April Features
Continued: New Orleans Memories
Exasperating errors also followed Lomax's self-aggrandizement, like the many misheard, misspelled and mangled names of people, places and things in Mister Jelly Roll. Gordon and Nemerov note this tendency in their study with an especially egregious example: Lomax, in releasing several 1941 recordings by McKinley Morganfield, one of the Coahoma study's great finds, got his nom de guitar wrong, misprinting it as "Muddy Waters" rather than "Muddy Water," thus fecklessly rechristening one of our major modern blues artists!
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To write about Jelly Roll Morton's life and art, I had to hack away an oppressive weight of gossip, slander, rumor, legend and outright lies, like overburden in strip mining. The weight of Alan Lomax's contributions is almost overwhelming. He made possible the whole re-evaluation of Morton with his biographies on disc and paper, but he also left us with a mass of material to be examined, analyzed and recalibrated. However, his work, along with that of many tireless collectors and researchers like Lawrence Gushee and his associates (see the website www.doctorjazz.freeserve.co.uk.) preserved maps and treasure troves for us. The problem is to chart Morton's clear achievements and to illuminate shadowy passages in his career.
Some writers tried to fill in details with assumptions about what Morton, a busy and indefatigable worker, must have been doing when he is not visible on the radar of historical evidence. One easy assumption is that he was busy with a colorful life of minor crime -- pimping, gambling, managing black-and-tan honky-tonks like The Cadillac or The Jupiter. He, after all, boasted about his scrapes with con games, pool-sharking, the girls of his "Pacific Coast Line," the "hard-hitting .38" he kept close at hand. But we also know Morton was a compulsive musician who often took on odd jobs -- silent movie accompanist, pit pianist for itinerant tent shows, drop-in player at local gin mills and barrelhouses -- just to keep his hand in and feed his voracious appetite for new music. It is more exciting and glamorous to make Morton "notorious" (one of his favorite terms) rather than portray him as a hardworking musical hustler busy practicing and scribbling down his many pages of "little black dots."
Another problem in putting Morton's complicated career in perspective for 21st century readers is to deal with the sheer volume of lies, innuendo and gossip accruing to his story. He was always at the eye of verbal tornadoes, and he attracted vicious attacks by his peers, by writers and critics and by a remote posterity that convicts him as a foolish figure in some allegorical pageant of African-American history. His mode of tall tale-telling was solidly within the venerable vernacular tradition of "signifyin'," and his comic, parodic and deliberately hyperbolic Creole self-inflation was despised by dicty musicians in the East. When he told stories of the bad men he met, when he related the mythic history of jazz (beginning with Buddy Bolden, Paul Bunyan of the cornet), he spoke in the tones of high comic irony, the mock-insults of the Dirty Dozens and the heroic-surreal "toasts" that defined the mythic heroes and heroines of African-American vernacular culture.
Rivals heard vain bragging and self-promotion in Morton's rambling comic epics, just as some listeners mistook the young Cassius Clay's raucous self-parodies as simple egoism and not the untrammeled joie de vivre of a wild spirit. Clearly, Morton loved a far-fetched tale and an astounding adventure that featured him as its hero (he was as much a story-telling enchanter as Othello), but his persona as the Grand Emperor of Signifyin' was a self-crafted pose like his vaudevillian persona as a hyper-sexual lover (the basis of the bawdy "Windin' Boy" and "Jelly Roll" monickers and his early act with Rosa Brown as "The Jelly Rolls" -- i.e., two really hot, really hip, really sexy young black entertainers).
Nonetheless, Morton has attracted heavy flak from prudes, jazz purists, historians, musicologists (sometimes defined as "people who can read music but who cannot hear it") and most recently from politically correct African-American cultural theorists. Morton was a self-assured and uninhibited storyteller, but this facet of his character was in stark contrast to another side -- the introverted loner who spent much of his time working on his music, the man who mentored much young talent, the musician who always appreciated other good musicians and who spent a great deal of his time not shining as a solo talent but working tirelessly as a band pianist who (in Baby Dodds's highest praise for good drumming) "played for the band."
In the midst of my project, as I was completing a draft of the book, came the terrible news of Hurricane Katrina and the shambolic political aftermath of this natural disaster. Between the fury of the windstorm and the mindless bumbling of the federal administration's "rescue" efforts, the city and its aged, fragile culture were nearly eradicated. For days I watched numbly as the continuing disaster unfolded on TV, ever more unbelieving.
Thinking about this deep, ineradicable scar on our national history and culture spurred me to finish writing on Morton and the golden age of New Orleans music, if only as an exercise in elegy. I tried to imagine what Morton, Armstrong, Bechet and other pioneers of jazz might have felt had they heard of Katrina and the failure of America to understand itself and its heritage, the abandonment of New Orleans and the enforced diaspora of its black population. As feeble as it sounds, I hoped my writing might memorialize the region and its genius in the story of an important and ever-loyal native, Ferd LaMothe.
While I uncovered plenty of examples of neglect and negative thinking about Morton to combat, the real joys of the project (to use a Morton coinage) came in small incidents reported by his peers and sidemen when they recalled his sunny personality and his geniality as a jazz master. One episode was recalled by reedman Albert Nicholas, one of Morton's favorite clarinetists. Late in the 1930s, while Morton was down on his luck and outside the mainstream of jazz, he visited Harlem haunts and ended up checking out the sounds on 52nd Street, the fabled "Swing Street" of the era. Nicholas gives an interesting, intimate account of Morton at work and at play:
Then we went where John Kirby's great little group was playing. Jelly sat at the bar. When he was listenin' he said, "Uh huh, I see, uh huh, they got something."
The boss said, "Would you like something to drink, Jelly?"
"I'll take a Coke."
When the band came off for intermission, Charlie Shavers, Billy Kyle, and all of them were smiling and [Russell] Procope, who had worked with Jelly in 1928, said, "I know you're gonna play one with us."
When they went back on, Jelly got on that piano, and with all due respects to Billy Kyle, it was a different sound. Without any practice, Jelly played all their scores, and the people said "Who is that?"
--William Russell, Oh, Mister Jelly, pp. 324-25)
Kirby's superb, highly skilled "big-little" band, a highly disciplined, subtle sextet, was a direct descendant, in a way, of the Red Hot Peppers, and Morton could well appreciate its brilliant combination of arranged and improvised hot music. For his whole career, he was ahead of the trends, in touch with the future of the music he claimed to have invented. While the world passed Morton by, he never lost touch with the music and with any possibility of returning to it.
His persistence and his refusal to give in to despair and doubt was enough to keep me writing. The small instances of Morton's stubborn adherence to his beliefs and his self-confidence have often been characterized as nothing but empty bravado or hollow boasting, but they are central to his life as a man and as an artist. The lyric voice we hear in all his compositions is serenely self-confident and basically happy, a sensibility that felt blues and joys were truly sides of the same emotional and esthetic coin.
Trying to write freshly on a subject tested in print over two-thirds of a century was frustrating but educational. As in all historical-biographical essays, minefields of error and bias surround every idea and fact, and it is hard to feel that any argument is ever settled. At the end of such a big project, I recall recent percipient observations on the futility of jazz historical/critical writing -- Orrin Keepnews' summary of 50 years as a commentator and the value of his work when he stated, "jazz criticism is a bad idea, poorly executed," and Thelonious Monk's (or someone's) more trenchant aphorism, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
My only excuse is that the dance was a labor of love.
April 2008 issue | © 2008 The Mississippi Rag
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