by Mezz Mezzrow
I never believed that you had to practise and study a hell of a lot to play real New Orleans. The secret is more mental than technical. If you want to play real jazz, go live close to the Negro, see through his eyes, laugh and cry with him, soak up his spirit. That’s the best way to prepare for a recording; it’s what I always do. If you’re not prepared to do that, then okay, play your own music but don’t pretend that it has anything to do with jazz. Make up a new name for what you’re doing, just to keep the record straight. But if you’re humble enough, and strip off all the prejudices that are a barrier between you and the source, you’ll make it. It takes a lot of living and loving, among the right people. The rest comes easy.
It’s taken me thirty years, but I think maybe I’ve finally made it. That’s the road I followed. All my life I’ve been striving for those weaving patterns that Jimmy Noone and Johnny Dodds and Sidney Bechet left imbedded in my skull, and I think I’ve finally gotten pretty close to them. If I have, it’s only because I spent my life fighting to get back to the source. It wasn’t any special talent in me; I didn’t have any more gifts than a lot of those Chicago boys. It was only a mental attitude, an instinct that steered me right. I never wanted to take up permanent lodging in the halfway-house that has gone down in history as the Chicago School.
1. See passages discussing Tesch later in this chapter.
Appendix Two
TRANSLATION OF THE JIVE SECTION
(See the original passages)
I’M STANDING under the Tree of Hope, selling my marihuana. The customers come up, one by one.
FIRST CAT: Hello Mezz, have you got any marihuana?
ME: Plenty, old man, my pockets are full as a factory hand’s on payday.
FIRST CAT: Let me have three cigarettes [fifty cents’ worth].
ME: I sure will, slotmouth. [A private inner-racial joke, suggesting a mouth as big and as avaricious as the coin slot in a vending machine, always looking for something to put in it.] (Pointing to a man standing in front of Big John’s ginmill.) Look at the detective on your left—the head bartender slipped him some hush money, and he’s swaggering around as if crime does pay.
FIRST CAT: I hope he croaks, I’m not paying him even a tiny bit of mind. [Literally, father grab him suggests that the Lord ought to snatch the man and haul him away; and when you don’t pay a man no rabbit, you’re not paying him any more attention than would a rabbit’s butt as it disappears hurriedly over the fence.] Friend, this marihuana of yours is terrific, I’m going home and listen to that new record Louis Armstrong made for the Okeh company. I hear he did some wonderful playing and singing on the number Exactly Like You. See you at the Savoy ballroom on Thursday. [That is, the maids’ night off, when all the domestic workers will be dancing there.]
SECOND CAT: Hello Mezz, give me some of that marihuana that makes all the others look silly. I’m short ten cents but I’ll pay you later.
ME: O.K., gizzard, you’re poor but you’re honest—now don’t disappoint me. [Gizzard has a subtle overtone here: a gizzard is stuffed, and stuff means jive or kidding in hip talk, so the implication is: don’t come up with no stuff, in other words, don’t kid me, make sure that you pay me.]
SECOND CAT: I never lie, friend. I’m going to bring a suit to the pawn-shop to raise ten dollars, and I’ll show up with some money.
THIRD CAT (Coming up with his girl): Baby, this is that fine man who has the good marihuana that will make you walk through life as unburdened as a blueblood kitten. Mezz, this is my new girl friend and she’s regular, she smokes marihuana.
GIRL: All the girls are always talking about you and Louis. Are you sure there isn’t something funny between you two? You’ve sure got the upper hand on us young girls, we’ve been going crazy trying to decide which of you is the wife and which the husband. But everybody loves him and we know how he must have gone right to your heart.
FOURTH CAT (Coming up with a stranger): Mezz, this is Sonny Thompson, he’s one of the regular guys on Seventh Avenue and he’s a fine dancer too. Sonny has known what it’s all about since he was a kid, and he smokes a lot of marihuana, so give us a dollar’s worth and let us get happy. He and Louis have been friends for years.
ME: Any guy Louis thinks is all right must really be O.K. Here, have a smoke, Sonny, you’re going to get high on me this time.
