Jelly Roll Morton

Jazz musician

• Born: October 20, 1890
• Birthplace: New Orleans, Louisiana
• Died: July 10, 1941
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

A central figure in the development of jazz and a master of the Dixieland style, Morton is generally considered to be the first published composer in the history of jazz and one of the first major jazz musicians to be recorded.

Early Life

Jelly Roll Morton was born Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe in New Orleans, Louisiana, to a Creole family, and he displayed musical talent at an early age. He claimed to have learned a variety of instruments, including the harmonica and the guitar, before settling on and beginning his mastery of the piano at the age of ten. Although no details are known concerning his formal musical training, the renowned New Orleans musician Tony Jackson, according to Morton, profoundly influenced him. In 1902, he played ragtime, quadrilles, and popular dances in the bordellos of Storyville. His great-grandmother, with whom he had been living since the death of his mother, disowned Morton for such activities, and he began to travel the South in 1904.

Morton quickly made a name for himself as an itinerant pianist, a gambler, a hustler, and a notorious womanizer, and he performed in such cities as New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis, and Kansas City. He made his way to Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York City by 1911; to Chicago by 1914; and westward to San Francisco and Los Angeles by 1917. Though Morton was involved in a number of financial endeavors, some of a questionable nature, much of his musical activity during these years was working in vaudeville productions and minstrel shows, leading his own bands, and performing as a solo pianist. At this time, Morton’s career as a jazz composer began in earnest, with the publication of his fox trot “The Jelly Roll Blues” in 1915. It was not until he finally returned to Chicago in 1923, however, that he began to achieve serious recognition as a jazz icon.

Life’s Work

Prior to his return to Chicago in 1923, the same year his “Wolverine Blues” was published, Morton had established his mature compositional style. In addition to displaying elements of ragtime, blues, and minstrelsy, his musical language was influenced by African American folk songs, hymns, spirituals, and the Creole music of his native New Orleans. As such, Morton’s music was akin to that of other jazz musicians of his day, specifically those of the Dixieland variety. Setting his music apart from that of his contemporaries, however, was what he famously referred to as the “Spanish Tinge,” by which Morton meant the incorporation of Caribbean musical elements, specifically the habanera rhythm.

With this signature sound and his exceptional skills as a jazz composer, Morton entered the recording studio, expanding his already busy career as a performer and bandleader. The majority of these early recordings, made in 1923 and 1924, were for solo piano and included such Morton originals as “The Jelly Roll Blues,” “Wolverine Blues,” “King Porter Stomp,” “Grandpa’s Spells,” “Kansas City Stomp,” “The Pearls,” and “Frog-I-More Rag.” In 1926 and 1927, with a small group of freelance musicians known collectively as the Red Hot Peppers, Morton made recordings that best demonstrated his abilities as a composer and an arranger and as a skilled improvisational jazz artist. Included among these tracks, all recorded by the Victor Talking Machine Company, were arrangements of some of his earlier solo works and works by other jazz musicians that he had arranged for ensemble, including Charles Luke’s “Smokehouse Blues,” Anita Gonzales’s “Dead Man Blues,” and King Oliver’s “Doctor Jazz.” The 1926 recording of Morton’s “Black Bottom Stomp” was a compendium of his musical aptitude and a masterpiece of Dixieland jazz. These recordings also demonstrate the three categories into which Morton himself divided his works: blues, stomps, and Spanish Tinge.

Following his move to New York City in 1928, Morton’s career began to suffer, at first because of a scarcity of musicians of the caliber with whom he had worked in Chicago and later because of the recording industry’s decline during the Great Depression. Concurrently, though his music remained in the repertoire of several notable musicians of the day, Morton’s inability to adapt to new developments in the jazz idiom proved detrimental. His final recordings with the Red Hot Peppers, though a different lineup from the one he had had in Chicago, were made in 1930. By the time he moved to Washington, D.C., in 1935, Morton was largely forgotten, although a brief stint as the manager of a local jazz club allowed him to remain connected musically. Further, a series of interviews he gave to folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax in 1938 rejuvenated Morton’s career to the point that he returned to the studio in 1939 and 1940. The resulting recordings consisted of pieces for solo piano, several ensemble numbers, and a handful of songs. This revival was short-lived, however, because of Morton’s rapidly deteriorating health and his subsequent death from asthma during a visit to Los Angeles in 1941.

Significance

Morton’s accomplishments are often overshadowed by his boldly exaggerated claim that he invented jazz, just one of many such self-serving hyperboles he offered during his career. Morton may safely be considered the first significant composer of jazz music, however, with “The Jelly Roll Blues” (1915) probably being the first published jazz composition in history. His adherence to the musical traditions of his native New Orleans, combined with those of his African American heritage, helped to solidify and popularize the Dixieland style. At the same time, Morton’s mature musical voice, developed fairly early in his career, along with his involvement in the burgeoning recording industry, definitively established him as a seminal force in the early history of jazz.

Particularly revealing of Morton’s impact on the history of American culture are more than eight hours of interviews and musical numbers he recorded with Lomax in 1938 for the Library of Congress. These recordings, which earned two Grammy Awards following their 2005 release on compact disc, provide an invaluable source of information on Morton’s involvement in the early development of jazz music. In addition, he has been the subject of two Broadway musicals, including the award-winning Jelly’s Last Jam (1992), and he has been portrayed in a variety of fictional works. Morton was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.

Bibliography

Lomax, Alan. Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz.” Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. In its fourth edition, Lomax’s classic biography, based largely on his 1938 interviews with Morton, is a readable, informative, and updated consideration of the musician.

Pastras, Phil. Dead Man Blues: Jelly Roll Morton Way Out West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pastras reconsiders the two periods in Morton’s life spent in California, the first from 1917 to 1923 and the second during his last two years of life, partially through the use of newly discovered letters and documents.

Reich, Howard. Jelly’s Blues: The Life, Music, and Redemption of Jelly Roll Morton. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2003. Focusing less on Morton’s personality and more on his role as a musician, Reich pays particular attention to the composer’s final years, including his musical development and the struggle to revive his career.