It makes all the novels with jazz backgrounds seem as phony as an Eddie Condon concert.Īn autobiography such as was never seen before beneath the moon. Brooke Horvath, Review of Contemporary FictionĪn intense, sincere and honest book. The story, while probably just a lot of junk, was compelling for me because it was about many musicians whose work I knew and. Really the Blues returns us.to the roots of rock, to the roots certainly of beat and hence to the beginnings of the sixties counterculture through an extended look into the life of a Jewish boy.who turned his back on the middle class and all it had to offer to blow jazz in 'more creep joints and speakeasies and dancehalls than the law allows.'

In many ways, Mezz is the Augie March of jazz.Īs to the books of Bernard Wolfe, his extraordinary imagination, his range of styles and genres, should alone qualify him for a conspicuous role in 20th-century American literature. As usual, Mezzrow is the weak point of the music, bragging a bit in places and doing his best on five songs (including two versions of 'Really the Blues') with an all-star group consisting of cornetist Muggsy Spanier, trombonist Sandy Williams, the great Sidney Bechet on soprano, pianist Sammy Price, bassist Wellman Braud and drummer Baby Dodds. Mezz Mezzrow’s rambunctious enthusiasm for jazz and the world it shaped and defined keeps the pages turning.The lost world of the Jazz Age comes alive in these pages, replete with all the Chi-town bounce and streetwise braggadocio that came with the risqué territory.Mezzrow’s love of the music and the ‘bandid’ lifestyle is palpable and infectious, giving his story a novelistic verve. The mighty Mezz was at once the greatest digger, the greatest chronicler, the greatest celebrator of culture, as well as being a principal actor on its main stage and contributor of its most characteristic fragrance-the pungent aroma of burning bush. American counter-culture classic Really the Blues a stylized oral history that anticipates the Beat novel… Really the Blues is part quixotic adventure novel, part inside-scoop…Mezzrow’s voice is funny, impulsive, full of itself and often spectacularly scatological….Listening to “Mezz” is tremendous fun…the book’s true literary inheritance is its style…one of the great, flawed, jubilant, jive-talking characters of American literature.

Really the blues mezzrow