Mezz MEZZROW

The story

Born in Chicago in 1899 into a Jewish family out of Eastern Europe, Milton Mezzrow found jazz where nobody goes looking for it: in a reformatory, played by Black inmates. He came out of it a clarinettist, and changed. The rest of his life would hang on a decision taken at that moment: never to go back to the side he was born on. He settled in the Black districts of Chicago and then of Harlem, married a Black woman, took up the language and the codes of the musicians, and declared himself a “voluntary Negro” — a phrase he would claim without irony until he died.

As a musician he was not the most gifted of his generation and never claimed to be; the critics reproached his playing enough. His importance lies elsewhere. In November 1938 he set up in New York the sessions the French critic Hugues Panassié had come to record, and brought back to them Sidney Bechet and the trumpeter Tommy Ladnier, whom the swing fashion had made old-fashioned and whom nobody would hire. Those records reopened Bechet's career and set off the New Orleans revival. Ladnier died six months later.

He was also Harlem's chief marijuana supplier, with a reputation for quality such that the product ended by taking his name: people asked for “a mezz”. Arrested in 1940 with sixty cigarettes on him, he demanded at the desk to be booked as a Black prisoner. The prison administration, embarrassed, gave in at last and moved him to the Black wing of Rikers Island. He served his sentence on the side he had chosen, and told the story without giving himself the good part.

In 1946 came Really the Blues, his autobiography written with Bernard Wolfe in the slang of the musicians — a book whose closing glossary remains a document on the speech of jazz. The beatniks read it before Kerouac published his own, and it became a classic of American counter-culture. Mezzrow ended his life in Paris, where Black American musicians found a welcome their own country refused them. He died there in 1972 and lies in the columbarium.