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Really the blues mezzrow7/8/2023 ![]() ![]() In short, he was a devoted lover of all things jazz and someone who wasn’t above colouring up his backstory. He was a musician who played clarinet and saxophone, with a little piano on the side. He was friends with Bix Beiderbecke, Count Basie and the influential French jazz critic Hugues Panassié. He was a jailbird, an opium addict and “the link between the races” in Harlem, not to mention one of the most famous drug dealers of his time. He was Louis Armstrong’s manager and played on some seminal early jazz recordings. Mezz was many things, sometimes more than one at once. ![]() So why did the New York Review of Books re-publish his memoir Really the Blues earlier this year? Who exactly was Mezz Mezzrow? ![]() By any definition, that’s a pretty slim legacy. At the time my copy was published, only a few recordings of his were still in print: post World War II recordings with Sidney Bechet, some pre-war sides, and a session from the 50s. Deep in the bowels of my paperback copy of The Penguin Guide to Jazz, there’s a short section on Mezz Mezzrow. ![]()
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