Really The Blues

Really The Blues By Mezz Mezzrow Mezz Mezzrow was born in Chicago in 1899 and was one of that city's leading clarinettists during the twenties, golden age of the blues. Many of Mezzrow's records from his 1933 big band, through faultless sessions with Tommy Ladnier and Sidney Bechet in 1938, to post-war Mezzrow-Bechet masterpieces on his King Jazz label, are marvellous, revealing his deep feeling for the blues, well thought lines, frequent agility and appealing acid tone. Following his appearance at the Nice Jazz Festival, 1948, Mezzrow became a big star in Europe, touring regularly with various bands and with Louis Armstrong. For a white musician, Mezzrow was acclaimed for his exceptional feel for jazz, but his most important contribution is this autobiography, Really the Blues, written with Bernard Wolfe and first published in 1946, for its unbounded vitality that so captures the revolution that jazz represented to the youth of Chicago in the twenties and even more of Harlem in the thirties and forties. Flamingo An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB A Flamingo Modern Classic 1993 First published in the llSA by House 1946 ,sRandom Copyright © Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe 1946 The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work Author photograph by Redferns A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 00 654691 9 Set in Garamond 3 Printed in Great Britain by HarperCollinsManufacturing Glasgow All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. To all hipsters, husders and fly cats tipping along The Stroll. (Keep scuffling.) To all the cons in all the houses of many slammers, wrastling with chinches. (Short time, boys.) To all the junkies and lushheads in two-bit scratchpads, and the flophouse grads in morgue iceboxes. (RIP.) To the sweettalkers, the gumbeaters, the high jivers, out of the gallion for good and never going to take low again. (You got to make it, daddy.) To Bessie Smith, Jimmy Noone, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Zutty Singleton, Johnny Dodds, Sidney Bechet and Tommy Ladnier. (Grab a taste of millennium, gate.) Introduction to the Flamingo Edition The End of Rascism One of my favorite places to go when I was a kid in Chicago was Riverview, the giant amusement park on the North Side. Riverview, which during the 1950s was nicknamed Polio Park, after the reigning communicable disease of the decade, had dozens of rides, including some of the fastest, most terrifying roller coasters ever designed. Among them were The Silver Streak, The Comet, The Wild Mouse, The Flying Turns, and The Bobs. Of those, The Flying Turns, a seatless ride that lasted all of thirty seconds or so, and required the passengers in each car to recline consecutively on one another, was my favorite. The Turns did not operate on tracks but rather on a steeply banked, bobsled-like series of tortuous sliding curves that never failed to engender in me the sensation of being about to catapult out of the car over the stand of trees to the west of the parking lot. To a fairly manic kid, which I was, this was a big thrill, and I must have ridden The Flying Turns hundreds of times between the ages of seven and sixteen. The Bobs, however, was the most frightening roller coaster in the par