Music Career
Mezzrow organized and took part in recording sessions involving black musicians in the 1930s and 1940s including Benny Carter, Teddy Wilson, Frankie Newton, Tommy Ladnier and Sidney Bechet. Mezzrow's 1938 sessions for the French jazz critic Hugues Panassie involved Bechet and Ladnier and helped spark the 'New Orleans revival'.
In the mid-1940s Mezzrow started his own record label, King Jazz Records, featuring himself in groups that usually included Sidney Bechet and, often, trumpeter Oran 'Hot Lips' Page. Mezzrow also can be found and heard playing on six recordings by Fats Waller. He appeared at the 1948 Nice Jazz Festival.
Following that, he made his home in France and organized many bands that included French musicians like Claude Luter, as well as visiting Americans such as Buck Clayton, Peanuts Holland, Jimmy Archey, Kansas Fields and Lionel Hampton. In 1953, in Paris with ex-Basie trumpeter Buck Clayton, he made a recording of the Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues."
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