SONNY (To his friend): Do you want to know something? This guy should have been born jet black, he understands all our subtleties and talks like a Negro. (Turning to me.) Boy, are you sure there isn’t some colored blood in your family tree? Boy, you’re too much to cope with, you keep plugging, you’re bound to be successful in life.
FIFTH CAT: Hello Mezz! Got any marihuana?
ME: I’m as loaded as the chinaberry trees in Aunt Hagar’s backyard. [Aunt Hagar is a kind of generic name for the old colored mammy, immortalized in the famous old blues, Aunt Hagar’s Blues. The name summons up the picture of an old colored woman living in a ramshackle little hut in the gallion, with elderberry trees growing in the yard.]
FIFTH CAT: Give me a dollar’s worth so I can get high and I’ll come back and pay you late tonight. [The late watch is about three or four in the morning, when the musicians and entertainers get through work, and when the streetwalkers begin parading the streets with less fear of the law.]
SIXTH CAT (Seeing me hand the cigarettes to Cat Number Five): Wow, I know I’m going to be straightened out now, I know you’re going to let me smoke some of that marihuana.
FIFTH CAT: Get away from me boy, far away. You’re always looking for a handout, why don’t you cut it out for once, the winter’s here and the icy wind is blowing and here I am with this topcoat on, trying to raise a few bucks for the pawnbroker so I can get my overcoat out of hock. [Two’s and fews: prostitutes try to collect the standard two dollars for their services, but often they have to take whatever they can get—in other words, two’s when they can get them, fews when they can’t. The term has come to have a meaning less limited occupationally: a little money, whatever you can raise, the most you can scare up. As for lead sheet, it’s only one sheet of music out of a whole orchestration, with only the melody line on it, and hence thin enough to mean topcoat; whereas the full orchestration is, by contrast, thick and bulky, and could only mean a heavy overcoat.]
SIXTH CAT: Oh, come on and be big for once, don’t spoil our fun and make life so grim. You know I treated you last time.
FIFTH CAT: Looks like he has me cornered, Mezz, but this guy is so selfish he would turn his back on a completely helpless animal. He’s as tight as they come. Just look at him, and get a load of that old-fashioned suit, and his trousers are so baggy at the knees that it looks like he’s crouching, ready to jump. This guy’s trying to catch up with me [even the score, because he treated last time], and I’ve got to get him high. Stay on the corner, Mezz, and I’ll bring you the dollar as I promised I would. [Line two means the price is a dollar; prices, like times of the day, are often doubled so that outsiders won’t understand the details.] Come on friend, let’s go over to my home. [Main stash is home, where you and your wife or steady girlfriend live, as distinguished from other secondary “homes” you might have, where other women friends of yours live. In the same sense, your wife is the main saw on the hitch; you may have other saws to cut your wood, and you might say that you were hitched to them too, but not in such a basic way.]
SEVENTH CAT: Give me three cigarettes, gatemouth [another private inner-racial joke, suggesting a mouth whose lower lip swings like a gate], so I can go and make myself feel good. What kind of object is this keeping you company? (Nodding towards Frankie Walker.)
FRANKIE: Don’t pay any attention to that razor-legged, axe-handled, slew-footed obscenity, Milton. [The hyphenated epithets here are all inner-racial jokes too, referring to the shape of the knee and shinbone, and to the flat-footed, toes-out manner of walking. Motherferyer is an incestuous obscenity which has its counter-part in every language in the world.] He’s an antiquated guy from
down South who hasn’t been up North long enough to learn what the score is. His hair is as knotty as if he had acorns sticking to his scalp, up on top of that brain which hasn’t been working for a long time. If the rain ever struck the back of your neck, that hair [which has been smoothed down with hair-grease] would roll up again like a windowshade, you conceited, unenlightened dope from down South, you look like an old Southern mammy with a handkerchief over her head, you don’t amount to anything. You went crazy long ago. [Obviously, when you’re like Jack the Bear, you ain’t nowhere, because for a good part of the year a bear is just huddled snugly in a hole, oblivious to the world. His brother, No Fu’ther, is in the same sorry predicament, far from alert.]
SEVENTH CAT: Your friend is too smart, Mezz, but he’d better grow wings and fly away, or else I’ll cut a piece out of his hide.
