Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton was a New Orleans French Creole born Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe (October 20, 1890 / July 10, 1941). He was an American virtuoso pianist, bandleader, and composer of songs including “Whining Boy Blues,” “King Porter Stomp,” “The Pearls” and “The Crave, ”Alabama Bound,” “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor,” “My Gal Sal,” and various other rags, blues, stomps, marches and stride numbers. . Morton was a highly intelligent, colorful character whose business card referred to him as the "Originator of Jazz."
New Orleans
He was (along with Tony Jackson) one of the best regarded pianists in the Storyville District early in the 20th century. According to Morton, Jackson was the only pianist "in the world" better than he.
In his prime through the 1920s, Mr.
Jelly Roll was at the the top of his game as a composer and piano player, making money handily to the point where he could afford custom tailored suits, new cars, and other trappings of musical success.
He recorded numerous sides for Victor Records and fronted a number of jazz bands in New Orleans, New York City and Washington DC including the Red Hot Peppers and The Incredibles. But his personality – unlike that of, say, African American bandleader King Oliver – was not amenable to band leadership, the reason why he couldn't hold onto a band for very long.
By the late 1930s, at age 48, he had become reduced to penury – thanks in part to the rise of the big bands, the ascent of the vocal blues idiom and the cultivation of blues shouters and chanteuses like Big Joe Turner and Bessie Smith. Morton, with his nearly purely instrumental oeuvre -- was nevertheless hoping for a second chance at the brass ring.
The Library of Congress interviews
Jelly Roll Morton wandered off the street into the Library of Congress's Coolidge Auditorium one warm May day in 1938. He was intent on speaking to someone whom he believed had the power of righting what he viewed as a skewed history of American jazz and therby restore his rightful place as the prime mover, the Emperor of Jazz.
The very self-possessed Morton – he had changed his French Creole name years before -- lucked out on that day. His interlocutor was a smart and well-educated young guy with a musical family mission. Like papa John Lomax before him, Alan Lomax by his early 20s had already begun dedicating what would ultimately become a long and fruitful life to preserving that delicate candle known as American “roots” music, and he was succeeding like no one before or since.
The initial irony of their meeting is that Lomax was no fan of jazz: Numerous times, he had decried jazz as the musical Antichrist, supplanting, in his view, the many more native and rural folkways of the south. Lomax's strong initial predilection for roots music nearly forced Morton back home, where his story would have remained untold.
As the two men spoke, however, it became clear to Lomax – ever the ethnomusicological prospector – that lying within Morton's sometimes self-aggrandizing monologues was nested a history of American southern musical and folk culture as recalled from life in turn-of-the-century New Orleans that had never been written or recorded.
The September, 2005 release of The Complete Library of Congress Recordings of Jelly Roll Morton, arguably the most seminal figure in American music, takes full advantage of that chance meeting and presents its wealth of anecdote and music, history and cultural odyssey, courtesy of Rounder Records and the Lomax Archive.
It's to Lomax's prescience and documentarian's creativity that we owe a huge historical and musicological debt, for never before, and never again, will a man and a milieu exist quite like what's described inside these eight golden platters.
This very satisfying multimedia collection, which includes Lomax's 1950 biography, “Mr. Jelly Roll,” elaborate liner notes, music, talk, document facsimiles, photos and other ephemera, has been lovingly crafted. A huge Adobe Acrobat file on Disc 8 contains the entire transcript of the recordings as well as transcripts of conversations never recorded; photos of Morton and some of his peers; facsimiles of letters to and from Morton, including a letter to FDR outlining an ambitious series of benefit concerts to be held for down and out musicians.
Even though portions of the interviews have been issued on LP at various points over the years since they were first recorded, the recordings themselves were always at the mercy of the producers who selected and abridged the material and often suffered from artifacts introduced by the machinery Lomax used: battery-operated disc cutters that were notoriously unreliable in maintaining constant speed and pitch.
In this superbly produced edition, the recordings have been reissued in their entirety and laid down in their original recording order (May, June and December, 1938). Pitch has been corrected, and in many cases alternate masters used so that sound fidelity is almost all one could ask for in such a historic and entertaining record of a life in music.
From the elaborate die-cut grand piano packaging to the portfolio packaging of CDs, Lomax's book-length biography of Morton, and rewarding liner notes written by John Szwed in the form of a thinner, coffee table-size booklet, this is the definitive audio-and-text life story of an immensely talented and intelligent Louisiana Creole musician with keen observational powers and strong opinions.
Shafts of light grew long as they poured through the windows of the Library that May day in 1938 as Jelly began his tale – speaking in long and descriptive passages, singing in a rich baritone voice -- he seemed compelled to speak of a culture that was already history by 1938. Adding to his loquaciousness, no doubt, was the excellent whiskey Lomax was glad to provide to keep his guest's tongue wagging engagingly. “That's extraordinary whiskey!” shouts Morton at numerous points throughout the interviews as he told tales of his pool shooting prowess, his fear of certain New Orleans gangsters and pimps, his forthright opinions of other musicians.
Legacy
Two Broadway shows have featured his music, Jelly Roll and Jelly's Last Jam. The first draws heavily on Morton's own words and stories from the Library of Congress interviews. The latter show has created considerable controversy with its very fictionalized and unsympathetic portrayal of Morton, and the creator has been sued by Morton's heirs.
SOURCES
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