Mezz Mezzrow


Milton Mesirow, better known as Mezz Mezzrow, was an American jazz clarinetist and saxophonist from Chicago, Illinois. He is well known for organizing and financing historic recording sessions with Tommy Ladnier and Sidney Bechet. He also recorded a number of times with Bechet and briefly acted as manager for Louis Armstrong. Mezzrow is equally well remembered as a colorful character, as portrayed in his autobiography, Really the Blues, co-written with Bernard Wolfe and published in 1946.

Music career

Along with his other white counterparts, such as Eddie Condon and Frank Teschemacher, Mezzrow would visit the Sunset Café to learn from and listen to Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. He admired Armstrong so much that after the release of "Heebie Jeebies," he, along with Teschemacher, drove 53 miles to Indiana in order to play it for Bix Beiderbecke.
Mezzrow organized and took part in recording sessions involving black musicians in the 1930s and 1940s, including Benny Carter, Teddy Wilson, Frankie Newton, Tommy Ladnier and Sidney Bechet. Mezzrow's 1938 sessions for the French jazz critic Hugues Panassie involved Bechet and Ladnier and helped spark the "New Orleans revival".
In the mid-1940s Mezzrow started his own record label, King Jazz Records, featuring himself with groups, usually including Sidney Bechet and often including the trumpeter Oran "Hot Lips" Page. He also played on six recordings by Fats Waller.
He appeared at the 1948 Nice Jazz Festival, following which he made his home in France and organized many bands that included French musicians like Claude Luter and visiting Americans, such as Buck Clayton, Peanuts Holland, Jimmy Archey, Kansas Fields and Lionel Hampton. With ex-Basie trumpeter Buck Clayton, he made a recording of the Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" in Paris in 1953.

Personal life

Mezzrow became better known for his drug dealing than his music. In his time, he was so well known in the jazz community for selling marijuana that Mezz became slang for marijuana, a reference used in the Stuff Smith song, "If You're a Viper". He was also known as the Muggles King, the word muggles being slang for marijuana at that time; the title of the 1928 Louis Armstrong recording "Muggles" refers to this. Armstrong was one of his biggest customers. A letter from 1932, written by Armstrong, demonstrates this relationship; while in England, Armstrong details in this letter about where and how Mezzrow should send marijuana.
Record producer Al Rose was critical of Mezzrow's musicianship, saying that in his opinion "he wasn't a very good clarinetist," but praised him for his willingness to help other musicians in need, citing "his generosity and his total devotion to the music we call jazz."
Mezzrow praised and admired the African-American style. In his autobiography, Really the Blues, he wrote that from the moment he heard jazz he "was going to be a Negro musician, hipping the world about the blues the way only Negroes can."
Mezzrow married a black woman, Mae, moved to Harlem, New York, and declared himself a "voluntary Negro". He believed that "he had definitely 'crossed the line' that divided white and black identities". In 1940 he was arrested in possession of sixty joints while trying to enter a jazz club at the 1939 New York World's Fair, with intent to distribute. When he was sent to jail, he insisted to the guards that he was black and was transferred to the segregated prison's black section. In Really the Blues, he wrote:
Mezzrow was lifelong friends with the French jazz critic Hugues Panassié and spent the last 20 years of his life in Paris.
Eddie Condon said of him, "When he fell through the Mason-Dixie line he just kept going".
Mezz Mezzrow was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Selected discography