CITYFOLK

Jelly Roll Morton was the first great jazz artist. He was born in New Orleans October 20, 1890—as we now know after years of uncertainty—and grew up there, learning the musical traditions of the place that was in the forefront of the creation of the music that came to be known as jazz. He lived an eventful and musically productive and sometimes difficult life and died in 1941 just shy of his 51st birthday.

We can think of groups of material in Morton’s formidable output. First there were his early solo-piano recordings in 1923 and 1924. Apart from his compositions, these recordings show us an original, accomplished pianist and a true modern improvisor—someone whose improvisations created original melody, not merely embellishments of what already existed.

Second, there are the compositions themselves. The full listing of his compositions is impressive both in number and in the types of pieces they represent, from large-scale three-strain pieces that show a development and extension of ragtime’s organizing principles to songs of a typical popular-music type, to works for big band, to the unusual late 1930s GAN JAM, a theatrical piece that goes beyond the conventional dance-music repertoire that dominated jazz until the early 1940s. Further, the set of pieces is impressive for their variety and the compositional skill they show, introducing innovations, including cohesiveness, that go well beyond the means ragtime bequeathed to him.

Third, there are his recordings with bands and what they show about him as an arranger and organizer. His best recording group, Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers, a seven-piece group, made what many consider the finest New Orleans jazz recordings. These truly are miracles of the power and beauty of New Orleans style, representing its swing, its relaxed rhythmic feel even at very quick tempos, its orderliness and clarity in collective improvisation, its dignity, and its ability to accommodate even large-scale and atypically-conceived pieces, his own. As Louis Armstrong and King Oliver did, Morton turned to the early big band, three saxes, three brass and four rhythm, as his touring and recording group—he’d been touring with such groups for years—as the vogue of New Orleans-style music was fading. These groups themselves were often marginal as performing groups and failed to show to advantage Morton’s continuing output as a composer.

Fourth, a special category, there are the eight hours of recordings he made at the Library of Congress with music historian Alan Lomax. With Morton sitting at the piano, playing and talking, this series captured his view of the history of jazz, a huge amount of early-jazz and folk music and lore, Morton’s philosophical and theoretical views on jazz, his recollections of the lives and playing styles of musicians he heard growing up, his abilities as a jazz singer, and some of the best, most masterly extended improvising he did on recordings.

By itself, any one of these bodies of work--the piano solos, the compositions, the band recordings, the Library of Congress interviews--would assure him an estimable position in the history of jazz. But he did them all.

Born Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, October 20, 1890, Morton grew up in a Creole family in New Orleans, with among other advantages, hearing some classical music in concert settings and formal piano lessons. His great-grandmother was largely responsible for raising him and when she found out that, as an early bloomer as a jazz pianist, he was working in New Orleans sporting houses, she expelled him from the family home in 1907, fearing he’d be a bad influence on his sisters.

For the next ten years he traveled throughout the U. S., working as a pianist, Vaudevillian—onstage and as a pit musician, refining his abilities as a musician, and creating a portfolio of compositions. At times other activities—pool hustling, gambling, running small scams like selling harmless and worthless patent medicine—tided him over. He played residencies in Chicago, from which his JELLY ROLL BLUES, the first published jazz composition, was issued in 1915.

Los Angeles was his headquarters from 1917 to early 1923. He continued his work, and traveling, as a musician but here also made a home with Anita Johnson Gonzalez, whom he sometimes referred to as his wife, and her mother. Morton seems to have worked with his wife in maintaining a brothel

He returned to Chicago in the spring of 1923 and began the most visible, successful part of his career as recording artist—pianist and bandleader, touring bandleader and publishing composer. He recorded for a number of labels—and made piano rolls—and his Red Hot Peppers recordings were among Victor’s best selling recordings, kept in print for years after they were first issued. In 1927 he married Mabel Bertrand, a dancer from New Orleans working in Chicago.

In 1928 he and Mabel moved to New York, increasingly the center of jazz business activity as the Democratic reform movement in Chicago took over and began clamping down on organized crime, particularly bootlegging, and graft. With New York as his home, he still toured and recorded and played in the city. In 1930, his Victor contract ran out, and like other jazz artists on what was now a record label fighting for its life during the early days of the Depression, Morton now no longer recorded for Victor, though until 1934 they continued to issue recordings he had made.

At first doing well performing, including as a sideman and having a radio show, Morton eventually lost money in other business enterprises and, in a reassertion of an element of his New Orleans roots, in an attempt to ward off the effects of a voodoo curse.

In 1935 he moved, without Mabel who remained in New York, to Washington, D.C. He began to play in, and manage, a small nightclub there named, among other things, the Jungle Club. Not at all a glamorous, well-known club, the place nevertheless allowed him to meet many people who would eventually help him and to begin to cultivate the image of a jazz pioneer who’d “been there” at the very beginning of jazz. Among those people were Roy J. Carew, who published some of his music and Alan Lomax who recorded him for the Library of Congress. Also significant there was that he was stabbed, and as a result was ordered by a doctor not to play the piano.

Through the 1930s bands had continued to record some of his music, notably the decades-old musically prophetic KING PORTER STOMP, so his name hadn’t dropped to total obscurity, at least among musicians.

In the late 1930s, as jazz was as prominent a component of America’s popular music as never before or since, there was a movement to look back at the jazz past and to earlier musicians, such as Morton, who had first brought the music to a wider public. Publicity from the Library of Congress recording sessions and a controversy with blues composer and publisher W. C. Handy via Robert Ripley’s “Believe it or Not” radio show, both covered in “Downbeat” magazine, gave Morton’s “jazz pioneer” image a boost, and he returned to New York in December, 1938 to make a comeback.

In New York he made some good recordings, under the name Jelly Roll Morton’s New Orleans Jazzmen for Bluebird, a Victor subsidiary in September 1939 and a solo album called “New Orleans Memories” on the small General label in December, 1939 These were both intended to work from the “jazz pioneer” persona, which Morton seemed to relish.

But in the meantime, in early 1939, he had assembled, rehearsed and auditioned for appearances with a big band of the instrumentation typical of the period, four saxes, five or six brass, and four rhythm. This put the band in the same realm as those of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman and the Dorseys, and signaled Morton’s intention to be thought of as a contemporary artist, not merely an interesting relic. But on the night that this band was to open, Morton collapsed from the heart aliment that was to dog him for the remaining two years of his life. As he underwent three-week hospital stay and a long recovery until he could be active again, this big band disbanded and its music, except for five arrangements Morton had written for it and one written by someone else, disappeared.

As Morton recovered, he turned to the available “jazz pioneer” opportunities, making the smaller-band New Orleans Jazzmen recordings and the solo piano album. In January of 1940, he made some small-band recordings for General, his last commercial recordings, and in July of 1940 he appeared on the NBC radio show “The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street,” playing an abbreviated version of his most famous piece, KING PORTER STOMP.

In November, 1940, driving his Cadillac and towing his Lincoln, Morton left for Los Angeles--again leaving Mabel behind--partly to benefit from the better climate. Unwell enough to have someone else play piano, he organized a band there. But before anything could come of this and before the New Orleans revival that benefited many of his colleagues could help him, he died July 10, 1941 in Los Angeles County General Hospital in Anita Gonzales’ arms.