REALLY THE BLUES - MEZZ MEZZROW

As a YT guy, who primarily listens to rap music, this book has been on my radar for a long time. I finally got around to it and it turned out to be a bizarre exercise in reading around. Let me backup. REALLY THE BLUES is a memoir. Mezz Mezzrow is a minor figure in the Jazz world as an arranger and a clarinetist but he’s most famous for being a drug dealer. If you listen to older jazz, “If You’re a Viper” for instance, you occasionally hear weed being referred to as Mezz. He dealt in Harlem for years, supplying all sorts of jazz luminaries, Louis Armstrong perhaps being the most famous. Additionally, Mezz is YT. I’m interested in all of that, the social history of drugs (specifically pot and opium, though heroin and cocaine also make appearances), the early 20th century criminal underworld (this is nice companion to Iceberg Slim who often writes about roughly the same era and scene), race relations in the north, the history of jazz and American popular music broadly, prison culture, etc. Sadly, you have to sort of read around the book for this stuff. Primarily, Mezz is interested in what he considers “true Jazz,” aka New Orleans style Jazz from the first couple decades of its existence. I am not interested in Mezz’s opinions on Jazz or why the newer style is no good, I’m not really interested in his Jazz career, I’m interested in the stuff around it. It is funny that, even 100+ years ago, YT men were deciding what was “authentic” in a Black art. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Mezz record but poking around online, it seems like his reputation is negative to mixed, as a Jazz player. Some people think he’s bad, others think he’s middling. Either way, his drug dealing and general involvement in the scene is more interesting than his music. Maybe a modern equivalent would be someone like Desto Dubb, if Dubb was YT. That being said, there were lots of really interesting, historically engaging sections. It’s interesting that he grew up on Division and Western in Chicago, near-ish to where I used to live in an area that is now called Ukrainian Village. Strangely, he goes to Austin High School on the Westside which, apparently, was both all-YT and jazz obsessed at the time. Austin, both the school and neighborhood, are 100% Black and quite poor at this point. The first moment of racial awareness, one he comes back to, takes place in Juvie where a race war breaks out between transplanted Southern YTs and Blacks in Chicago. Mezz tells us that “punks” or sex-slaves were common and unremarkable in jail but a Black kid named Big Six had a YT punk which cause a huge riot in which Mezz took the black kids’ side. He notices that all the YT inmates are actual criminals and mostly bad but the Black inmates are merely victims of racism so, in general, much easier to deal with. Eventually, and famously, he gets Riker’s in NYC to classify him as “Negro” so he can be in the Black section of the jail. Also, all the jails in the book have jazz bands, which is strange from my 2020 vantage point. It’s funny that he gets high at the zoo (same) and meets lots of displaced Russian princes in NYC. It includes sections about seeing swastikas in NYC in the mid-30’s, stuff about how Black people supported, vaguely, the Japanese (as a colored race) before Pearl Harbor (a particular interest of mine), there’s strange stuff about how when he first got to Harlem, all the gangsters were YT but then that changed over. At first Mezz had a YT wife who lived in the, then-YT, Bronx while he went to sell pot in Harlem all day. Eventually, he divorces and marries a Black woman. Amazingly, he claims to have coined the phrase “jam session” which is a weird flex. It’s also funny to track the evolution of the term “hipster” which shows up in this book several times and changes meaning over Mezz’s life. I also found out Fats Waller and I have the same shoe size. All pretty amazing stuff, the book just needed a crueler editor that would have given us more details w/r/t the scene and less about the jazz itself. ‘47 hot jazzes.

ADDENDUM: This takes place slightly before but in the same general scene as the Iceberg Slim novels. As such, the characters have amazing, evocative street names. While there are the Slimian pimps and gangsters, most of these characters were Jazzmen and/or drug-dealers:

-Yellow

-Big Six

-Red Tell

-Big Izzy

-Nick the Greek

-Bon Bons

-Monkey Pollack

-Dead-eyed Dick

-Yiddle

-Slick

-Louie the Wop

-Legs Diamond

-Dirty Dan

-Poppa-Stoppa

-Little Fats

-Tip/Tap/Toe (dance trio)

-Too Sweet

-Zutty

-Snake-Hips (two different Snakes-Hips)

-Big Green

-A-Number-One

-Bumble-Bee Slim

NICKNAMES FOR WEED:

-Muggles

-Golden-Leaf

-Muta

-Gunja

-Gerfa