The Jew who’s black, white and blues

It is a confessional autobiography in which he vividly detailed not only the jazz age of the 1920s and ’30s but his drug-dealing, stealing sprees, opium addiction and the consequences he endured. These included several spells of imprisonment, a slide into squalid degradation, the nightmare experience of kicking his habit and his exclusion, albeit temporarily, from the fraternity of musical associates that included Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa and Bix Beiderbecke.

Mezzrow should have had a fairly comfortable life. He was the son of a Russian-Jewish drug-store owner and grew up in untroubled circumstances in Chicago. But he identified so passionately with the music emerging from New Orleans and the lifestyles of the African Americans (then called Negroes or Coloureds) that he effectively classified himself as one, crashing through the racial barriers of that time to live in Harlem, marrying a black woman, and, while in jail, electing to be segregated as a black man.

Having eventually succumbed totally to opium, his redemption came in the form of Hughes Panassie. A Frenchman, Panassie had become an enthusiastic scholar of the music of New Orleans after being introduced to it by Mezzrow in 1929 when the musician was visiting Paris.

By 1938, the big swing bands were eclipsing the classic jazz that had emerged from New Orleans. Panassie travelled to America to record the music of those earlier improvising instrumentalists and sought out Mezzrow to lead him to them.

It provided the challenge Mezzrow needed. Having recovered his health and sanity, he resumed his musical career and, in collaboration with Bernard Wolfe, produced Really the Blues.

More than 60 years after its original publication, the appeal of the book, now reissued in Souvenir Press’s “Independent Voices” series, is its gloriously idiomatic “jive-talk” slang and its first-hand, if exaggerated, account of the jazz age with its speakeasy joints, whorehouses, crap-games, mobsters and molls.

A subsidiary musical theme is Mezzrow’s insistence that, whatever their talent, white musicians were incapable of attaining the spiritual and emotional depths of their black brothers.

A similar musical schism runs through Jazz Farrago, only this time it is between the modern-jazz “boppers”, who originated Ronnie Scott’s London jazz club, and the “mouldy fygges”, the trad-jazzers who infiltrated it in later years.

The book is a compilation of entertaining and informative articles, photographs and cartoons that appeared in Jazz at Ronnie Scott’s, the club’s house magazine — known as JARS — between 1979 and 2005. Selected and mostly written by the JARS editor, Jim Godbolt, the mix of profiles, commentaries and interviews reflects the history and the existential humour of the British jazz world, along with in-house jokes that may be beyond all but the most cogno of the cognoscenti.

Michael Knipe is a jazz drummer and former New York Correspondent of The Times