Louis Armstrong is given an affectionate and awe-struck treatment he comes across as an incredibly hard working professional and as an all around stand-up guy. We’re treated to his rapturous firsthand accounts of listening to Billie Holliday and Bessie Smith, whose records Mezzrow played over and over until he felt he understood the meaning of the blues. Mezz traded choruses, shared flophouse rooms, guzzled bottles of hooch, and sold sticks of high-quality “muta” in the streets of Chicago, New York, and New Orleans he jammed with many of the early jazz masters after hours, including the likes of Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, Eddie Condon, and the doomed, brilliant Bix Biederbecke. Though another Allen movie also comes to mind: Mezz spent decades making his living playing on numerous recordings, hustling to make ends meet between gigs, and had the Zelig-like knack to always make the scene, either as observer or participant. On occasion, Mezz’s anecdotes read like a prose version of Allen’s film Sweet and Lowdown. No less a jazz aficionado than Woody Allen listed it as one of his favorite books. Really The Blues, recently reissued by the NYRB in an extensive new edition with several appendices and a glossary of Mezz’s wigged-out hipster lingo, is the popular and raffish memoir the musician narrated to the sociologist Bernard Wolfe in 1946. His family was “as respectable as Sunday morning.” Not satisfied with the mundane version of the American dream, he quickly fell in love with the salacious and subversive underworld lure of what was about to be christened the Jazz Age.

Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow began life as a nice middle-class Jewish boy from Chicago growing up in the beginning of the last century. Really the Blues by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe. For all his memoir’s faults, Mezz Mezzrow’s rambunctious enthusiasm for jazz and the world it shaped and defined keeps the pages turning.

Really the blues mezzrow