Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  After that, the modern symphonic-jazz composers got hold of this music and stuffed their version of jazz with Ravel and Debussy and Delius and them, adding ninths, thirteenths and what they call sixteenths to it. They completely changed the progressions with these “symphonic” chords; you see, certain chords, like the ones the modernists use, leave you at a dead-end in jazz, no sequence to lead into, so you have to make stereotyped and mechanical passages, play one feeble run over and over because there’s no way out of the trap. (Did you ever hear a horn player in a big modern swing band blast one note over and over, in a monotone riff? That’s because he’s got no place to go, harmonically speaking; he’s stuck on that tonal plateau because there are no chords to use as stepladders in climbing up or down.) When you’re caught in a blind-alley like that, you have no alternative: you have to grope your way back to the beginning and build up again. Whatever gifts for improvisation you may have are squelched. The modern inflection has done all this to jazz.

  And then, to make things worse, along came an invention called the sock cymbal or highhat cymbal, and that was the end. This cymbal is played by the drummer with his left foot, as though he didn’t already have enough to do, what with his bass and snare drums and the cowbell and the woodblock and the rachet and the two or three Chinese and Turkish cymbals that real jazz drummers use. The result is a sort of topheavy effect, um-ching, um-ching, um-ching for a beat instead of the steady tempo of the New Orleans drummers, and that strangles the rhythm so necessary to jazz. Now the tendency for the swing drummer is to play cymbal solos all the way through, fighting all the other musicians instead of helping to build them up. An offbeat ring comes out of his sock cymbal because the human body just isn’t constructed to do so many things all together—and that delayed ching makes all the horn players fall into a kind of hesitation style, waiting for the drummer’s lagging cymbal beat before they can come up with their own notes. And they have to overblow their instruments, fighting to be heard above the drummer’s loud metallic hum; trumpets and clarinets go way up into their upper registers and become shrill and squealing, losing the rounded soulful tone of New Orleans music. Your improvisation, if you’re allowed any, isn’t built from a rich harmonic pattern any more, but centers around that clanging cymbal beat. Arrangers have to keep the sock cymbal in mind, and they build their orchestrations around it instead of using free chordal progressions, and all the New Orleans color is lost. When people with sensitive ears get apoplexy over the terrible din of so much modern swing and jump, they ought to remember that it’s not jazz they’re so horrified at. It’s the corruption of jazz that was brought about by the wrong, egocentric use of the piano, the individualistic sock cymbal, the modern-classical influence, and the terrible mechanization of today’s arrangements.

  Now, for all these years, whenever I went back to the good oldtime blues, the vibrant source of all our jazz, it sounded so foreign to modern ears that I got no reaction. No one cared to hear our story—people saw only the modern trimmings and identified them with jazz, they didn’t know about roots and sources. That made me so mad, one night when we were playing in the Castilian Gardens out on Long Island, that I decided to try and pick up the tempo of the blues, like it had been picked up in the happier New Orleans jazz. We had just finished a real slow blues and didn’t get applause once, so I told the band to hold it, we were going to play the same thing only in a brighter tempo, and I stomped it out. Then we sailed into it again and I worked it up to such a pitch that I finally succeeded in reaching that audience with my message, and they screamed for ten minutes. We had been giving them a lesson in musical history—going from the lowdown blues of the gallion slave to the high-spirited strutting music of New Orleans, and it was infectious, it caught hold of the whole crowd. All the musicians jumped up in their excitement, faces flushed, and I’ll never forget the expression of joy on Eddie Condon’s face as he looked at me.

