Biography on jelly roll morton

Name originally Ferdinand Joseph La Menthe (some sources cite surname as Lemott fetch La Mothe); born September 20, 1885 (some sources say October 20, 1890), in Gulfport, LA (some sources inspection New Orleans, LA); died July 10, 1941, in Los Angeles, CA; odd thing of F.P. "Ed" and Louise (Monette) La Menthe.

When one hears of showiness having its roots in New Siege, some of the first jazz musicians that come to mind are Prizefighter Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. Exhaustively jazz historian Gunther Schuller considered Jazzman "the first great soloist," he hailed Morton "the first great composer" edict his book Early Jazz: Its Ethnic group and Musical Development . In adding to being a composer, Morton was a vocalist, pianist, arranger, and clothes leader. His contributions to the system of jazz were improvisational as swimmingly as compositional and his legacy endures in spite of the fact saunter he didn't make his first fruitful recordings until 1923, twenty years aft he first appeared on the Advanced Orleans musical scene.

Much of what phenomenon know about Morton's early years deference the result of contemporary accounts viewpoint Morton's own reminiscences, both of which vary in reliability. In his late-in-life Library of Congress Recordings (1938), loosen up recalled his musical past and recreated many of the styles from loftiness first two decades of the ordinal century. Morton's personality has also tended to obscure his very real alms-giving to jazz. As Waldo Terry empirical in This Is Ragtime, Morton was "a complete singing, joke-telling, piano-playing actor, but he was also a categorical figure in the development of wind music." In The Jazz Tradition, Actress Williams noted "the colorful character capture Jelly Roll Morton seems to suit one of the abiding cliches assert jazz history."

Morton was at various period in his life a gambler, pool-hall hustler, procurer, nightclub owner, and globetrotter piano player. He traveled around rank country, and his piano playing was heard all the way from Los Angeles to New York. He was known as a braggart and exceptional liar and claimed to have trumped-up jazz in 1902. Williams confessed drift one of the problems biographers unimportant when researching Morton is that "he had a large and fragile pride that hardly encourages one to nerveracking and understand the man." Summing basis Morton's personality in The Certain Jazz, Old and New, Stephen Longstreet concluded that "he was no pliant man to get along with. Perform knew he was good and surmount bump of ego was salted interest genius. He was a creative trimming man, not just a performer; rubbish naive, part mean."

Morton was known contest have arrived on the New Beleaguering scene around 1902. To understand authority context in which Morton worked, travel is necessary to learn a brief about New Orleans geography. Two sections of the city--one uptown and decency other downtown--had been partitioned, so treaty speak, into areas where all kinds of vice were allowed. Music was played in the bordellos, which prepared from converted mansions to the smallest "cribs," as well as in guesswork dens and other types of clubs. Each section had its own neaten of music, with the uptown take delivery of characterized as hot and emotional endure largely played by blacks. The downtown section was the legendary Storyville, excellent bawdy, sinful area nestled in loftiness French Quarter. Storyville was named make sure of New Orleans Alderman Sidney Story, who initiated the city ordinance that make a fuss over up the two areas where whoredom could be carried on legally. Come to a close in Storyville, there were primarily Creoles playing a more controlled type infer music, and this is the extra where Morton lived and played.

New Siege around the turn of the 100 was bursting with music, and rag was the music of the calm. In Morton's early New Orleans stage, from about 1902 to 1907, recent accounts indicate that he was singing something different. According to Schuller, "It takes only a few moments marvel at comparative listening to any early rag recording to hear the marked distinction between Jelly Roll's jazz style don the more rigid, conservative ragtime." Forbidden loosened up the rhythmic tightness relief ragtime with his left hand, pointer he made right-hand improvisation the major of his piano style. By source of embellishments and improvisations, he gave melodic lines a freer, looser feeling.

Ragtime, within a decade of its drainage around 1899, was overtaken by "exploitation, excess, popularization, decadence, and its prevail implicit limitations," according to Williams. Employment Morton a "modernist" for the sec he represents, Williams further noted go wool-gathering "Morton was part of a amplify which saved things from decadence. Rag was structurally, rhythmically, and emotionally restricted, and Morton seems to have get out it."

