Jelly Roll Morton’s Later Years

(c)2010 Seymour Jacklin

Jelly Roll Morton was a jazz pianist, one of the original architects of the genre whose early life paralleled the phenomenon we call jazz. He was born around the time that jazz emerged in New Orleans in the first decade of the 1900s. His technical brilliance and colourful lifestyle soon won him fame. He claimed to be the “Inventor of Jazz” and, as grandiose as this assertion was, the recordings he made with his Red Hot Peppers in Chicago in the early 1920s and then later in New York are still considered to be the most outstanding records of early classic jazz.

“Mister Jelly Roll”, as he liked to be called, enjoyed his fame and the proceeds of his record sales with fine cars and diamonds in his teeth but the times were against him. A new generation of musicians had taken up the call to play hot jazz and were evolving it into “swing” and “bebop”. These innovations were distinctive from the kind of music that Jelly helped to invent.

The jazz that blew out of New Orleans from the first decades of the 1900s was characteristically orchestral. It relied on ensemble work, with the whole band playing together and weaving into each other, each instrument having its own contribution to make. New Orleans hot jazz was very democratic. Swing was what it became when it was imported to the big cities where people wanted to dance to music with a stricter tempo and wanted to be wowed by impressive soloist virtuosi like Benny Goodman. Jelly’s complex and primitive orchestrations began to sound dated.

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Much to his frustration, many of the big bands of the 1930s adopted Jelly Roll Morton’s compositions and got rich on them; the best example of which is “The King Porter Stomp” which almost became Benny Goodman’s signature tune.

This is where the sad story of Jelly Roll Morton’s later years needs to be told in all its poignancy. His business card claimed he was the “Originator of Jazz – Stomp – Swing,” and the “World’s Greatest Hot Tune Writer” but by 1938 he was the resident pianist and all round impresario in an obscure Washington night club called “The Jungle Inn”. As impressive as Jelly wanted this to sound, the place was a dive and struggling to attract punters. Jelly had to do everything from running the bar to entertaining the patrons, acting as a bouncer, and cleaning up afterwards. Nobody came to see The Originator of Jazz, they were too busy listening to Duke Ellington and Jimmy Lunceford who had the ear of the public at the time.

If it had not been for an astute archivist from the Library of Congress who befriended Jelly at this time, his whole story would have died with him three years later. That man was Alan Lomax, to whom every American folk tradition owes its finest ovation for his work recording and documenting the people’s music throughout the mid-century.

Jelly still had the manners and bearing of a southern gentleman; he still had one or two diamonds in his teeth, but he was desperate to be recognised for his artistry. He had not made a record for about 8 years but Alan Lomax sat him down at a piano in May 1938 and allowed him to tell his life’s story in words and music. Given this freedom to use his own words, Jelly waxed about his early days and sporting life in which playing the piano was just one of the ways he had to get around that also included pool hustling and pimping. He also recorded some piano solos that still leave the listener breathless, proving he could faithfully imitate the styles of pianists long forgotten and then improve upon them.