Archives for February 22, 2016

Mezz Mezzrow is one of those fascinating, exceedingly odd figures in jazz history about whom I could write instructively and at length if I felt so moved. Alas, I don’t, at least not today, so I’ll leave it to Wikipedia to briefly tell his story. Suffice it for now to say that Mezzrow wasn’t quite the worst clarinetist in the world, that he is widely and plausibly believed to have introduced Louis Armstrong to marijuana in 1928, and that (yes, I’m really going somewhere with this) he wrote a self-aggrandizing but nonetheless immensely readable autobiography called Really the Blues, originally published in 1946 and newly reprinted by New York Review Books, that I found altogether invaluable back when I was writing Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.

The reason why I bring him up now is that I ran across this passage, about which I’d completely forgotten, while rereading Really the Blues over the weekend. The date is 1926, the “Dave” referred to in the first sentence is the great jazz drummer Dave Tough, the Austin High Gang was a group of young white jazz musicians from Chicago that also included Tough and Bud Freeman, and “muta” and “muggles” are, of course, marijuana, of which Mezzrow was a celebrated dealer:

It was little Dave who gave me a knockdown to George Jean Nathan and H.L. Mencken, two guys who could mess with the King’s English too. Dave used to read The American Mercury from cover to cover, especially the section called “Americana” where all the bluenoses, bigots, and two-faced killjoys in this land-of-the-free got a going-over they never forgot. That Mercury really got to be the Austin High Gang’s Bible. It looked to us like Mencken was yelling the same message in his magazine that we were trying to get across in our music; his words were practically lyrics to our hot jazz. I dug him all the way, because The Mercury gave you the same straight-seeing perspective that muta does—to me that hard-cutting magazine was a load of literary muggles.

How could I possibly have failed to include that paragraph in my Mencken biography? Ah, well, you can’t think of everything….

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Tommy Ladnier and His Orchestra play “Weary Blues” in 1938. Ladnier is the trumpeter, and the performance also features Sidney Bechet on clarinet and soprano saxophone and Mezz Mezzrow on clarinet:

The French composer Darius Milhaud makes a rare TV appearance in which he talks about jazz in the Twenties, followed by a performance of his jazz-influenced composition Caramel Mou, Shimmy pour Jazz-band, Op. 68, written in 1920. An English translation of the text is read by Madeleine Milhaud, the composer’s wife. Dave Brubeck, who studied with Milhaud, is also seen briefly in this clip, which is drawn from a documentary originally telecast by KQED-TV in 1965. The actual performance took place at Mills College in 1963:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.)

“In 1962 I was asked to talk about myself at an American college. I recalled my parents, who were so understanding, my wife, my son and his children, who have brought me nothing but joy. In short, I said that I was a happy man. At that moment I sensed general consternation—almost panic—in the hall. Some students came to talk to me after the conference: how had I been able to create in these conditions? An artist needs to suffer! I replied that I had managed to arrange things differently.”

Darius Milhaud, My Happy Life