The History of Jazz (9 page)

More often than not, later historical research has vindicated Morton’s assertions as well as validated his recreations of earlier musical styles. Moreover, few jazz figures of any era have matched him in providing insightful commentary into the aesthetic dimensions of the music. Although Morton did not invent jazz, he was perhaps the first to think about it in abstract terms, and articulate—in both his remarks and his demonstrations—a coherent theoretical approach to its creation. On a wide range of topics—dynamics, vibrato, melodic construction, the use of breaks, the essence of Latin music—Morton’s comments continue to provoke thought and demand our attention.

Yet Morton’s assertions, for all their musical insight, stand out as paragons of doublespeak and evasion on autobiographical matters. Like his fictional contemporary from the Jazz Age, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, Morton had a flair for rewriting his life story to match the dimensions of his ego. He sometimes gave his birthdate as 1885—like many early New Orleans players, adding to his age to strengthen his case for being present at the birth of jazz—and stated that his original name was Ferdinand LaMenthe. In fact, Jelly Roll was born in or around New Orleans in 1890, as Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, and was raised in a strict Creole environment that strenuously resisted assimilation into New Orleans’s black population.

Morton’s family all but disowned him when he became involved in the world of jazz, with its lowlife connotations and attendant vices. Not that Morton himself was open minded in embracing African American culture. On the contrary, Morton’s tendency to rewrite the past was never more apparent than when he dealt with racial issues. In a typically bizarre aside, Morton explained to Lomax that he abandoned the name LaMenthe for racial reasons—because of ethnic hostility directed at the French! As to his own African roots, Morton was in a lifelong state of denial, pointing instead to his European ancestry (“
All
my folks came directly from the shores of France,” he told Lomax
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) and upper-class Creole background, and putting faith in his relatively light complexion and his mastery of white diction and mannerisms. Even by the standards of black Creole society of the turn of the century—many of whose members shared his anxieties about assimilation into black culture— Morton’s protestations were extreme. Despite his insatiable ego, Morton would have been nonplussed to see himself lauded by posterity as a major African American musician.

Yet in his actions, if not his words, Morton strived to relinquish all the highbrow trappings of his Creole youth. More than any other major New Orleans jazz artist, Morton’s apprenticeship in the music business took place largely in the bordellos of Storyville (although Morton worked mainly in the white bordellos where few other jazz players could follow). Rather than regretting the lowlife associations of the District, Morton luxuriated in the company of pimps, prostitutes, murderers, gamblers, pool sharks, and dealers and hustlers of various sorts, and at times could rely on a few of these trades himself. At some point in the early 1900s—Morton claimed 1902, although this seems too early, given his birthdate—he began working as a musician in Storyville. His great-grandmother expelled him from home when she learned of his activities in the District, and before long Morton started on the peripatetic freelancing that would occupy most of his life. His early travels brought him to Memphis, New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Tulsa, Houston, and other locales. By 1917, Morton had traveled farther west, visiting California, Canada, Alaska, and Mexico.

Wherever Morton journeyed, he was noticed. How could it have been otherwise? He was a big spender, wore a diamond in his tooth and more on his garters, was known to boast that he kept a trunk full of money back in his hotel room (only the top tray carried the cash, but visitors catching a glimpse walked away believers), and showed off an extensive and expensive wardrobe, often by changing outfits several times a day. His skills as a pianist and composer were no doubt refined during these years, but Morton’s income at this time almost certainly relied more on his activities as a procurer and pool shark. However, when he returned to Chicago around 1923, Morton was well prepared to draw on his considerable talents for self-promotion in building a musical career. Certainly the time was ripe. The Jazz Age had begun in earnest, and Morton looked to capitalize on the public’s insatiable demand for this new style of music.

Morton’s Chicago years, which lasted until 1926, constitute the most prolific musical period of his career. He made over one hundred recordings or piano rolls of his compositions, published a steady stream of pieces, and formed his most famous ensemble, the Red Hot Peppers. This band, which recorded in both Chicago and New York during the remaining years of the decade, achieved a level of collective artistry that few New Orleans groups ever matched, and none surpassed. Nor would Morton’s preeminence as a jazz composer—“the world’s greatest hot tune writer” was how his business card modestly described it—be seriously challenged until Duke Ellington pushed the limits of creativity even further in the following decade. But, above all, in its mastery of ensemble interaction—so essential to the New Orleans aesthetic—this band remains the paragon to this day.

