Mezz Mezzrow.

THE 'SMALLER' MUSIC WHEN INVIDIOUS comparisons are made between the "larger" and "smaller" forms of music, I like to recall that Brahms took more than a casual view of ragtime; that the conductor Ernest Ansermet in 1919 saw in the jazz arabesquez of Sidney Bechet the music of the future; that Shostakovich incorporated the strains of "Tea for Two" into one of his compositions (ditto Khachaturian with Rodgers & Hart's "Lover"); that Stravinsky wrote an Ebony Concerto for the Woody Herman dance band; and that Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue has become a concert-hall standard.

But in a sense, this misses the point. What is of greater significance is that on their own, the "smaller" forms--whether they be jazz and blues, the cante hondo, the existentialist songs of the St.-Germain boites, or the evocations of the Tin Pan Alley minnesingers--have a place in the pantheon of music. The "smaller" music does not, like that of Beethoven and Berlioz, storm the citadel of Heaven or hack its way to the soul, but it has its rich vocabulary with which to address the human condition.

Take, for example, the music of Mezz Mezzrow. Born Milton Mesirow, of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Mezz grew up in the urban jungles of Chicago, learning to play the clarinet in reform school. His Torah and Talmud were the instrumental blues that moved up from New Orleans during World War I. For him--and he could be more than a little abrasive on the subject--black was not only beautiful but all there was in jazz. In his lifetime, he made only a scattering of records--most notably the extraordinary and historic sides he cut for Hugues Panassie, the French jazz critic and regisseur, which brought together Sidney Bechet, Tommy Ladnier, James P. Johnson, and other caretakers of the blues-cum-New Orleans genius.

Mezz dominated every record he made--his clarinet ranging from a warm chalumeau register so typical of New Orleans clarinet to the reedy vibratos of the high, and surging with his inexhaustible inventions and his empathy with the tradition that obsessed him. His best recording, an LP entitled Mezz Mezzrow, now rescued from oblivion by DRG Records (157 West 57th Street, New York, N.Y. 10019), which is lovingly reissuing much of the great jazz stored away in the vaults of Disques Swing and French and British Pathe, was recorded in Paris at the Schola Cantorum in the mid-Fifties when New Orleans jazz was considered dead.

Mezz is backed by a small group of French musicians who understood what New Orleans was about often far better than their American counterparts, and together they capture the spirit and the letter, the mind and the guts, of what was the source of all jazz. Two slow and two fast blues make up the album, and they seize and hold the plangency and the exhilaration, the involved musical textures that have not really been heard since the days when the riverboats brought to Chicago the Louis Armstrongs, the Johnny Dodds, the Jimmie Noones, the Zutty Singletons, and their kleine Nachtmusik (DRG-Disques Swing SW 8409).

Jazz evolved as it moved, its instrumental techniques becoming smoother and more sophisticated--and this found its apotheosis in the four-to-the-bar music of the small bands that played in the basement clubs of New York's 52nd Street until bebop corrupted it and rock killed it. The best of it was quit and restrained--a distillate and purification of Harlem bigband jazz--tightly arranged but with wide latitude for the solo performer. A DRG release from French Pathe masters, Eartha Kitt, Doc Cheatham, Bill Coleman comes from the top drawer of this genre. (Be not dismayed by the "Eartha Kitt" of the album's title; she is unobtrusive as the vocalist on four cuts, with none of the show-biz brash that later brought her fame as a showcased "stylist.")

Neither Doc Cheatham nor Bill Coleman ever made the Downbeat polls of the Thirties and Forties. They were musicians' musicians, better known to the aficionados of the Hot Club de France than to a wide American jazz public. Their trumpet playing was always in perfect taste, eschewing the pyrotechnics that mar so much jazz horn--marked by clean intonation and a light vibrato, improvisations that strayed only slightly from the melody, and the subtlest of phrasing. In this album, their style is beautifully defined on "Doc's Blues" (Cheatham) and "Blues in My Heart" (Coleman). Color it memorable (DRG SW 8410).

It is not as great a leap as it might seem from jazz to Gilbert Becaud, Paris's monsieur cent mille volts. Singer, composer, arranger, lyricist, Resistance fighter, antic performer, and star of the French music halls, Becaud was just a reputation to me until I heard Mon copain, DRG's sampler of his best work--a successor to the post-St.-Germain school that produced Juliette Greco, Edith Piaf, Germaine Montero, and Jacques Prevert.

I confess that I was surprised by how deeply moved, affected, and joyed I am by this cigarette-and-whisky-voiced present-day trouvere whose style combines singing and speaking, who hits the downbeat of each measure like a drum, and whose Gallic bravura touches the anguish of love and irony and death. "Je me fous de la fin du monde et j'aimerai pas la fin de toi," Becaud sings--but it is not necessary to understand the words. The mood and the meaning are in the delivery--a delivery full of the shock of recognition. You find it in the sung blues and in the flamenco (DRG 52L 5199).

Other DRG albums of interest:

Lena Horne. This is a batch of lovely standards, recorded in 1962, when the lady's interests were still in music and performance, not political activism. Lena Horne walked the thin line between jazz and pop, but she gives her all to such great tunes as "Stormy Weather," the Ellington-Webster "I Got It Band and That Aint Good," the rollicking "The Lady is a Tramp, and "Love Me or Leave Me."

Together with Music. This is an "archive recording" of that TV special by Noel Coward and Mary Martin. It loses something without the video, but Null is always witty and delightful, though Mary Martin can never match him. They fondly traverse the Coward oeuvre and some pleasant oldies.

Alberta Hunter. One of the genuine old blues singers, Alberta Hunter went polite, but in her old age returned to belt them out again. These recordings were made with a British dance orchestra that had not yet been vitalized by visiting American jazzmen, and Alberta Hunter is equally pallid. But as a period piece it merits attention.

Cut! Volumes 1 and 2. These are outtakes from some of the unforgettable movie musicals. They feature a galaxy of the singers who made these musicals a part of our culture. You will find Judy Garland, June Allyson, Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Gene Kelly, and many others in songs that, for one reason or another, were cut from the sound tracks. Nostalgic and fun.