The Penguin Jazz Guide (9 page)

JELLY ROLL MORTON
^&

Born Ferdinand Joseph Lemott (or La Mott, or La Menthe), 20 October 1890, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 10 July 1941, Los Angeles, California

Piano, voice

The Complete Library Of Congress Recordings

Rounder ROUCD 1888 8CD

Morton (p, v); Alan Lomax (v). May–June 1938.

Mary Lou Williams said (1976):
‘I was afraid of him. He had this big mouthful of diamonds and he stuttered when he talked fast, which made him seem more frightening rather than ridiculous. He pushed me on to a stool in his office uptown and told me to play. I played “The Pearls” for him, hoping I wouldn’t get dumped on my butt on the floor. He was supposed to hit out for almost no reason, especially girls.’

Oral history is either the curse of jazz studies or its greatest resource, and probably both. In the summer of 1938, broke and almost finished, Morton was recorded – almost by chance at first – by Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress, and when Lomax realized the opportunity he had on his hands he got Morton to deliver a virtual history of the birth pangs of jazz as it happened in the New Orleans of the turn of the century. His memory was unimpaired, although he chose to tell things as he preferred to remember them, perhaps; and his hands were still in complete command of the keyboard. The results have the quality of a long, drifting dream, as if Morton were talking to himself. He demonstrates every kind of music which he heard or played in the city, re-creates all his greatest compositions in long versions unhindered by 78 playing time, remembers other pianists who were never recorded, spins yarns, and generally sets down the most distinctive (if not necessarily the most truthful) document we have on the origins of the music.

The sessions were made on an acetate recorder and, while the sound may be uncomfortably one-dimensional to modern ears, everything he says comes through clearly enough, and the best of the piano solos sound as invigorating as they have to be. Yet another edition of these priceless recordings has been issued by Rounder, amounting to eight CDs and what is surely the most comprehensive coverage of the speech and music to date. The overall sound quality has become something of a
cause célèbre
among jazz scholars – at times it does seem inferior to the previous four-disc edition on the same label – but for the general
listener this should be accorded a warm welcome, expensive though it is. It is a wonderfully illustrated lecture on Morton’s music by the man who created it. Indispensable records for anyone interested in jazz history.

& See also
The Piano Rolls
(1920, 1997; p. 9),
Jelly Roll Morton 1926–1928
(1926–1928; p. 25)

BABY DODDS

Born Warren Dodds, 24 December 1898, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 14 February 1959, Chicago, Illinois

Drums

Baby Dodds

American Music AMCD-17

Dodds; Bunk Johnson, Louis ‘Kid Shots’ Madison, Wooden Joe Nicholas (t); Jim Robinson, Joe Petit (tb); George Lewis, Albert Burbank (cl); Adolphe Alexander Jr (bhn); Isidore Barbarin (ahn); Lawrence Marrero (bj); Red Clark, Sidney Brown (tba); Alcide ‘Slow Drag’ Pavageau (b). 1944–1945.

Drummer Max Roach said (1981):
‘Baby Dodds
played
behind the soloist. He could conjure up a whole range of tonal colours from his kit, and he varied the spectrum depending on who he was with, and how he was feeling about the music.’

Clarinettist Johnny Dodds’s brother was playing drums at 16 and developing great showmanship. He was with King Oliver in 1922, then in Chicago for 20 years, before playing in New York with Bunk Johnson during the revival. Exemplifying the New Orleans style while remaining at a tangent from it, he was the first drummer to be documented who embellished his playing rather than simply ticking out the time, and his inventiveness comes across even on primitive early recordings. A slice of living history,
Baby Dodds
features the leading drummer of New Orleans jazz talking at some length about his traps, his cymbals, his style and how it all comes together – for jazz bands, marching bands, funeral parades and whatever else a drummer had to play for. Most of the music is actually lifted from other records, notably Bunk Johnson’s American Music CDs. Some of it is horse sense that still holds good – ‘Tiger Rag is played too fast’, he grumbles, and then we hear the tempo he liked to play for it – and when he talks us through a lesson in technique, the good-natured generosity of the man comes alive again, five decades after his death. Remastering of all the speech/drum tracks is excellent, and though the music comes in mainly for illustration the compilers have chosen well. Dodds finally slowed down in the ’50s when he suffered a series of strokes, but he lived long enough to stand as a role model and example to the younger generation, and the first beboppers.

