Results for "Mezz Mezzrow"

Mezz Mezzrow

Mezz Mezzrow was born in Chicago in 1899 and was one of that city's most popular clarinetists during the golden jazz age of the twenties. Many of Mezzrow's records reveal his deep feeling for the blues and his playing is characterized by well-thought lines, frequent agility and an appealingly acid tone, but despite touring regularly with various bands and with Louis Armstrong, his most notable contribution to jazz history is his autobiography, Really the Blues, written with Bernard Wolfe, first published in 1946. It is its unbounded vitality that so captures the revolution which jazz represented to the youth of Chicago in the twenties, and even more that of Harlem in the thirties and forties. He learned to play the saxophone in the Potomac Reformatory School where he was sentenced at the age of 16 for car theft

Sex & Drugs & Jazz & Jive: Top Ten Stash Records Albums

By CHRIS MAY

With all the transgressive flair you would expect of bohemian New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, Bernie Brightman's Stash Records made its name with a hugely entertaining series of sex and drugs-themed compilations of swing-era recordings. The first was Reefer Songs in 1976. But Brightman's legacy extends much further. There was a finite amount ...

New York Nights At Birdland Theater And Mezzrow

By MARTIN MCFIE

On West 44th street in midtown Manhattan, Johnny Valenti recently inaugurated the new Birdland Theater, which has been built downstairs, below his Birdland club. The seating is arranged with two chairs at each round table, the rearmost of which are high tops, ensuring a clear view of the well lit stage from every table in the ...

Martin Torgoff Discuss Bop Apocalypse

By STEVE PROVIZER

I recently reviewed Martin Torgoff's book Bop Apocalypse; Jazz, Race, The Beats and Drugs. Mr. Torgoff was kind enough to answer a few follow up questions. One of the things that jazz people still try to understand is why so many players became heroin addicts in the 40's and 50's, even after it was ...

Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats, and Drugs by Martin Torgoff

By STEVE PROVIZER

Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats, and Drugs Martin Torgoff 448 pages ISBN: 0306824752 Da Capo Press 2017 The vilification and suppression of marijuana and narcotics in the U.S. was fueled in the 20th century by a campaign that whipped up fear of “the other"--Mexicans, Caribbean islanders, South Americans ...