On Music
COOK, BRUCE
On Music JELLY ROLL AND THE BIRTH OF JAZZ BY BRUCE COOK They called him Jelly Roll (a euphemism for the sex organ). He was a whorehouse piano player, a pimp and an itinerant showman. Toward the...
...True, he didn't play the rags exactly as Joplin would have, yet no one could argue he did not do justice to the music...
...Because Jelly Roll wrote and recorded prolifically until a couple of years before his death, it is possible to trace the process with some precision...
...Lomax realized what a plentiful source of information and anecdote Morton might prove to be, and persuaded him to come to the Coolidge Auditorium and record his musical memoirs...
...What we do know is that as early as 1902 Morton added something distinctive to ragtime—the blues...
...The session lasted longer than either of them could have foreseen: Once Jelly Roll sat down at the grand piano, the stories and songs welled from him in an almost unceasing stream...
...I have compared the new album with a few Morton prototypes and Dapogny has followed them not just note-for-note, but with incredibly precise duplication of tempo, phrasing, attack, and touch...
...Pianist Billy Taylor was then an undergraduate at Howard, and he once told me of going with some friends to listen to the "old prehistoric monster...
...That was, after all, the very height of the national ragtime craze, and Jelly was always (to a fault) willing to give the folks what they wanted to hear...
...One that deserves mention is the loving effort by pianist Dick Hyman and a studio orchestra featuring the great jazz violinist Joe Venuti...
...He was certainly present at the creation...
...While Morton accomplished the synthesis by 1905, he did not abandon ragtime...
...If he hadn't been so dogged about "authenticity," a good album—and this is a fine effort—would have been an outstanding one...
...The very pretty melody is straight blues, and the Spanish coloring is present in an extended variation on the main theme...
...Nevertheless, listening to "Jelly Roll Blues" you feel it is jazz...
...Toward the end of his life he claimed to have invented jazz, and perhaps he did...
...I think he deserves this attention: Despite his serious shortcomings, in his playing and writing he was the direct link between turn-of-the-century ragtime and everything that flowed from it...
...Over an eight-week period he cut 116 78-rpm sides...
...A bridge passage in the middle of the number is pure jazz: The tempo changes to 4/4 and the strong bass figure is close to boogie-woogie...
...Once available in a series of LPs...
...Although brilliant on the keyboard and a fine singer in his day, Jackson is remembered, if at all, only as the composer of the old Fanny Brice hit "Pretty Baby...
...In their attempt to achieve absolute musical faithfulness, Dapogny and his Smithsonian associates went so far as to cut the album in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress, the site of Morton's longest and most justly celebrated recording date...
...In recent years, there have been a few worthy recordings aimed at reasserting Morton's succession to Joplin...
...Instead, they are the work of a young musicologist and teacher from the University of Michigan, James Dapogny, who has scrupulously recreated the sound and style of the originals...
...The Smithsonian would be doing us all a great, great turn if it were to release them once again...
...Chances are Jackson had already begun the process of adaptation and addition that brought forth jazz from rag...
...Ferdinand Joseph LaMenthe Morton, born in Gulfport, Louisiana in 1885, died a poor man in 1941...
...Jelly Roll Blues" of 1905 represents a further step in Morton's musical evolution...
...It took place in 1938, at a time when the pianist, down on his luck, was managing and playing at a Washington nightspot called the Jungle Club...
...Taken together, they comprise a rich treasure of reminiscence as well as an informative seminar in the musicology of jazz...
...Once rag and blues were combined, the chemical reaction began and jazz bubbled up out of the test tube...
...Frankly, though, I would rather he hadn't been quite so conscientious...
...Since Jackson did not record and chose not to publish any of his piano pieces, however, we will never know...
...In one of his initial compositions, "New Orleans Blues," written when he was only 17, both blues and rag are present...
...Between sets Jelly Roll would sit and regale him with tales of the beginnings of jazz in New Orleans...
...There was nothing called jazz when Morton first sat down at the piano of a New Orleans bordello sometime around 1900...
...Simplistic as it may sound, I suppose I am suggesting a formula: Ragtime plus blues equals jazz...
...real jazz, not a piano transcription of crude, back-country blues, or some primitive ur-jazz picked up from Storyville street musicians...
...Listening to Dapogny perform them, I yearned for a lighter touch, syncopation a little less jerky, a more flowing line...
...Incidentally, the piece is so oddly and heavily accented that it comes out almost as a tango, providing a good early example of the "Spanish tinge" Morton later said was essential to jazz...
...I wish Dapogny had shown the same initiative...
...There were, of course, many more components to the equation—in rhythm, for instance, the shift from the clipped 2/4 of ragtime to the more relaxed 4/4 of jazz—but these were refinements, stylistic niceties...
...The club attracted a mixed audience...
...Morton was an accomplished pianist for his day, but the style reproduced here with such exactitude is dated...
...these sides are currently out of print and have been for some time...
...He was one of the few true geniuses of American popular music, yet never achieved greatness...
...Still, Morton's seminal role in the development of jazz parallels Scott Joplin's contribution to ragtime...
...But Morton was to have uncharacteristically high praise for him, and cited him as an influence...
...The title is Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton: Transcriptions for Orchestra (Columbia M325287), and some of the selections present extraordinarily beautiful interpretations of Morton's music...
...Morton chords away at the piano, telling of Tony Jackson, Buddy Bolden and other heroes of New Orleans, and then provides samples of their music...
...Arrogant and egotistical, he abused his gift shamefully, quitting music entirely for long periods of time in favor of the sporting life, promoting himself unscrupulously, copyrighting the work of others in his own name, stealing licks and strains and incorporating them into his own compositions...
...They stayed on, soon found themselves under Morton's spell, and returned repeatedly...
...We hear a restlessly active right-hand line that is very much in the old ragtime style, playing against a left-hand harmonic foundation that is pure blues...
...Moreover, the individual touches in them—like the dissonances in "Grandpa's Spells" and the sudden shifts of tempo and mood in "Frog-I-More"—suggest that even strictly as a ragtime composer, Morton was second only to Scott Joplin...
...The top player in town then was Tony Jackson, a man nine years his senior...
...On and on he goes—playing, singing, telling it the way he wants it remembered...
...Jelly, who had grown up on the blues, included them in his repertoire at the sporting houses, and little by little integrated their unique harmonies and melodic lines into his music...
...Another one of those who came by and were transfixed was Alan Lomax, the folk curator for the Library of Congress...
...I was most aware of the deficiencies of his approach on three of the compositions?The Pearls," "Jungle Blues" and "The Crave.' They are among Morton's richest pieces, each offering so much in shades and subtleties that they seem to equal the piano writing Debussy and Ravel were doing at about the same time...
...These are not, as has been the case with most of the Collection's offerings, remastered versions of ancient recordings...
...And now that all America knows Joplin, there are signs of an effort to revive serious interest in Jelly Roll...
...Less pleasing to the ear, but no doubt more authentic, is a new album from the Smithsonian Collection, Piano Music of Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton (Smithsonian N 003...
...Morton, in other words, may merely have taken up his lead...
...Along with the usual crowd of good-timers came white and black jazz aficionados and a scattering of students from nearby Howard University...
...They expected to be amused, but were fascinated by what they heard...
...He continued to turn out songs like "Grandpa's Spells," "The Perfect Rag," "The Frog-I-More Rag," and many others...
...What made Joshua Rifkin's recent interpretations of Scott Joplin so fresh and exciting was precisely the contribution of Joshua Rifkin...
Vol. 59 • August 1976 • No. 17