  Well, I remembered this experience, so when we got to the Victor studio that day I told Hugues about this trick of picking up the blues tempo, and he got all enthusiastic over the idea. We got the engineers together and told them we wanted to try something new, if they’d give us a hand: we wanted to have two turntables ready with masters on them, and we’d start out for the first record playing a traditionally slow blues, and at the end of the first record they were to drop the needle on the second master. While they shifted to the other master I would knock out four beats, so they’d have enough time and there’d be silence to start the second record, and then we’d sail into a real bright tempo with the same tune. And that’s how we came to make Comin’ on With the Come On in two parts, and to name it as we did. In a sense, that record is an attempt to give a capsule history of the birth of New Orleans music, and to entice people that way into an appreciation of the blues. But it didn’t quite work.

  When we hit upon Sidney De Paris for the second trumpet on this date, I noticed Tommy Ladnier screw his face up and frown, because he was afraid Sidney played in a too modern idiom. I told him I would talk to Sidney and explain what we were doing, so there wouldn’t be any friction. To this day I regret that I didn’t heed Tommy’s warning, because Sidney is one hell of a talented guy but the modern style had taken deeper roots in him than I’d realized. “Sidney,” I said, “we’re going to try and capture Joe Oliver’s idea with this band in the way we use the two trumpets, and I want you to play second or third harmony to Tommy’s part, depending on what he leads into, and then in some choruses you’ll play the first or second part, whichever fits at the time. If you guys weave together we should have some fine records that’ll be an eye-opener to all the kids.” Sidney agreed, and I came to the studio with a clear mind, but on Side Two, where the tempo is picked up, the fireworks came.

  Things had gone along fair for about the first nine choruses, but then Sidney’s suppressed “modern” instincts got the better of him and he got evil and began to growl on his horn. The riff he growled was a discordant one that went way tangent to the whole spirit of the music, and it made Tommy furious. Then Sidney wound up the first ending of the tenth chorus with a real modern swing riff that’s a terrible cliché. That made Tommy say “Merde!” real loud on his horn, and it scared everybody in the band so bad that we didn’t have our bearings to start the eleventh chorus. After Tommy’s blast Sidney shut up almost entirely, and hardly played note one from then on. By the time the twelfth chorus came up, Zutty was the only one really in there trotting. But now Tommy was completely disgusted, hearing the band fall to pieces all around him, and he was hardly playing at all.

  Zutty played the most wonderful drums I have ever heard on records on this side, really in the New Orleans idiom, but it sounds sort of out of place when he hits the beat on his cowbell, because he’s not in a real New Orleans atmosphere. It just proved all over again that the modern riffs which took the music world by storm are all against the rhythmic and harmonic patterns of the real jazz. For those who don’t read music I’ll try to put it down in words: the riff I’m talking about is just a steady duh-duh-dum, duh-duh-dum, duh-duh-dum, duh-duh-dum, all hitting on one note, the tonic of the key being played in. That’s what Sidney De Paris did on the recording. We had started out to show how the blues led into New Orleans, but what came out was really a history of how New Orleans got corrupted into modern swing and jump. That riff will be self-explanatory to you if you’re acquainted with the harmonic progressions to a first ending in our music—in fact, if you’re familiar with any music that resolves to the tonic, where a dominant seventh for two beats, or an augmented chord, brings you back to the key signature in common harmony sequence.

  On the same date we made Revolutionary Blues, a type of blues that comes from the real old school and has been almost completely forgotten. It has thirty-two bars, but differs from the standard thirty-two bar chorus that Tin Pan Alley uses, because it isn’t divided into first eight bars, second eight bars, then the release for eight, and then back to the first eight. It starts with six
teen bars, then resolves back to them with no release, and the last eight bars have a definite resolution that was invented by the real New Orleans jazz school. Feeling that all the hip musicians would play these blues as soon as they heard them, and hoping that they might revolutionize the standard blues sequence that most musicians played because they never heard any others, I named this record Revolutionary Blues. I’m afraid not many people got the point.

  Well, we never did get to finish our fourth side on this date, although we started one. Tommy and James P. Johnson were so fed up with the way things were going, and Tommy resented Sidney’s modern style so much, that both he and James P. got real juiced. In the middle of the next record Tommy yelled “Vive la France!” and James P. fell off the piano stool. They both wobbled out of the studio and we tried to make a side with just the five of us, but it didn’t work.

