JELLY ROLL MORTON (1885 - 1941)

 

"I invented jazz in 1902."
-- Jelly Roll Morton

Somehow this seems to be evolving into a recurring series. I was thinking about New Orleans, how it was almost completely destroyed and what had remained of what it once was. By the same time I stumbled over an old record I once snatched up from a flea market for a penny - some number 18 of an old Jazz-series about the great masters of "early jazz". On it were remarkably happy and original songs by a piano man with the ominous name of Jelly Roll Morton. The sparkling and rolling (no pun intended) piano figures made me research a little more and I found an interesting life and great personality all in one. A life that deserved being put into this series for no other reason than that it still shines even if most people have forgotten all about it. Other than that there is almost no connection to Howard Hughes or Buckminster R. Fuller, except the fervor and energy with which this man followed down his private path.

Jelly  Roll Morton was one of the most important figures associated with the transition of ragtime to jazz. He became notorious for his bragging and exaggeration, which did not endear him to his fellow musicians, but he was nevertheless a highly talented individual and wrote many of the early jazz classics. Morton's date of birth, and his surname, is disputed by researchers, but one possibility is that he was born Ferdinand Joseph La Menthe in Guflport, Louisiana on 20th September of 1885. He adopted the name Jelly Roll Morton himself, firstly as a business name and secondly so that he would not become nicknamed "Frenchy". His family had been in New Orleans for over a century, since the time whent he area west if the Mississippi was owned by France. 

As a youngster, Ferdinand was surrounded by the sounds of classical music, and he soon began trying to play instruments by himself. He began with the harmonica, when he was five years old, and was having guitar lessons by the time he was six. By the age of seven, he was playing in local string bands, and three years later he switched to piano.

By the age of fifteen, Ferdinand had discovered the nightlife of New Orleans. He had also discovered that his impressive skills on the piano could earn him a lot more money on the bars and bordellos of New Orleans than regular work would. This brought him into conflict with his parents, and a short time later, he found himself thrown out of the family home. Beginning by working in the bars and bordellos of Storyville, Morton quickly learned to survive by his piano playing skills, by hustling at pool and gambling. He moved from town to town as necessary, searching for new "suckers" to seperate from their money, or to avoid dangerous individuals he had crossed.  Other lines of work attributed to him included pimp, vaudeville comedian and small time drug runner.

To maintain his reputation as the best of the piano players, Morton wrote his own songs, not having them published at the time; this was to prevent others claiming them as their own work. Morton would have chance to record them later and many now are classics, a century after being composed. by around 1912, Morton had begun writing down his arrangements in the new "hot" style in order to work with other musicians, and he was having them published. By 1917, when Morton decided to move to the West Coast, his income from his music and his other activities was beginning to make him a wealthy man.

The Red Hot Peppers

 Always a man to go his own way, Jelly Roll Morton departed for California at a point, when most of the other New Orleans jazz musicians headed for Chicago. The trigger for the leaving of New Orleans was the closing down of Storyville, the area of New Orleans, that had been given over to "prostitution and vice" by Alderman Sidney Story. Louis Armstrong and King Oliver were setting Chicago alight with their "hot" jazz and inspiring a generation of white college kids like Bix Beiderbecke and Benny Goodman. Meanwhile, Jelly Roll Morton, was playing the dance halls and cabarets in cities from Los Angeles to Vancouver. After five years of playing the "high class joints" of the West Coast, Morton had hones his skills to the point, where he was ready to make permanent recordings of his talents, and in 1922, he moved to Chicago.

Jelly Roll Morton's recording career began in 1923, in Richmond, Indiana with some solo performances for the Gennett label that highlightes his originality and two performances with a sextet (Big Foot Ham and Muddy Water Blues). Over the next few years, he became famous for his performances with his outfit the Red Hot Peppers, which at times included Kid Ory, Omer Simeon, Barney Bigard, Johnny St. Cyr, Bud Scott and Johnny and Baby Dodds. His songs composed for the 78rpm medium took special advantage of the new 3 minute limitation. They were a triumphant fusion of composition and improvisation. Pieces like Grandpa's Spells, Black Bottom Stomp, and The Pearls are masterly examples of Morton's creative talents, not only as a composer and arranger but also as a piano player. These works were ingeniously conceived so as to yield a maximum variety of texture and timbre without sacrificing clarity of form; furthermore, unlike most jazz performances in those days, they were carefully rehearsed. Particularly noteworthy is the manner in which Morton provides opportunities for all the performers to contribute significant solos without losing sight of the overall structure and a balance between solo and ensemble. His own unique contribution to the jazz corpus was the playing of sensitive countermelodies, that was unprecedented in jazz up to this time. Morton relocated to New York in 1928 and continued to record for Victor records until 1930. His New York version of the Red Hot Peppers included sidemen like Buddy Miley, Pops Foster and Zutty Singleton.

The more success Morton had, the more he gace free rein to his flamboyant personality, however, and he began to become unpopular with his fellow musicians. Perhaps his most outragous claim was that he "invented jazz in 1902". His increasing difficulty in recruiting musicians, coupled with the Depression, meant that Morton's fortunes began to wane in the mid 1930's, and the rise of swing was a further blow to him. The audiences turned from the older outfits to the new format of the big band. He fell upon hard times and even lost the diamond he had in his front tooth, but ended up playing piano in a dive bar in Washington D.C.

By the end of 1930, however, interest in early New Orleans jazz was beginning to increase, and Morton's career took off again. In 1938 Alan Lomax recorded him for a series of interviews about early jazz for the Library of Congress, but it wasn't until a decade later that these interviews were released to public. Sadly, his health was deteriorating as quickly as his success was increasing, and Jelly Roll Morton died in Los Angeles on 10 July 1941, just before the Dixieland revival that rescued so many of his peers from musical obscurity. He blamed his declining health on a vodoo-spell.