The outrageous stories of Jelly Roll Morton's turbulent life often overshadow his role as one of the creators of early jazz. A new book reminds us of his contribution.
By PHILIP BOOTH
Published May 15, 2003
Wynton Marsalis, Keith Jarrett and a few other jazz artists occasionally grab headlines and generate heat with pronouncements about their art, and sometimes because of their music.
But not even innovators Miles Davis or Charles Mingus, or their swing predecessors, came off as audacious as Jelly Roll Morton, the New Orleans piano wizard generally accepted as jazz's first composer. Ask him, and he'd tell you: He invented jazz.
"I myself happened to be the creator (of jazz) in the year of 1902," wrote Morton, his spoken words paraphrased and typed out by longtime fan and friend Roy Carew, in a letter published in the August 1938 issue of Down Beat magazine. The missive, a variation on the seasoned raconteur's familiar claims, was fired off after W.C. Handy was praised as the creator of jazz and blues in a nationally broadcast radio show.
Exaggerations like that, and the series of colorful interviews Morton gave the same year to Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress, served to shift attention from the musician's well-earned reputation as a chief architect of early jazz, along with the likes of trumpeter Joe "King" Oliver and saxophonist Sidney Bechet.
By the time Morton died in Los Angeles in 1941, a pauper forced to remove a diamond from a tooth to pay for medical bills, his gritty, colorful, polyphonic sound had long fallen out of favor, and he was a has-been. His stories about his life as a pistol-carrying gambler, pimp, womanizer and brothel entertainer in the Crescent City's tough, hedonistic Storyville district trumped his artistic achievements, at least in the popular imagination.
That's the theme sounded by Howard Reich and William Gaines in Jelly's Blues: The Life, Music and Redemption of Jelly Roll Morton. Reich, longtime jazz critic for the Chicago Tribune, and Gaines, formerly a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for the newspaper, aim to "dispel the myths, partial truths, and distortions" associated with the subject of their revisionist biography.
Lomax's Mister Jelly Roll, the first full biography of Morton, published in 1950, "codified many of the myths," according to Reich and Gaines. Morton, in recent years, has been called a brute and a bully (in Ken Burns' multipart jazz documentary on PBS), a cliche, a racist and worse.
The co-authors, making use of a cache of previously unavailable correspondence, photos and other documents made public when eccentric collector William Russell died in 1992, handily succeed in rescuing Morton's reputation as a musical visionary, particularly with their detailed explications of his late-career compositions and recording sessions.
In the process, Reich and Gaines churn out a compelling tale about a larger-than-life character, an astonishing, wild rise followed by a long, immensely sad decline, impending doom writ large on the final pages of the story.
Morton, a light-skinned Creole born Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe (in 1885 or 1890), played harmonica and guitar before moving to piano at age 10. He studied classical music before switching to ragtime and blues, encouraged by godmother Eulalie Hecaut, a voodoo practitioner.
Kicked out of his home at 16, he soon made a name as an unbeatable piano ace, card shark and all-around hustler, eventually borrowing his moniker from other black vaudevillians. By 1905, he had completed, but not yet published, two important compositions, New Orleans Blues and the influential King Porter Stomp. The latter, as played in 1935 by Benny Goodman from a Fletcher Henderson arrangement, helped usher in the swing era.
Reich and Gaines, who also detail the creation of Wolverine Blues and other Morton tunes, deserve kudos for their direct, evocative descriptions of the music: "These were neither the fiery stomps with which Morton had jolted Chicago's South Side in the mid 1920s nor the lazy blues reveries with which he had brought a distinctly Southern sensibility north," they write about Morton's last pieces, not played publicly until 1998, in New Orleans. "This was something radically different, a plush, sumptuous ensemble music, with reeds and brass forming gleaming instrument choirs, the band's phrases neither fast nor slow but gently pressing forward, above an undertow of deep swing rhythm."
The authors, throughout, weave carefully worded analyses of Morton's compositions and recordings with telling anecdotes, background color and historical details, relating his triumphant stand in Chicago, from 1923 to 1928, incessant road traveling, turbulent relationships and less productive periods in Washington and New York.
Jelly's Blues also serves as a reminder of how much Morton, and other African-American musicians, suffered at the hands of white profiteers. In his case, he was exploited by sibling Chicago music publishers Walter and Lester Melrose, who cavalierly - and illegally - named themselves as co-writers of his tunes.
And for most of his career, Morton was denied membership to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. At the time, ASCAP routinely withheld royalties from black songwriters. It's yet another ugly chapter in the history of the American music industry.
-- "Jelly's Blues: The Life, Music and Redemption of Jelly Roll Morton," by Howard Reich and William Gaines, DaCapo Press, $26, 256 pages.
BOOK REVIEW
Jelly's Blues: The Life, Music and Redemption of Jelly Roll Morton
By Howard Reich and William Gaines[Last modified May 14, 2003, 12:47:04]