GEORGE ‘POPS’ FOSTER

Born 18 May 1892, McCall Plantation, Louisiana; died 30 October 1969, San Francisco, California

Double bass

George ‘Pops’ Foster

American Music ASMCD-105

Foster; Art Hodes (p). 1968.

Art Hodes said (1981):
‘He knew Louis Armstrong before Louis Armstrong was Louis Armstrong, so who are you to doubt a word he says? George Foster
was
jazz, and don’t forget it.’

‘Pops’ worked on riverboats, including the
Belle of the Bend
with Fate Marable and with all the major New Orleans bandleaders, before moving to St Louis and eventually New York. A celebrated figure in the ’40s revival, he carried on till the end, always rock-solid, his snapping tones a familiar aspect of many, many early recordings, including key Sidney Bechet sides. On this valuable recording, a little under 40 minutes in length, Pops and Art chat about the bassman’s long career, and intersperse the dialogue with whichever tunes come up in this eavesdropped conversation, privately recorded by Hodes. Inevitably, some of the anecdotal detail in George’s ghost-written autobiography is suspect, but the inconsistencies aren’t as damaging as has sometimes been made out, and like the conversation with Hodes it remains a valuable memoir of the early days of jazz, and the spirit of a great survivor shines through the factitious stuff. Pops plays in his elemental style, grumbling away with the bow on ‘Closer Walk With Thee’, slapping on the others; they open and close with ‘Mahogany Hall Stomp’, which he always said was his favourite piece of music.

THE ’20s

Two wonderful things happened for jazz in the 1920s. Electrical recording happened, and Louis Armstrong happened. The music’s greatest master emerged in the middle of the decade with a series of recordings that some consider unmatched to this day, the pinnacle of jazz art. After 1925, despite the resistance of some companies, most studios switched to electrical recording, in which sound vibrations were encoded as an electrical signal and then decoded by the playback machine, giving a far higher level of audio fidelity. Curiously, perhaps, the greatest advantage of electrical recording fell to the other members of the ensemble, particularly pianists and bass players, though percussionists, too, who henceforward could be captured with a degree of fidelity. The jazz combo was always a flexible format, by no means fixed to one or two horns plus a ‘rhythm section’ of piano (or guitar), bass and drums. This became the convention for small-group jazz during the swing, bebop and hard-bop era, only to dissolve again in more recent years, where drummerless groups, or ensembles with stringed instruments, or with no harmony instrument, again became common.

After a slow start, jazz recording became a substantial and geographically widespread business, with a large number of subsidiary and specialist labels emerging, and in 1924 the first African-American recording company, Black Swan. Perhaps most important of all, though, was the beginning of jazz recording in New Orleans, recording some of the early masters of the music in their own unique cultural environment. Even at a time when many musicians were leaving the city to move north to Chicago and New York or West to California, it remained the cradle of jazz and its most important single centre, though again one has to wait until the revival to hear some aspects of New Orleans music in ‘authentic’ form. The 1920s was a paradoxical period in jazz history. The so-called ‘Jazz Age’ established a white, middle-class jazz audience (the novels and stories of Scott Fitzgerald capture some of its values) and reinforced a certain gap between the production and consumption of jazz music, and between the kinds of black music enjoyed by white and black audiences, with the latter somewhat favouring blues over sophisticated instrumental jazz.

