March Features
Continued: Original Jelly Roll Blues
This understanding accounts for the weird vituperations in the Morton-Handy slanging match of the late '30s. From Morton's perspective, Handy was a stodgy, music-reading hack who lifted blues from folk performers, regularized and prettified them and then got altogether too much credit for being "Father of the Blues." Morton was stung, because he had done very much the same thing and got precious little credit (or money -- Morton claimed with some justification that somebody owed him $3 million for the use of his copyrighted compositions, mostly held by the feckless Melrose brothers). Late in his career, Morton began consciously and carefully exhibiting his transformational skills, going back to the ragtime from the turn of the century. He used "Maple Leaf Rag" as the prime example on the Library of Congress sessions, but he also recorded a brilliant Mortonized version of "Original Rags" and was working on Tom Turpin's "A Ragtime Nightmare" when he died.
In the midst of his epic recording years in the 1920s, Morton used the transformational trick to great advantage. The best examples are from his second edition of the Red Hot Peppers for Victor in 1928, when he used classic jazz tunes from his peers as jumping-off points. The New Orleans Rhythm Kings' "She's Crying for Me" became Morton's textbook of high-powered small-band jump, "Georgia Swing," and King Oliver's classic "Chimes Blues" was effectively transmuted into the deeply blue "Melancholy Serenade." Both his versions significantly raise the jazz quotient of these compositions, already famous as authentic and effective hot renditions. It was as if Morton were saying, "Yes, I can supercharge that old square-rigged ragtime, but I can fuel-inject the latest hot stuff, too!"
Among many rock-ribbed scandals and libels that followed Morton (he raised high emotions, pro or con, with everyone on every side of every issue in jazz) was the charge that he was musically illiterate and a cheap tune-thief who swiped other folks' music and pasted his monicker on it. It is easy to refute the ideas of his non-reading by reference to the arrangements he made (usually amendments to stock arrangements Melrose published) and to a litany of reports by eye- and earwitnesses to Morton's live performances and recording sessions. He had an effective teacher of composing and arranging in the marvelous blues arranger and bandleader Lovey Austin, and he worked for years to hone his musical skills. But he also had an eidetic musical memory that allowed him to pick up virtually any music, regardless of complexity and size, and play it right back phonographically, like pioneer piano prodigies Blind Boone or Blind Tom. Anecdotes about his photographic memory abound, including Morton's own classic story of hitting St. Louis for the 1904 World's Fair and dazzling local ragtime elders with his supposed "reading" skills by playing von Suppe's "Poet and Peasant Overture" from memory (with the score propped open in front of him as a blind).
So, Morton had a battery of skills at knowing scores, including sight-reading but also including the "never play anything the same way twice" attitude of most creative African-American musicians. He was always on the edge of improvisation, and his creativity came through a joy of rediscovery and re-exploration. Every performance was one more chance to make the music perfect, and Morton was a relentless perfectionist.
"Jazz was born in New Orleans . . ." One of Morton's lifelong claims was that he came from the time and place of jazz genesis, the Garden of Eden in which the music was born, in fact was coeval with its birth. In part this was a defensive ploy on his part (his axiom being that a good offense is the best defense), to promote his there-at-the-creation primacy in all things jazz. In part it was also a lifelong love of the city and its multifoliate ways. Like James Joyce, Morton was a self-exile from his home city (and with Joyce he wore "silence, exile and cunning" as his armor), and like Joyce he thought of it incessantly and made it the subject of his best work.
After Morton exiled himself from his family and home, he never again settled back in New Orleans, and he became as footloose as Odysseus, covering most of the United States in his ramblings. Some of his earliest music refers to the city and its hot culture ("New Orleans Blues/Joys" or "Milenburg Joys") and later numbers transmit a deep nostalgia for the place ("Ponchartrain" (sic) or "My Home Is in a Southern Town"). For a traveled sophisticate, Morton had a surprising soft spot for the city which had often been grim and inhospitable to him, as Jim Crow destroyed its old pluralistic society. The New Orleans of his dreams (his brilliant General Records album from 1939 was titled New Orleans Memories) was long gone, but Morton enshrined it in his heart and transmitted its feelings in his music.
Morton knew the name "New Orleans" was a guaranteed money-maker, along with terms like "Dixie," "Creole," "original," "jazz" and other key pop-culture words around 1920, and his work was as redolent of the Louisiana worldview as the music of King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, which featured "New Orleans Stomp," "Canal Street Blues," "West End Blues" (next-door neighbor to "Milenburg Joys"), "King of the Zulus" and "Zulus' Ball." It was good business practice to refer back to New Orleans ever since the Original Creole Orchestra toured the U.S. in the mid-teens, but New Orleans musicians felt a deeper allegiance to the place than that. Despite the oppression, ignorance and poverty of the city, its traveling sons and daughters recalled it as Shangrila, and Morton was no exception.
He traveled first in a narrow orbit beyond New Orleans -- to the near Gulf Coast and a ways up the Mississippi. Then he ranged to Texas and Oklahoma, then to Chicago and far west to California and the whole West Coast, back to Chicago, out to that magnet of the late 1920s, New York, and finally one last trek to the sunshine of California as he wore out and died in 1941. He was always in search of work and learning. He sought new markets for his music and constantly assessed the local music and local talent, judging himself in relation to the competition. He rarely found anyone or anyplace to match New Orleans and the great musicians he had known there, especially his mentor Tony Jackson and a few other advanced ragtimers like Albert Cahill or Sammy Davis. On the endless road, he found little competition worthy of respect, but he learned everything about music he possibly could. Contemporaries recalled his habit of working at musical odd jobs in pit bands, with impromptu skiffle groups, as a silent movie accompanist, etc., just to soak up every and any kind of musical form or style, grist for the great Jelly Roll Patented Transformation Mill. He was endlessly curious, and he felt almost a compulsion to witness history and its accompanying soundtrack.
In one anecdote about his work as a tickler in New Orleans whorehouses, he recalled working in Hilma Burt's Circus House, which specialized in pornographic exhibitions with live ensembles, and told how the youngest and prettiest girls were selected for the most degrading acts and then philosophized on the cruelties of human nature. But he hastened to add that while he was forced to play behind a screen, he cut a hole in it to observe the lascivious acts, because he didn't want to be left out. He was voracious of experience and voracious of music, ingesting it all and turning it into the amazing figure who was Jelly Roll Morton, on the road to becoming the World's Greatest Single-Handed Entertainer, the Man of a Thousand Songs, like his boyhood idol, Tony Jackson.
End of Part 1
March 2008 issue | © 2008 The Mississippi Rag
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