By Jack Brummet, American Music Ed.
Reading American jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow's biography 'Really the Blues' tonight. What a sweet, insightful, and marijuana-laced book. It is way more a microscope on the expansive and kaleidoscopic personality of Mezz Mezzrow than an actual, or factual, retelling of his life, kind of like a lot of the great autobiographies I've read (Keith Richards', Bob Dylan's, and Charles Mingus's come immediately to mind). So many sweet stories about his mentor Louis Armstrong, struggling to bring real jazz to NYC, and missing the music of Chicago. About being a Jewish boy in what was an African-American racket, and eventually becoming a link between black and white players in the Jim Crow era. The language is amazing, and at times incandescent--a kind of hybrid of Lord Buckley, Louis Armstrong, and Tom Wolfe. There is no question in my mind that this book, published in 1946, influenced The Beats and specifically Jack Kerouac, who to my ear, clearly lifted rhythms and language from Mezz. And good on him--he picked the right guy to lift from.
Mezz writes about going with Louis Armstrong to the RCA recording studio in Camden, New Jersey:
"In the dead of night we drove up to a large red brick church. I wondered if we were going to have a special prayer service, but when we went through the chapel door I saw it was a recording studio. `This is funny, ain't it, Mezz,' Louis said, `jammin' in a ole church.' I came back with `Where else should Gabriel blow?'" Yeah.
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