  In one short and frantic afternoon, we’d relived the bloody musical battles of a full quarter of a century. It was a history lesson, and it taught us plenty. The best remark I ever heard about these records was made by Bubbles, of Buck and Bubbles, when he first listened to the test pressings at my house. “I hear what you’re tryin’ to do on them records Mezz,” he said. “You’re tryin’ to call them all home but it’s a tough scuffle.”

  On our next date, November 28th, 1938, under the title of “Tommy Ladnier and His Orchestra,” we left Sidney De Paris out, replacing him with Sidney Bechet, and we used Cliff Jackson on piano and Manzie Johnson on drums. I got one of the biggest thrills of my life that day, because at last I was playing with wonderful old Sidney Bechet, in spite of John Hammond’s warning. How easy it was falling in with Bechet—what an instinctive mastery of harmony he has, and how marvelously delicate his ear is! We fitted together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Before I go any further I want to go on record and say that of all the living New Orleans musicians he is the greatest, along with Zutty Singleton and Louis Armstrong and Tommy Ladnier, a truly remarkable genius.

  On this date we made Really the Blues, which I named the moment I heard it played back after the recording, because it brought tears to my eyes and I felt we had caught the real spirit of the old blues more than any other record I knew of. Bechet played such a wonderful second part to my second chorus; I was ashamed of not being better than I was, to give him the support he deserved and the inspiration too. That tune had come to me one night in a back-room joint in Harlem where I used to sit in with Manzie Johnson’s trio most every evening, and Bechet had never heard it before we started to make this record, but he stepped right in with his clarinet and wove through the harmony like he’d been practising it all his life. Then, to top it off, he picked up his soprano sax after Tommy’s fine chorus and played two of the greatest choruses I have ever heard on that tough instrument, ending the record with a spectacular display of brilliance that left me all trembling inside.

  We made three more sides that day, Jada, Weary Blues, and When You and I Were Young Maggie. Weary Blues is a wonderful record, and in the closing chorus we work up to a pitch closer to that of King Oliver’s original Lincoln Garden band than any other recorded music I know about. Bechet plays terrific clarinet all the way through, and Tommy’s trumpet eats right into your soul. As I listen to that record today his tone makes me limp all over—its deeply sorrowful accents, full of haunting overtones, were already hinting that he wasn’t long for this world.

  On Jada I played tenor sax, because Panassié had a nostalgia for my sax playing, and Teddy Bunn and Tommy both show their genius. Teddy is one of the greatest guitar players of the day; even though he has gone modern to some extent now he can still come on, and those records prove it. (On this date, by the way, Bechet had to use the pseudonym of Pops King because he was under contract to another company.)

  There was a third date on December 19th, 1938, this time under the title of the “Mezzrow-Ladnier Quintet.” We decided not to use any piano, so our line-up was: Tommy, Teddy Bunn, Pops Foster, Manzie Johnson, and myself. The five sides we recorded that day were: Everybody Loves My Baby, Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None of My Jelly Roll, Royal Garden Blues, If You See Me Comin’, and Gettin’ Together. When we started on If You See Me Comin’ I just asked Teddy to make an introduction on his guitar, and goddamn if he didn’t bust out with a vocal on the first chorus, followed by a guitar solo, one of the very few such solos to be played without a pick since the early Twenties. Teddy always played the guitar with his fingers. I followed him in a lower register solo which I still don’t think very much of, but then Tommy came on for the next two choruses with some beautiful arpeggios and changes that you can hardly equal anywhere. On Royal Garden Tommy and I play together like we’d been bosom pals for years. I swear, this was the first time, right during those Panassié sessions, that I’ve ever played with either him or Bechet and it really bolstered up my ego and improved my morale, because then I really knew that, no matter how uneven my performance might be, my musical convictions were right. How I wished I could have been up in their class in tone, in inventiveness, in sheer mastery of my instrument. I felt and believed everything those guys did, now more than ever. If only I could play like them!