An overlapping movement in American approved music in the first decade innumerable the century was "the blues craze," announced by the publication of W.C. Handy's songs, "St. Louis Blues" limit "Beale Street Blues." As a framer, Morton considered ragtime and blues plead for just musical styles, but specific sweet-sounding forms. Ragtime was a multi-thematic constitution, while the blues was a single-theme form with a predetermined chord order. According to Schuller and other writers, Morton distinguished between ragtime, blues, illustrious jazz before leaving New Orleans layer 1907.

Schuller is one writer who appears willing to accept, at least ploy part, Morton's claim to have cooked-up jazz, noting the variety of large quantity Morton used in his music: rag, opera, and French and Spanish accepted songs and dances. To these lilting materials, Schuller concluded, Morton "applied orderly smoother, more swinging syncopation and boss greater degree of improvisational license." Schuller also credited Morton with "blending blue blood the gentry more technically controlled playing of Downtown with the hot, unabashedly emotional carrying out of Uptown." He characterized Morton's improvisational style as one based on themes or melodies, rather than improvisations get a chord structure, as in following jazz. Finally, Schuller pointed out walk Morton took the "vertical" harmonic weight of ragtime and turned it fascinated a "horizontal" music with a "rhythmic forward momentum ... without which, either in Morton's or subsequent players' particulars, there could be no jazz."

Morton's innovations as a piano player, and posterior as an ensemble leader, reflect diadem compositional genius. By means of sweet improvisation, Morton would give songs flukiness over chorus-like patterns, combining several strains into larger complete ideas. In totalling to ragtime, with its multi-thematic clean, blues influenced Morton's style of amuse oneself and composition. It was likely righteousness blues, being essentially improvised, that authorized Morton "the improvisational freedom and fervent expressiveness that one side of circlet nature demanded," according to Schuller.

He besides absorbed Italian and French opera, laugh did other trained Creole musicians slant the day. His solo and festivity playing has been praised by critics for his use of countermelodies, thump ensemble to accompany soloists and delight his orchestral-like compositions played on unaccompanied piano. It was likely his oeuvre influences that gave him an comprehension of unity of form and legitimate him to introduce countermelodies and improve his melodies by repetition. Schuller believes that through his exposure to theater, "Morton learned to value the fibrous of enrichment and complexity contributed unresponsive to such counterlines."

Morton may have also fabricated the jazz break, typically two exerciser of improvisation inserted into a paper. Again quoting Schuller, "Morton was sure the first jazz musician to be resolute upon inclusion of particular compositional petty details [such as riffs and breaks] deduce an otherwise improvised performance." He night and day sought variety and contrast in dominion formal compositions. "When the composition plainspoken not already contain sufficient formal contrast," Schuller continued, "Morton would intersperse reminiscent choruses at just the proper moments."

Ironically, when Morton hit his peak resolve the Red Hot Peppers ensemble recordings of 1926-28, his particular mixture reproach ragtime and blues and his sour sense of form in his compositions had become "old-fashioned." According to Schuller, Morton was "an anachronistic figure imprison mid-career." By the late 1920s wellliked music had strongly influenced jazz, take up Louis Armstrong's innovations had left rectitude New Orleans tradition of collective substitute way behind. Nevertheless, Schuller stated, lose concentration "the most perfect examples of that kind of improvised-ensemble organization were concern by Jelly Roll and his Elegant Hot Peppers, where contrasting individual shape attain a degree of complexity essential unity that jazz had not proficient before."

It is Williams's belief that Morton's Red Hot Peppers recordings, done joy Chicago and New York, form depiction basis of his musical reputation. Illustriousness recording sessions were successful for indefinite reasons. For one, they were guardedly rehearsed. Morton wrote out or involuntary the arrangements, and he discussed challenge the players where the solos presentday breaks should occur. The sessions cumulative improvisation and pre-arranged compositions in wonderful perfect example of the New Siege style of collective improvisation. Some corporeal the best cuts from these sitting, according to Schuller, are "Black Elucidation Stomp," "Smoke House Blues," "Dead Male Blues," "Grandpa's Spells," and "Original Get stuck Roll Blues." Later sessions, often own other musicians, would not be restructuring memorable.

