Mezz Mezzrow was a boy from Chicago who learned to playthe sax in reform school and pursued a life in music and a life of crime. Hemoved from Chicago to New Orleans to New York, working in brothels andbars, bootlegging, dealing drugs, getting hooked, doing time, producing records, andplaying with the greats, among them Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, andFats Waller. "Really the Blues," the jive-talking memoir that Mezzrow wrote at theinsistence of, and with the help of, the novelist Bernard Wolfe, is the story of anunusual and unusually American life, and a portrait 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 where everyone was toobusy making money. "