  After the quintet date Hugues decided that he wanted to record some of the modern musicians, so on January 13th, 1939, there was a fourth session during which, under the title of “Frankie Newton and His Orchestra,” we made Rosetta, The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise, Minor Jive, Rompin’ at Victor, Blues My Baby Gave to Me, and Who. These records are made up almost entirely of individual solos, without very much of the New Orleans collective spirit of teamwork. The personnel consisted of Frankie Newton (trumpet), Pete Brown (alto sax), Albert Casey (guitar), John Kirby (bass), James P. Johnson (piano), Cozy Cole (drums), and myself on clarinet. Two of the numbers, Minor Jive and Blues My Baby Gave to Me, were compositions of mine.

  So much for Panassié’s history-making recordings. There’s one thing I want to say to you youngsters who hear our music for the first time, in this age of swing and jump, and are puzzled by it, even though you sense its great pulse and vitality. You may be discouraged at some of the things you hear on our records, and they may lead you away from New Orleans. You may say to yourself, “Hell, I don’t know, there seems to be something missing—the polish, the suaveness, the finished quality. Listen to that gutty tone Bechet gets, or Mezzrow’s clinkers on the clarinet. It doesn’t sound good. There’s something rough and crude about it.” You’ve hit on something there; you’re partly right in bringing those questions up. But what you have to keep in mind is that any unfinished quality in our music is no reflection on New Orleans style—and that goes especially for the unevenness you may find in my own performances. I will tell you where the roughness, the jagged edges, come from. We never practise. When we’re not working, which is only too often, we forget about our horns, which is wrong but it’s understandable. Don’t forget that all of us have to keep on eating, and when we can’t make a living out of our music we have to scramble for our doughnuts at something else, and that means that months and even years may go by without our touching our horns. Remember that New Orleans musicians, even the greatest, haven’t had an easy time of it: many of them have spent long years, during the total eclipse of New Orleans music, working as stevedores, truckdrivers, janitors, farmhands, and whatnot.

  And then, maybe after years of oblivion, suddenly a chance to play for a while, or make a few records, comes along, and we all grab it like a drowning man grabs at a straw. What comes out, naturally, isn’t always smooth and polished. But still, there’s the old throbbing pulse, the old ensemble spirit, the good old lively, breezy, racy quality, and that in itself is enough to mark off our music, for all its rawness, from the dead mechanical big-band music of today. I prostituted my music for many a year, and then had the nerve to record with the great men in the field, but don’t think I regret it, especially when I hear the records. I wish I could have played better—there’s so much room for improvement, I grit my teeth as I play them o
ver and ache for a chance to do it again. Still and all, what we did together stands up; it’s a great, almost-dead American music being revived, a music that has no equal anywhere else, and its unique flavor should be recaptured and preserved, as it is on those records.

  The clarinet, of all the instruments, requires the most constant practice, it’s so sensitive that you’ve got to have a real embouchure. If you don’t have any “lip” you can’t control your breathing perfectly, and that’s just what happened to me on those records. I was running arpeggios in the New Orleans idiom, and they take a lot of breath, and with no embouchure the air just escapes through the corners of your mouth, and as a result the shortage of breath may make you fade out on a pretty run before you reach the end, or prevent you from even trying it.

  But still, as I say, I’m not sorry I made those records. They are landmarks in the history of New Orleans. The flavor, the tang of the unbeatable oldtime stuff is there. It’s up to the kids to absorb it fully, work at it hard, and make it better than our generation, for a lot of reasons, was able to. When this music comes back in all its glory, as it’s bound to, as it’s already beginning to, it’ll be the kids who recapture it fully and lead it back to green pastures again.