. Next comes an interlude leading into the piano solo which is characteristic of the style and the idiom that Tesch loved—a definitely set melody with three-part harmony, pretty and with a lot of sentimental quality. During Sullivan’s piano solo, Gene uses a heavy press roll on the snare drum and accents the second beat with the foot pedal on the bass drum, a characteristic beat of Zutty Singleton’s. Tesch invented the four-bar break which follows his clarinet solo, opening with a duet by Rod and me and continuing with Rod alone for the last two bars, as a lead-in to his alto solo. Tesch comes in on the first ending, and we all go into the last chorus ensemble, with a heavy riff by the saxes that was taken from New Orleans. There’s another four-bar break in this last chorus, split four ways: Tesch takes the first bar, Rod the second, myself the third, and Eddie the last. This was Tesch’s idea too, adapted from the South Side bands. Tesch’s clarinet playing on this record was his very best.

  A whole lot more could be said about these records, but that’s plenty for now. The reason for all this analysis is that these were some of the trail-blazing records: they defined the Chicago School, so-called. There have been so many myths grown up around them and the guys who made them that I wanted to help, as much as I could, to get the story straight.

  Many years later Bud Freeman showed an unusually solid understanding of the confused perspectives and derivative quality of Chicago style. In an interview in Down Beat (December 1, 1942), he said: “In our youth . . . we were schooled on the New Orleans Rhythm Kings (a white band). They brought a new kind of music to us. It was something that we had never heard or felt before. We didn’t know what it was . . . didn’t even realize that it was to any extent Negroid. . . . That was in the very early days when the Negro bands hadn’t really begun to develop out of New Orleans and Memphis. There were some colored bands who had come up the river and migrated to Chicago, that’s true, but they weren’t developed, organized bands then. And another thing, they were playing in places that we weren’t supposed to go as kids.” He goes on to tell how Dave Tough one day went to the Lincoln Gardens to hear Joe Oliver’s band with Louis Armstrong in it, and how Dave went crazy over this new music. “At first we didn’t understand the music. We didn’t know if we liked it or not. It was a more vigorous music than the Rhythm Kings and it was really quite a lot different. Although we were at first confused by Joe Oliver’s band, we soon decided that it was the thing so we took up their style and dropped that of the Rhythm Kings. When Louis left Joe and started playing on his own at the Sunset with Earl Hines, we followed him. . . . Then about that time, just to confuse things more, Bix Beiderbecke came along with a still different style to exert the greatest influence that any white man had on us. Take, if you can, a composite of, first, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings who planted the seed, and then Joe Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Bix, Jimmy Noone . . . and Bessie Smith. Our style, ‘Chicago style,’ came from all of that.”

  Bud went on to say some very nice things about me: “I think that our style and our success individually depended as much upon a fellow by the name of Mezz Mezzrow, as it did upon all of the musicians put together. Mezz never spent enough time on his instrument to make the splash that he could have, but he understood what we were doing and what we wanted and he gave us more inspiration and influenced us more than it seemed any single man could ever do. . . . He used to drive us hundreds of miles to see a band or a new musician. It’s funny how much his encouragement and interest did to give us confidence in ourselves and our style. . . . [That] style was a driving style, more on the beat than others. It was as typical of the Negroes as we could make it. That was what we were striving for.” Bud’s words are kind, but it wasn’t thanks to any remarkable qualities in me that I was able to influence the Chicagoans a little. It was only because I was trying to fight my way upstream, straight back to the source, and ignoring the side eddies and tangent ripples like Bix and modern classicism. It was because of my monomania; there was some kind of method in my madness, though I sure as hell couldn’t claim credit for putting it there.

  The Chicagoans, all in all, were learning fast. They were alert, and they were talented. If we had all stuck together we would have made it, we would have captured the New Orleans idiom almost completely. We’d reached the point where we played collectively, but the melodic line we followed was still a white-man’s conception, a mixture of New Orleans, ragtime and white jazz. We still had plenty to learn about solid rhythm and soulful interpretation.

  It was prejudice and aloofness of mind, plus some inferiority complex way down, that kept the Chicagoans from finishing what they had begun. A few of them, even though they took the Negro’s music, were biased against the Negro, and wouldn’t get close enough to
him to learn at first-hand. When they latched on to a few riffs and played them over among themselves, without a colored audience, they got all excited and thought they had something great. That’s how they acted when they recorded Nobody’s Sweetheart. But when colored musicians listened they saw a lot was lacking. Then these kids, instead of trying to learn more, got antagonistic and shied away—maybe because they were over-sensitive and got hurt too easy, maybe, too, because they weren’t sure they could do better.

  Bud and Dave used to ridicule me all the time, saying nobody could ever touch the Negro race, nobody could ever play as good as them, it had to be born in you. They were in a world by themselves, you could just get close but not close enough. Bud’s conclusion was that you might as well go commercial, join up with the big bands and make money. They kept saying I would never make it, I’d just break my heart trying, and wind up a tea-man, and that was that. Some of them thought that three thousand years of prejudice towering up between the races was too high a fence to hurdle. And besides, some of them figured that we’d come up with a music that didn’t have to be just a shadow of New Orleans because it was good enough by itself. We really had it so to hell with any more working at it.

  It was easy for them to kid themselves along like that. The general public isn’t hip enough to separate what’s authentic and what’s phony. Even today, a white musician can go along doing his own little things, being kind of mechanical and repetitious, and then he’ll suddenly play a riff taken from Noone or Armstrong or Bechet, just one—and the kids hear it and recognize it and immediately put this guy on the same level as Noone, Armstrong and Bechet, regardless of the corn that preceded and followed this one authentic touch, regardless of how that one copied riff sticks out like a sore thumb. You can coast along like that, if you want to. You don’t have to work too hard at this business.