Morton (again like Ellington) was able to get the most out of his musicians, so much so that his groups could rise above the limitations of individual players. Here Morton’s high opinion of his own talents was clearly a decisive factor: by sheer force of will, he prodded his sidemen into sharing his exalted vision of New Orleans jazz. Sometimes Morton used even more dramatic means to keep his musicians on track. A telling anecdote from the 1920s describes a recording session at which trombonist Zue Robertson refused to play the melody of one of Morton’s pieces the way the composer wanted. Morton took a large pistol from his pocket and placed it on top of the piano. On the next take, Robertson played the melody note for note.
¹⁸

Morton’s 1926 recording of his “Sidewalk Blues” testifies to the results achieved by this single-mindedness. The piece begins with a roll call, a ten-bar introduction in which each major instrument is summoned to order: piano, trombone, cornet, and clarinet. This leads directly into a twelve-bar cornet melody statement over blues harmonies supported by a stop-time vamp. Stoptime techniques such as this—here the band propels the soloist with sharp accents on beats two and four—were a trademark of Morton’s music, invariably used for a brief spell to add variety to the accompaniment. A second twelve-bar melody follows, this time employing the interlocking trombone-cornet-clarinet counterpoint style, which is the calling card of classic New Orleans jazz. The piece then returns to the opening twelve-bar melody, but with the clarinet taking the lead this time. A four-bar interlude segues into a new thirty-two-bar melody played by cornet, trombone, and clarinet (interrupted briefly at bar sixteen by a car horn, a typical Morton novelty twist) that abandons the blues form and sensibility in favor of a plaintive parlor song style. This thirty-two-bar melody is repeated, but now played in an arrangement for three clarinets. In the context of the New Orleans style, this was a startling device. Morton brought two extra clarinetists to the session, letting them sit idly by most of the day, merely requiring their presence at certain key junctures of the performances such as this interlude. This change of instrumentation in midsong, so rare in other jazz recordings of the period, is representative of Morton’s penchant to pull out some surprising sound at unexpected places in his music. This understated clarinet section changes direction dramatically in the final eight bars, with the return of the energetic New Orleans–style counterpoint. A five-bar tag closes this whirlwind three-and-a-half-minute performance. In a compact form, Morton has covered a world of sounds.

When lecturing on Morton’s music, I have always been struck by how long it takes to describe in words what is happening in any one of his pieces. For a three-minute recording, it requires ten times as much time to provide even a cursory explanation of the various shifts in instrumentation, harmonic structure, and rhythmic support that characterize these performances. This structural complexity is not arbitrary, but essential to Morton’s maximalist aesthetic. In his September 1926 version of “Black Bottom Stomp,” another telling example of this approach, the band disappears midway through the piece, leaving the leader to keep the music flowing with a blistering, two-fisted stomp, which Jelly ardently attacks as though it were the star soloist’s cadenza in a classical concerto. But, in a flash, the Red Hot Peppers are back, this time supporting cornetist George Mitchell in a heated stop-time chorus. This leads directly into a Johnny St. Cyr conversation, in syncopated time, with the ensemble. Soon the New Orleans counterpoint of trombone, clarinet, and cornet returns with redoubled energy, the trademark sound—as inevitable as the “happily ever after” at the close of a fairy tale—that indicates a Red Hot Peppers performance has reached its intended conclusion. Here again, three minutes of vinyl are forced to accommodate symphonic aspirations.

