Really the Blues by Mezz Mezzrow & Bernard Wolfe & Barry Gifford

Author:Mezz Mezzrow & Bernard Wolfe & Barry Gifford
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: History & Criticism, Genres & Styles, Music, Jazz
ISBN: 9780285640900
Publisher: Souvenir Press Limited
Published: 2009-04-07T21:25:02+00:00

Seems like a guy has to try everything once—next thing I knew I was sitting in the pit of a burlesque house. This was Minsky’s original look-but-don’t-grab emporium, the famous National Winter Garden on the sixth floor at the corner of Houston Street and Second Avenue. It was the Summer of 1929. Jack Levy was directing the pit orchestra then, and I was hired to play tenor sax and clarinet because Jack went for the hot style of playing. This band was nowhere, except in my hair. I never did hear the piano or the bass fiddle because they were a block away, on the other side of the pit, but with the other pieces I wasn’t so lucky. All the guys were wonderful to me, just like Johnny Powell had been, but they couldn’t play the note before note one. Every time I broke into a hot chorus Jack would bend way over his fiddle till his back was humped, plucking a pizzicato afterbeat on his strings that sounded like he was clopping behind me on a pogo stick, and the drummer got so inspired he started another afterbeat going on the cymbal, gaining time with his fidgety foot on the bass-drum pedal. We’d have two tempos gimping along at the same time, and then, to top it off, the trumpet would play a muted razzmatazz, but it wasn’t muted enough because I could still hear him. I would sit there in the pit chain-smoking reefers, but I couldn’t make myself drop dead. I began to wonder why, in this mechano-land where they dreamed up noiseless typewriters and engine mufflers and Maxim silencers, some friend of man didn’t invent a set of noiseless musical instruments for pit orchestras.

The Minsky brothers, being specialists in sucker-bait, set up a loudspeaker under the marquee outside the theater, and they kept playing some corny phonograph records over the P.A. system. That gave me a wig-trig. There was a wonderful colored boy named Columbus Covington running one of the elevators in the theater, and when I told him we ought to play some hot records instead of those sweet-and-sour concoctions, he put it right up to the Minskys and they were game. Columbus had never heard my favorite musicians, but when that loudspeaker introduced him to Louis’ West End Blues and When You’re Smiling and also his record of Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’, he jumped for joy. Man, those records caused a traffic jam for blocks around. All day long the lobby was packed tight with little old bearded grandpas in long black pongee frock-coats and cupcake-shaped yomelkehs, rubbing their hands behind their backs and shaking their heads sadly at Louis’ moans, like they understood everything he had to say. “Boy, where’d you get them records?” Columbus said all in one breath. “Gee, that Armstrong guy can really blow that horn, and when he starts to sing, well, it’s just too much.” I felt as proud as if I had made those records myself. Columbus and I became great friends.

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