March Features
Continued: Original Jelly Roll Blues
The many extended examples Morton recorded for Alan Lomax on the Library of Congress sessions of 1938 (the most famous is the "Tiger Rag" lecture-demonstration) show this process of invention. This alchemy is basic to a vernacular art like African-American music -- a process based on collective or communal creativity, sparked by individual improvisation on materials created, collected and passed on by many minds and hands. Morton was an "inventor" exactly as were Renaissance artists; he assembled a composition from materials everyone knew, recombining them in new ways and adding a signature of his own musical personality to stamp the performance with lively immediacy.
So, early in the 20th century (not as early as 1902, by the way -- Morton did back-date much of his career to insure he was first past the post in the historical chronicles), a young New Orleans pianist found new ways to fuse ragtime and blues and all the other multitudinous music around him into a new and fetching creation. The claim is vividly borne out by his recordings from 1923 onward.
"I invented jazz history in 1935 . . ." Morton never spelled this claim out, but I will assert it for him. Before jazz commentators existed in any serious way, Morton was contemplating jazz as an on-the-spot historian and trying to organize a historiography. At that date, Marshall Stearns was just beginning to write what he called a "history of swing," a few other dedicated hot record collectors and discographers were stirring into print, and Hugues Panassie was struggling to write about the music from across the wide ocean (an even wider cultural divide) in France. A mere handful of books and magazine articles had by that date even attempted to speak seriously about the music.
When Alan Lomax gave Morton a bully pulpit in the form of the Library of Congress's new folk music archives program, Morton was ready to work on an autobiography and commentary he used on a 1935 radio program on jazz, broadcast in Washington (Morton's program may have been the first one anywhere dedicated to playing and talking about jazz in the way that became absolutely standard thereafter). Morton was not faking it when he recorded his reminiscences for Lomax. He was way ahead of the young folk collector in seeing that the story of jazz could be spun into an epic with a beginning, middle and end (to date), with a cast of heroes and villains, reversals, discoveries, dramatic climaxes, etc. Morton was an architectonic storyteller with an accurate sense of order in words as well as in music.
The prime contributions Morton made to the story of jazz are still with it, and a mixed blessing they are. Firstly, he intoned the famous words, "Jazz started in New Orleans," which was his own Creole bias, and laid down an idea still difficult to shake or even modify. It has saddled all later commentaries with the idea that jazz came from a more limited region or locale than in fact it did. It was both a local and a universal music (a point Morton makes in many ways), but it wasn't only "New Orleans music," even in its early days.
Secondly, Morton assembled the gaudy legend of Buddy Bolden to describe the "invention of jazz," which also saddled us with a pesky Great Man viewpoint in jazz historiography, wasting oceans of ink and misleading almost anyone trying to understand the music. The appearance of the Ur-jazzman was a great rhetorical device for Morton, and his musical-cultural exposition of Bolden as a "bad man" and a great player who "blew his brains out through his trumpet" created a tidal wave of romantic nonsense about jazz and the road of excess that leads to the palace of wisdom-genesis of a thousand bad books, stories, TV scripts and dreadful movies. Bolden's lurid story allowed Morton to insert the charming Buddy Bolden tune ("St. Louis Tickle" in one manifestation) and to create nostalgia about the dance halls, marching bands and other aspects of the early music, so Bolden seemed almost an alter ego for Winding Boy, Morton's youthful persona as a whorehouse professor.
Thirdly, Morton made a serious attempt to describe, analyze and illustrate jazz as a complex, highly organized music, long before musicologists got there, and he was infinitely detailed in his recollections of tunes, players, styles and basic materials of jazz. He was recording his memoir at the height of the Swing Era, and he was anxious to show that this popular music was rooted in the past, in the jazz Morton had championed for decades, not a cheesy and transient fad invented by youngsters and sold in mass production to ickies, jitterbugs and bobbysoxers. It had an honorable history and real substance, and it was basically the product of a powerful African-American culture. It was complex and sophisticated and made a lasting impact on all American culture. Once again, Mr. Jelly Roll was there fustest with the mostest, in terms of taking seriously popular culture and (even) laying groundwork for American Studies as cross-disciplinary scholarship.
"This tune was transformed by your performer at the present moment . . ." Another minefield in discussions of Morton and his accomplishments is the vexed question of originality in jazz: in a vernacular art more rooted in tradition and communal creativity than in individual "intellectual property" and ownership, how to judge anyone's quotient of personal genius and invention? Clearly, Morton borrowed and built on music from New Orleans, and he acknowledged this repeatedly (again most famously in the "Tiger Rag" excursion). But he used the term "transformation" to describe his music, the transmutation of other music -- authored or free-floating in the African-American culture -- into "Jelly Roll style," the jazz that replaced ragtime as the most peppy and colorful dance music around 1915 (the date Morton's "Jelly Roll Blues" was published by Will Rossiter in Chicago as a piano and band score, orchestrated by the gifted master of fast, one-step ragtime, F. Henri Klickmann).
Through his career, Morton was a supreme musical magpie, hoarding bits and pieces of gold for his alchemical processes. He began with ragtime, supercharging the rhythm and syncopations of this music that was the hot fad of his youth. He studied and borrowed from New Orleans ragtime favorites like Robert Hoffman, whose "Dixie Queen" contains themes Hoffman undoubtedly heard in the air around him, musical fragments musicologists call "floating folk strains" or the like. The little motifs passed from everybody's property to Hoffman's printed creation. Then Morton continued the process by relinking them to the street ditties from which they came. His recreation of folkish tunes like "If You Don't Shake" (or "Tee-nah-nah") shows how Morton discovered and recycled music around him in a communal and an individualistic art. His resurrection of Buddy Bolden's theme song, from "St. Louis Tickle" (published by Theron Bennett under the pseudonymns of "Barney and Seymore" in 1904) as "Funky Butt Blues" was another example of this transformation. Morton clearly knew this music paradoxically belonged to everyone and no one, mostly to the last clever musician to appropriate it.
March 2008 issue | © 2008 The Mississippi Rag
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