EIGHTH CAT (Yelling to passing friend): Hey, you look like you’re making plenty of money, so don’t treat me so rough and tough, tell me the secret of your success because you’ve been keeping it to yourself long enough.
HIS FRIEND: Hey, hometown boy [friend from down home]! There’s nothing to my apparent prosperity, I don’t own anything besides the one good outfit that you see on me now. I saw that girl up the street, drinking beer in a saloon, and the smart boys were conning her like the Yellow Kid [a famous con-man], trying to catch her on their line [as they would catch a fish] and win her. [To weave the four F’s around a girl means a lot more than just winning her; actually, as nearly as it can be translated in public, it means to find her, fool her, frig her, and forget her.]
EIGHTH CAT: Hm, I gave her up long ago [to nix out has about the same meaning as cross off your list], she’s subject to too many changing moods; one minute she says yes and the next minute she says no, she never commits herself and she’s too snooty. [It’s the last word in ritzy behavior, obviously, to keep your glasses, or lorgnette, on when you go to bed.] Friend, she looks like the devil himself to me, so don’t give her another thought. Give me some of your good marihuana, Mezz, so we can get high and have a good time. Hey buddy [buddy ghee really means guy who is my buddy, the word guy being pronounced in the prison vernacular, as ghee], why don’t you and I go fifty-fifty and we’ll buy two dollars’ worth of marihuana, so I won’t have to carry the burden all by myself.
HIS FRIEND: O.K., take this dollar, but it didn’t come from a street-walker on the avenue. I had to put in time working for it, so don’t try to get any more out of me. [The idea is: I’m no pimp, I work for a living, and my money is hard come by.] How am I doing, Mezz, am I playing the rhyming game expertly or not?
ME: You were doing nothing else but, you’re really ringing true, if you’re not coming in on time a hawk can’t see. You started as smoothly as Horn-&-Hardart’s famous amateur radio show, and you wound up with as much of a bang as Amos-and-Andy. [Such references to popular radio shows, movies, and comic strips are common in this language. Another good example is the phrase, you came on like gangbusters, a reference to the well-known radio program. The phrase implies that you’re as strong as the law on that program, since the law always wins. When this expression got too popular and the whites began to use it, it was changed to read, you came on like Buster’s gang, and finally, just the word buster was retained, as in the succinct phrases, that’s a buster, Jack, or just Buster, Jack, which state your hearty approval or appreciation of something.]
EIGHTH CAT: Listen to old Mezz, feeding us the comebacks and right on schedule too. Friend, you really know what the score is, and you’re a fine fellow. This marihuana you’re selling is wonderful, pal, everybody ought to smoke it and wake up. [The expression, light up and be somebody, implies that some Negroes are so down-and-out and beat that they don’t care about anything, but when they smoke marihuana it stirs their spirits and gives them ambition to amount to something.] Well, I’m going to disappear up Seventh Avenue and see if there’s anything interesting waiting for me. [In other words, he’s going to stroll along the street like a lizard crawling along the railroad tracks, to see what he can find.]
NINTH CAT: Hello, czar! What are you giving away?
ME: I don’t give anything away except in the manner that I give away my laundry. [That is, I’m going to give this man some marihuana, but I expect something in return; no handouts.]
NINTH CAT: That’s right, old man, you give it away but you get it back, just like your laundry. You want to know something, I drank some cheap corn whisky mixed with wine with some dumb girl last night, smoking cheap marihuana till even my hair hurt. I haven’t eaten since sunset, and I have to fill my stomach. I know I’m going to start snoring as soon as I get into bed, so take this ten-dollar bill and give me ten dollars’ worth of marihuana, so I can leave. [To widen means to widen the gap between you and the other person—in other words, to leave.] I’m going to stay home until midnight on Friday, and then I’ll go over to see the midnight show at the Lafayette Theater, and hear Louis Armstrong when he begins to play those high notes.
TENTH CAT: Hello Mezz, what are you getting rid of? [The sense being, do you have any news for the grapevine?]
ME: Nothing much. [Punks and skunks are unclean, unpleasant people; in other words, there’s nothing very exciting to report.] But look, friend, your wife just walked down the sidewalk about ten o’clock and you’d better beat it because she was talking about cutting you up.
