商品簡介
Mezz Mezzrow was a Jewish boy from the slums of Chicago who learned to play the clarinet 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 picture 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 were everyone was too busy making money.”
作者簡介
Mezz Mezzrow (1899–1972) was born Milton Mesirow in Chicago. Beginning in the 1920s, he had a sometime career as a sideman in jazz groups. As a backer and producer of significant recordings by Frankie Newton, Teddy Wilson, Sidney Bechet, and Tommy Ladnier, among others, he helped to spark the New Orleans revival of the late 1930s. In the 1940s, Mezzrow started his own record label, King Jazz Records. He spent the last years of his life in Paris.
Bernard Wolfe (1915–1985) was a writer and, for a brief period, the personal secretary to Leon Trotsky. Wolfe is best known for his 1959 novel,The Great Prince Died, which is based on Trotsky’s assassination in 1940. Among his other books areThe Late Risers, In Deep, Limbo, and Logan’s Gone.
Ben Ratliff has been a jazz and pop critic for The New York Times since 1996 and has written three books:The Jazz Ear, Coltrane, and Jazz: A Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings. He lives in New York City.
