Jelly Roll, Unexpurgated at Last - by Terry Teachout
Jelly Roll Morton: The complete Library of Congress Recording by Alan Lomax
http://www.rouder.com
Excerpts from the Wall Street Journal "Leisure and Arts -
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Rounder Records has release Morton's recorded reminiscence in an unabridged form for the first time on an eight-CD set called "Jelly Roll Morton" The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax." It is to jazz what the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is to American history - only more fun.
In 1938 the 47 year-old Morton, a compulsive braggart with a diamond mounted in his front tooth, was living in Washington and scuffling for work. His sturdy, fat-bottomed piano playing was dismissed as quaint by big-band buffs unaware the "King Porter Stomp," one of Benny Goodman's biggest hits, had been composed by Morton years earlier, Back than he was a colossus, one of the hottest pianist to play in the whorehouses of New Orleans, and though his oft-quoted claim to have "created jazz in 1902" was mostly rodomontade, he was almost certainly among the first musician to loosen up the written-out syncopation of ragtime and set them to swing. Later he moved to Chicago and, starting in 1926, recorded with his Red Hot Peppers a series of kaleidoscopically scored small band performances that won him posthumous recognition (he died in 1941) as jazz's first great composer.
No less riveting are Morton's recollections of Storyville, the red-light district of turn-of-the-century New Orleans, among which are interspersed his renditions such lewd ditties as "Make Me a Pallet on the Floor." "Of course when a man played piano, the stamp was on him for life - the femininity stamp," Morton told Lomax. "And I didn't want to on, so, of course, when I did start to playin', the songs were kinda smutty a bit." (They are, in fact, unabashedly obscene.)
Your grandparent's tax dollars, incidentally, went to pay for the blank recording discs (and whiskey) that Alan Lomax used to preserve Morton's memories. Rarely has the U.S. Treasury been more profitably tapped.
Sincerly, GARGOYLE