Mezzrow resolutely turns his back on the more “advanced” evolution of the whites, chooses to be big in what is to him a small pond. The implication, of course, is that sex is unclean among whites because they are not animals, but beings created for better things. To the white man, the Negro is an elemental animal for whom sex is “clean” just as it is “clean” for all animals. In a passage that really cracks open the core of the book-and offers Mezzrow's personal solution-he says: “Songs like Tony Jackson's show the Negro's real artistry with his prose, and the clean way he looks at sex, while all the white songs that ever came out of whorehouses don't have anything but a vulgar slant and an obscene idiom.” Obviously, for all the changes he has made in his life, Mezzrow still has the white man's concept of the Negro. And it is not only in matters of music that Mezzrow glorifies the Negro, but also in matters of life. What really disturbs me about the conduct of the C.R.C. Really the Blues, Mezzrow Says: I Was the Only White Man in the Crowd rom the time that Mezz Mezzrowfirst heard Sidney Bechetplaying with the Original New OrleansCreole JazzBand in Chicagoin 1918, he nursed a burning ambition to record with him, inspired by the duets Bechet played with the band’s clarinettist Fleader, Lawrence Dewey. He has rejected Jewish life to such an extent that he repudiates Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson on racial rather than aesthetic grounds. its history is immersed in the race issue and Mezz Mezzrow, Norman Mailer. Unlike the Tin Pan Alley Jewish composer who uses his music to crash society, Mezzrow employs jazz to underscore his particularism, his differences from the majority.

To him, jazz is the irrational attribute of a race-Negroes can play it, whites cannot.īut by becoming a Negro, he did more than simply justify himself as a jazz musician-he was able to protest effectively against both his Jewishness and the whole idea of integration. He embraced the whole black-white schism, finally went to live and marry in Harlem.

He rejected his Jewishness and became a professional Negro.

Really the blues mezzrow