Jelly Roll Morton: The Inventor of Jazz

With the coming of the Great Depression – and with the music business suffering badly – Jelly Roll Morton’s celebrity soon evaporated and he found himself playing piano in an assortment of New York whorehouses and bars. But as another great pianist, Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith, describes in his 1964 autobiography, ‘Music on My Mind’ :

” Jelly Roll Morton was never down and out in body or spirit.

” It was in the early thirties that I really got to know Jelly Roll. He was living in New York City by that time and used to hang around the Rhythm Club.

” Morton was a man with strong spiritual and magnetic forces; when he sat down to play he could hold an audience by the strength of his strong personality. He was a sharpshooter and had always travelled in fast company. He was intelligent, had something to offer, and as far as I could tell, he was always able to back up what he said. He had a story to tell you about any and every place he had been.

” In this world if you give something you’ll receive something in return and Jelly would make it a point wherever he went to meet the people of value. When you talked to him he could tell you a lot of things he had learned from the people he met in his travels.

” It used to make me mad to hear the New York cats who hadn’t been out of Harlem making fun of Morton. Like myself, Jelly Roll had played in all kinds of places, and that was the way you learned about life – playing in all the different back rooms.

” Some people used to put me on by asking whether jazz was born in New Orleans and whether or not Jelly Roll invented it.”

Well, did he?

Morton certainly soaked up all the sights and sounds of New Orleans, a city that was one of the cross-roads of the world, of every culture, and every musical form of the world. Morton was – like Whitman in the world of poetry just forty odd years before him – a man, as Smith points out, who took note of everything and re-interpreted everything; but not in words like Whitman, but in music, and in a new kind of music that came not only from the fields, but from the brickyards, and the quays and docks. A music that incorporated everything: the blues, the stomps and ragtime in the honky-tonks, the French and Spanish folk music that was coming in and staying, and European classical music, and the waltzes and polkas. Morton absorbed them all and made them his own, and then gave them to the world as ‘Jass’. He prepared the way for others to build on, like Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and all the rest.

Yes, Jelly Roll Morton invented Jazz.

After a long series of interviews with Alan Lomax for The Library of Congress, Morton moved to Hollywood in 1938 (he drove there in his old Buick, towing another behind in case of breakdown) to try and rekindle his career in a popular music world dominated by Swing. But sadly, nothing came of it.

Ferdinand Joseph ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton died in 1941. The diamond stud between his teeth was never found.