TENTH CAT: Well, tip me off buddy, I didn’t know that. I know she’s sore at me because she saw me sitting with a couple of colored girls in a friend’s car last Friday night, and we drove away fast. She’s been raising the dickens ever since. I haven’t seen the sheets on my bed in two days, and the other night, when it rained so hard, she was on the warpath again. I don’t look forward to any unpleasant moves from that ugly female, but if my back’s to the wall I guarantee that I’ll fight her like a cage full of apes. No indeed, old man, I don’t relish a fight with her. Let me smoke some of that fine marihuana you pass out because I’ve just got a tiny butt of one left. I’m going to go over to my house and change my clothes while my wife is still out on the street, and thanks for tipping me off, old man. I’ll be seeing you. . . . [Unglamorous action is the kind of act that is most unbecoming—especially in a woman, from whom you’re supposed to expect only glamorous things, as any Hollywood opus teaches you. An example of some unglamorous action from a queen, frompy or otherwise, would be when she hits you over the head with a beer bottle. As for the phrase pulling my coat, it refers to what a man does when he grabs your coat-tail and tugs it two or three times, as a warning or hint or cue when he can’t speak up directly; the sort of thing someone might do when you’re in a group of people and he wants to call your attention to something; a variation on the nudge. Quite naturally, in the language of action which is jive, pulling somebody’s coat has come to be the more graphic description of what correct English, in more abstract ways, refers to as informing or enlightening someone.]
Appendix Three
A NOTE ON THE PANASSIÉ RECORDINGS
DURING THE TWO MONTHS THAT HUGUES PANASSIÉ WAS OVER here, he organized and supervised four recording dates. The records that came out of those sessions started a lot of hot air circulating in the music world. Now that the critics have had their say about them I’d like to put down what really happened.
Hugues, Tommy and I put our heads together and doped out the personnel for our first date: James P. Johnson (piano), Zutty Singleton (drums), Elmer James (bass), Teddy Bunn (guitar), Sidney De Paris (trumpet), besides Tommy and me. On November 21st, 1938 we recorded three sides down at the Victor studio: Revolutionary Blues and Comin’ on with the Come On (Parts One and Two).
For years I had been struck by the fact that whenever we played the authentic blues in a café or dancehall, no matter how good we played, the reaction was the same: very mild and cool. It kept worrying me. This was the music I really loved and could play the best, but very few people warmed up to it. Sometimes I used to think that this was our punishment for steal
ing a great music from its rightful creators and owners, but later I got some perspective on it. This blues music was born of terrible oppression, and the moment the colored people were released just the least little bit, after the Civil War, and got into New Orleans and started to march in Mardi Gras parades and organize their street bands so they could strut their stuff a little, why, some of the weight was off them and their music perked up, took on a happier and breezier spirit. So out of the blues and the worksongs, that went right back to the days of Simon Legree, came New Orleans jazz, and pretty soon it traveled up the Mississippi to Chicago and points east. It enjoyed success everywhere it hit, but on its travels it picked up a lot of trimmings. Later on when people were first introduced to it all they saw to it was those trimmings, which often smothered the whole soul of the original music—the backgrounds were lost entirely.
What were the things that made it go tangent? Well, aside from all the social and economic forces at work, first of all it picked up the piano on its travels, and the piano is one of the most selfish instruments known to mankind. It can be tolerated in New Orleans music only when it sticks to a rhythmic function, with either a four-four tempo or strictly comp. (The kind of accompaniment where there’s a bass beat in the left hand, then the correct inversion of the chord in triad or diminished or augmented form. Lil Armstrong’s piano playing on Louis’ Hot Five records is a pretty good example of what I mean.) Now don’t misunderstand me, I think the piano is a wonderful instrument, but the real jazz was born from march time and the piano can only fit into it as a rhythm instrument; you’ve got to get somebody to play it who has a very congenial nature, won’t hog the spotlight all to himself but devotes himself to helping all the other artists to express themselves. When I tried to give Joe Sullivan some hints about how to play the blues on the piano, and dug into harmony a little, I found out all about this and readily understood why the symphony doesn’t use the piano.