Word: mezze
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Among jazz fans, and they seem to be plentiful on both sides of the quadrangle, the super colossal attraction is the appearance of a body of top-notch improvisers at Lowell House. Art Hodes and Mezz Mezzrow head the list of jam specialists, so don't be surprised if you see a mad dash in the direction of Lowell House right after inspection...
...face of this situation the efforts of the Lowell Freshmen purists are all the more commendable. They're well on their way toward obtaining the necessary angels and permission, and some Saturday soon they hope to have Art Hodes and his band, including Mezz Mesirow, down from the Lawrence Hofbrau, for an afternoon-long jam session. As Johann Cristoph Friedrich von Schiller used to say, "Freude...
...rest of the band includes Mezz Mezzrow (clarinet), Jack Bland (guitar), George Lugg (trombone), and of course Hodes at the keys. It is interesting to note that all are veteran Chicagoans of the old school (Mezzrow, who was the original ringleader of that crowd, is now pressing 44 but still plays that highly controversial clarinet as agilely as he did 20 years...
Bland was a member of the original mind City Blue Blowers whose records sold in the millions, and Mezzrow and Lugg were in the ill-fated band which Mezz started in the fall of 1937 at the Uproar House in New York--the only full-sized mixed dance band ever to work regularly at a night club. There were six Negroes and seven white musicians in that group, but the club was padlocked over an irregularity in the liquor license, and the band had to break up, never to reform...
Perhaps the most convincing flaw in the fantasy of the Chicago style's existence today, is the wide discrepancy in the styles of the Chicagoans. Contrast, for example, Pee-wee Russell and Mezz Mesirow, who is in partial retirement from his music, the "dirty" clarinet and the pure, reminiscent of New Orleans...