Really the Blues [Paperback]

Mezz Mezzrow was a boy from Chicago who learned to play the sax in reform school and pursued a life in music and a life of crime. He moved from Chicago to New Orleans to New York, working in brothels and bars, bootlegging, dealing drugs, getting hooked, doing time, producing records, and playing with the greats, among them Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and Fats Waller.Really the Blues, the jive-talking memoir that Mezzrow wrote at the insistence of, and with the help of, the novelist Bernard Wolfe, is the story of an unusual and unusually American life, and a portrait of a man who moved freely across racial boundaries when few could or did, “the odyssey of an individualist . . . the saga of a guy who wanted to make friends in a jungle where everyone was too busy making money.”“American counter-culture classic Really the Blues [is] 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.” —Martin Riker, The Wall Street Journal

“The mighty Mezz was at once the greatest digger, the greatest chronicler, the greatest celebrator of [jazz] 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.” —Albert Goldman,High Times

“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 l#S