Production and consumption of another sort became a major social issue in the 1930s. The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on 16 January 1919 and enforced via the Volstead Act (which President Woodrow Wilson unsuccessfully attempted to veto) exactly a year later, prohibiting the manufacture, sale and consumption of alcohol. ‘The Noble Experiment’ wrought significant changes in American leisure, forcing alcohol underground, warping drinking habits and creating an ideal environment for organized crime. The ironic outcome was that jazz, which had developed in the brothel houses and shebeens of Storyville, was increasingly associated with Mob-run ‘speakeasies’ or ‘blind pigs’ in the northern cities. Among wealthier socio-economic groups, illicit drinking was largely confined to cocktail parties – the familiar backdrop of Fitzgerald’s tales of the ‘beautiful and damned’ – and this in turn had the effect of sharpening class and ethnic differences, even above the Mason–Dixon line.

The 1920s was also the period of the ‘Harlem Renaissance’, a vivid outpouring of black poetry and art, whose interaction with jazz was only uncertain, intermittent and to some degree ambiguous. The complex racial demarcations of American culture – this at a time when Ku Klux Klan activity and violence in the South was at a higher pitch than any since Reconstruction – were never more evident. Jazz recording does not necessarily reflect those ambiguities very well, but they remain as a subtext to the decade’s great music …

JELLY ROLL MORTON
^&

Born Ferdinand Joseph Lemott (or La Mott, or La Menthe), 20 October 1890, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 10 July 1941, Los Angeles, California

Piano, voice

The Piano Rolls

Nonesuch 79363-2

Morton (p rolls). 1920, February 1997.

In his own immortal words:
‘Jazz is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm’
, and with a
‘Spanish tinge’.

The first great composer in jazz – its inventor, he claimed – led a picaresque life in New Orleans as a pianist, pimp, billiards player, tailor, minstrel-show entertainer, hustler and more. Though these piano rolls date from earlier, he began recording in Chicago in 1923, then bandleading with his Red Hot Peppers, making some of the classic early jazz recordings. He scuffled over unpaid royalties during the ’30s, then began recording his life story (and his history of jazz) for the Library of Congress in 1938. This sparked a series of attempted comebacks at the end of the decade but Morton died in California, bitter and unrewarded.

The Nonesuch disc is one of the most fascinating retrievals of recent years. Morton’s 12 original piano rolls have been analysed in the light of his other recordings by Artis Wodehouse, who has subsequently converted the information to computer data and edited a previously missing interpretative element into the way the rolls are reproduced. The subsequently annotated rolls were then played back on a nine-foot Disklavier piano, in a concert hall, and recorded. The remarkable outcome may be the closest we can ever get to hearing what Morton might truly have sounded like at this early peak of his career. Or they may not. Sceptics will point to the issue that, however meticulous the homework, this is still only somebody’s idea of how the rolls should sound. Yet the results are exhilarating enough to suggest that Jelly’s ghost is indeed seated at the keyboard. If there is an inevitable sense of something mechanical in the delivery, it’s offset by the rocking syncopations, rips and general brio which always seem to be among the hallmarks of a Morton performance. The odd combination of ferocity and gentility in ‘Grandpa’s Spells’, the dizzying double-time break in ‘Midnight Mama’ and the unbridled virtuosity of ‘Shreveport Stomps’ have certainly never sounded more convincing. It is altogether a memorable event and essential for anyone intrigued by the early steps of the master.

& See also
Jelly Roll Morton 1926–1928
(1926–1928, p. 25),
The Complete Library Of Congress Recordings
(1938, but in ‘Beginnings’ section, p. 5)

LADD’S BLACK ACES / ORIGINAL MEMPHIS FIVE

Formed c.1917–19

Group

The Complete Ladd’s Black Aces 1921–1924

Timeless TCD 77

Phil Napoleon, Benny Bloom, Harry Gluck (c); Moe Gappell, Vincent Grande, Sammy Lewis, Miff Mole, Charles Panelli (tb); Doc Behrendson, Jimmy Lytell (cl); Ken ‘Goof’ Moyer (cl, as); Loring McMurray (as); Cliff Edwards (k2); Rube Bloom, Jimmy Durante, Frank Signorelli (p); John Cali, Ray Kitchingham (bj); Joe Tarto (bb); Jack Roth (d); Vernon Dalhart, Arthur Fields, Mandy Lee, Billy de Rex (v): collective personnel. August 1921–August 1924.