Messin’ with Mezz

Sunday, October 14 – 4:30 p.m.
which way west? Sunday concert series

Gerry Fialka & jazzbos reinvent the seminal music book Really The Blues by Mezz Mezzrow (Louis Armstrong’s herbalist) and Bernard Wolfe (cybernetics pioneer) with LIVE music, readings and rare film clips. Mezz influenced everybody from Henry Miller to the Beats to Tom Waits to gangster rappers.

Wolfe’s words best describe what’s on tap in Really the Blues – “Not very many people have gotten a good look at their country from that bottom-of-the-pit angle before, seen the slimy underside of the rock. It’s a chunk of Americana, as they say, and should get written. It’s a real American success story, upside down: Horatio Alger standing on his head. In a real sense, Mezz, your story is the plight of the creative artist in the USA. — to borrow a phrase from Henry Miller…It’s the odyssey of an individualist, through a land where the population is manufactured by the system of interchangeable parts. It’s the saga of a guy who wanted to make friends, in a jungle where everybody was too busy making money an dodging his own shadow.”

Clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow jams with Duke Ellington
(and that’s Dizzy Gillespie down front!)