Morton was not without his limitations. His harmonies, as in “Finger Buster” or “Froggie Moore,” occasionally present clumsy combinations of chromatic and diatonic tendencies, suggesting that the composer was reaching beyond his grasp of theory; his piano playing, for all his assertions to the contrary, was typically less than virtuosic; his claim to have invented jazz hardly merits serious debate. Nonetheless, in terms of overall artistry, Morton’s achievements were considerable. These 1926 Victor recordings find Morton at the peak of his creative powers. In performances such as “Sidewalk Blues,” “Black Bottom Stomp,” “Dead Man Blues,” “Grandpa’s Spells,” “Smokehouse Blues,” and “The Chant,” he tilled a fertile middle ground between the rigid compositional structures of ragtime and the spontaneous vivacity of jazz improvisation. This style would soon become anachronistic—in fact, it may already have been so by the time these recordings were made—as jazz came to forget its origins in the multithematic ragtime form. In this context, Morton’s work represents both the highest pitch and final flowering of this approach.

Although his artistic vision dominates these sides, Morton benefited from the presence of a seasoned group of New Orleans players. Trombonist Kid Ory, a Creole born in LaPlace, Louisiana, at some point between 1886 and 1890, had been a successful bandleader in New Orleans before taking his music on the road. In Los Angeles, in 1922, his band released the first New Orleans jazz recording featuring black musicians, and in 1925 he moved to Chicago where he participated in several of the most important studio dates in jazz history, working not only with Morton on the seminal Red Hot Peppers dates, but also recording with Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, among others. His frequent colleague Johnny St. Cyr, born in New Orleans in 1890, was one of the first jazz string players. St. Cyr was trained as a plasterer, but a musical career beckoned after he taught himself to play a homemade guitar. As a performer with Fate Marable’s riverboat band, St. Cyr traveled extensively, finally settling in Chicago in the early 1920s, where he also recorded with Armstrong and Oliver. In these years, St. Cyr often played a hybrid instrument, a six-string guitar-banjo, which combined the guitar’s neck and fingerboard with the banjo’s body. Other members of the 1926 Red Hot Peppers included cornetist George Mitchell, clarinetist Omer Simeon, bassist John Lindsay, and drummer Andrew Hilaire.

Jelly Roll continued to record frequently during the remainder of the 1920s. The members of his band changed regularly, but, regardless of the sidemen or the evolving musical tastes of the American public, Morton’s ensembles were at their best when working within the aesthetic constraints of the classic New Orleans idiom. Noteworthy Morton recordings from the 1920s include an invigorating 1927 trio session with clarinetist Johnny Dodds and drummer Baby Dodds, a tantalizing 1924 duet date with King Oliver, and Morton’s 1923 work with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings—a historic event that not only produced fine music but served as a milestone in countering the segregation of black and white jazz players in the recording studio—as well as ongoing performances as a solo pianist. As with so many of the artists from this period, Morton’s recording career came to a sudden halt with the Great Depression, but even under happier economic circumstances his music would almost certainly have fallen out of favor. Jazz had become a soloist’s music, and the structured, collectivist aesthetic of Morton’s finest work was not in keeping with the prevailing tone of the Swing Era.

Morton had his own, somewhat paranoid interpretations of his fall from the limelight after his Victor contract ran out in 1930. At times, he blamed a conspiracy of music industry insiders (led by ASCAP and MCA) for his problems; on other occasions, he asserted that a voodoo curse was the main culprit. In any event, Morton made only one recording during an eight-year stretch during the 1930s. If he maintained any degree of notoriety, it was as the composer of the “King Porter Stomp,” a piece popularized through the efforts of big band leaders Fletcher Henderson and Benny Goodman, who adapted it to meet the new tastes of the time. In the mid-1930s, Morton settled in Washington, DC, where he ran an unsuccessful nightclub on U Street—the club changed names every few months in a fruitless attempt to attract a clientele—and continued to hatch schemes for reviving his music career.

In 1938, he succeeded in doing just that, spurring his comeback through an audacious move marked by all the trademark Morton excesses. “It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of jazz, and I myself happened to be the creator,” opens a celebrated letter Morton sent to
Downbeat
magazine.
¹⁹
The conclusion of this long-winded epistle put everything into perspective, or at least into a Jelly Roll perspective:

My contributions were many: First clown director, with witty sayings and flashily dressed, now called master of ceremonies; first glee club in orchestra; the first washboard was recorded by me; bass fiddle, drums—which was supposed to be impossible to record. I produced the fly swatter (they now call them brushes). Of course many imitators arose after my being fired or quitting. … Lord protect us from more Hitlers and Mussolinis.