10 FEBRUARY 2024 | THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD JELLY ROLL MORTON JELLY’S JAM BY FRANCESCO MARTINELLI Probably the first great arranger of jazz, Jelly Roll Morton, born Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe to a New Orleans Creole family circa 1890 (no birth certificate was recorded), from an early age played different instruments, sang on the street in a boys quartet and regularly attended the French Opera. At first, he rejected the piano as a girls’ instrument, but soon realized piano players had success with the ladies. The raunchy, dirty lyrics and the bluesy, clashing notes attracted him, so he began to play piano in the “houses” (the New Orleans brothels) of Storyville, known as the red-light district. His family, which found this unacceptable, threw him out, and thus followed a nomadic life, playing in: Biloxi, MS; Pensacola, FL; Memphis, TN; Houston, TX; Mobile, AL; Kansas City, KS; Oklahoma City, OK. On the road he began composing, including one of his earliest and most well-known tunes, “King Porter Stomp”. More travel followed, including a tour through the Midwest as a vaudevillian in blackface (pointedly because of his light complexion), before he established his base in Chicago, publishing “New Orleans Blues” (aka “N.O. Blues”) in 1914. His first success was transforming the bawdy “Tricks Ain’t Walkin’ No More” into the romantic “Someday Sweetheart”, a hit for blues singer Alberta Hunter. Morton was given second billing on his own tune, “The Wolverines”, later renamed and republished as “Wolverine Blues” and recorded by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. And in 1923, Morton followed with a string of hit-making recording sessions. “One day Jelly Roll Morton came in,” pianist Lil Hardin told Studs Terkel in a long interview (And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey). “Oh, boy, he sat down at the piano and his long skinny fingers were hitting those keys and he was beating out a double rhythm and the people were just going wild. I was going wild, too! Jelly Roll is the first pianist that influenced my playing.” (New Orleans Magazine, October 2018). In 1926 with his Red Hot Peppers, Morton waxed “Black Bottom Stomp”, “The Chant”, “Sidewalk Blues” and the orchestral “Grandpa’s Spells”. Prophetically, 1927’s “Jungle Blues”, based on a single chord, full of dissonances and, lacking harmonic progression, hinted at modal jazz to come. But around this time, Morton’s star began to fall: his move to New York was unsuccessful; RCA dropped him and Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington took his place in the public eye, while his “King Porter Stomp” became a huge Swing era staple and success for Fletcher Henderson and Benny Goodman, Morton receiving no royalties at all. Dismayed, Morton moved to Washington and soon emerged in writing protest letters (to the White House and in DownBeat), as well as going on record about being deprived of his rights financially. In Washington, Morton recorded his recollections of New Orleans at the Library of Congress for folklorist Alan Lomax—the first oral history of jazz in sound. While his previous excessive touches (e.g. the golden tooth, the bank roll) might be considered part of the building of Jelly Roll’s persona, his boasting in Washington, including infamously presenting himself in an obviously exaggerated manner as the inventor of jazz and blues, must be viewed in a context where he was deprived of his rights, his profit and the fact that Benny Goodman was crowned in the press as “the King of Swing”, riding on his own success of “King Porter Stomp”. Knifed by a customer in a Washington dive, he moved back to New York, where in 1940, in poor health, he recorded his last, superb, piano solos. Another relocation, to California, followed before his health further worsened and, in 1941, he died almost penniless. According to Howard Reich and William Gaines’ excellent biography, Jelly’s Blues: The Life, Music, and Redemption of Jelly Roll Morton, LEST WE FORGET (CONTINUED ON PAGE 35) NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION PROVIDED BY THE HISTORIC