These new programs offer a fresh perspective on
Morton and do not overlap significantly with my Vintage Jelly Roll
Morton programs in music content or subject matter.
Part 4: The Gospel of Saint Jelly (King Porter Stomp, Library of Congress, Remembering Buddy Bolden and Tony Jackson, Evaluating Morton's Significance)
Jelly Roll Morton was a pianist, bandleader and composer who had a major role in shaping Jazz.
Jelly Roll Morton created a large body of early Jazz tunes, sheet music and recordings that summed up the best of New Orleans Jazz. He composed a great deal of terrific music making a vast number of recordings of mostly superior musical quality for their day during a career spanning from the early, early days in New Orleans (before the year 1900) to 1941.
He was one of the most gifted musicans from New Orleans to attain worldwide fame -- though more so after his death than during his life. Morton was possibly the best musician of the 1920s at achieving an ideal symmetry between structure and improvisation. His records skillfully balance between song structure and improvised group polyphony -- and between ensemble and solo improvisation.
A peculiar and fascinating character, Jelly Roll was a gifted musician, major jazz pianist & composer, and helped shape Classic Jazz in the 1920s. His music, particularly his piano style, can be seen a bridge -- the missing link if you will -- between Ragtime, the music that preceded jazz in the late 19th century, and the classic jazz style that emerged in the 1920s.
The Red Hot Peppers records were an unprecedented creative achievement.
Morton’s late-1920s Red Hot Peppers discs were an unprecedented artistic tour de force. He wrote all the tunes and took full charge of arranging, rehearsing and directing the sessions with an iron hand. His brilliant composing and directing brought New Orleans improvisation and ensemble style to its finest representation on record -- even though the records were made a thousand miles away . . . and a decade after he’d left there. But having worked his youth primarily as a piano player in the bordellos of the famed Red Light District, Morton never led a band there. But he heard the Golden Era bands, occasionally picking up a trombone or bass drum to join a street parade himself.
By the early 1920s, despite his occasionally thuggish pose and obnoxious self-promotion, Morton had intellectually worked out clear, very firm theoretical ideas -- almost an ideology -- of what Jazz music was, what it wasn’t, and how it was played to best effect.
We’re fortunate that Jelly Roll Morton set out to make himself the most accomplished pianist and Jazz composer of his day. The Red Hot Peppers records were an unprecedented creative achievement. His innovative writing, arranging and directing, brought New Orleans ensemble style to the world, left an indelible mark on the 1920s, and are the crown jewels of Morton’s priceless legacy.
Morton is the missing link between Ragtime -- the music that preceded jazz in the late 19th century -- and Classic Jazz of the 1920s.