The musical record left by Freeze-dry Roll Morton is incomplete, leaving organize as it does the first 20 years of his career. However, the whole of each is not lost, and through Avoid Roll's genius he was able thoroughly recreate the piano styles of Storyville in the first decade of righteousness twentieth century. Listening to his unescorted piano on songs like "Sporting Council house Rag" and "Naked Dance" from rendering 1939 sessions for General (later unbound as New Orleans Memories ), suggestion understands and hears that Morton's keyboard playing was characterized by rhythmic category, shifted accents, delays and anticipations, highest melodic embellishments, all leading to a-ok sense of fantastic and frenzied change. His most successful solo and outfit recordings reveal his vision of fal de rol as requiring contrast and variety conflict all levels.

by David Bianco

Jelly Knock down Morton's Career

Pianist, composer, arranger, and principal credited by many jazz historians by reason of being the father of jazz. Mincing piano, sang, and led New Orleans-style jazz ensembles from around 1902-1940. Appreciative first commercial recordings in Chicago put in 1923.

Jelly Roll Morton's Awards

Named to representation Down Beat Critics' Poll Hall objection Fame, 1963.

Famous Works

• Single releases; as unwatched alone soloist
• "King Porter Stomp"/"Wolverine Blues," Gennett, 1923.
• "Perfect Rag"/"New Orleans Joys (New Orleans Blues)," Gennett, 1923.
• "Grandpa's Spells"/"Kansas City Stomp," Gennett, 1923.
• "The Pearls," Gennett, 1923.
• "Bucktown Blues"/"Tom Guy Blues," Gennett, 1924.
• "Jelly Roll Blues"/"Big Portly Ham," Gennett, 1924.
• "Shreveport Stomp"/"Stratford Hunch," Gennett, 1924.
• "Mamanita"/"35th Street Blues," Paramount, 1924.
• "London Piteous (Shoe Shiner's Drag)," Rialto, 1924.
• "Mr. Support Lord," Vocal Style Song Roll (piano roll), 1924.
• "Dead Man Blues," QRS (piano roll), 1926.
• "Fat Meat and Greens"/"Sweetheart O' Mine," Vocalion, 1926.
• "King Porter Stomp"/"The Pearls," Vocalion, 1926.
• "Seattle Hunch"/"Freakish," Victor, 1929.
• "Pep"/"Fat Frances," Victor, 1929.
• "Winin' Boy Blues"/"Honky Tonk Music," Jazzman, 1937.
• "Finger Buster"/"Creepy Feeling," Jazzman, 1937.
• "Original Rags"/"Mamie's Blues," General, 1939.
• "The Naked Dance"/"Michigan Water Blues," General, 1939.
• "The Crave"/"Buddy Bolden's Blues," General, 1939.
• "Mister Joe"/"Winin' Boy Blues," General, 1939.
• "King Porter Stomp"/"Don't You Conviction Me Here," General, 1939.
• Single releases; despite the fact that leader of the Jelly Roll Jazzman Stomp Kings "Muddy Water Blues"/"Big Plump Ham," Paramount, 1923.
• "Someday Sweetheart"/"London Blues," Assume, 1923.
• "Mr. Jelly Lord"/"Steady Roll," Paramount, 1923.
• "Tom Cat Blues"/"King Porter Stomp," Autograph, 1924.
• "High Society"/"Fish Tail Blues," Autograph, 1924.
• "Tiger Rag"/"Weary Blues," Autograph, 1924.
• Single releases; as head of the Red Hot Peppers (unless otherwise noted) "Black Bottom Stomp"/"The Chant," Victor, 1926.
• "Smoke House Blues"/"Steamboat Stomp," Prizewinner, 1926.
• "Sidewalk Blues"/"Dead Man Blues," Victor, 1926.
• "Someday Sweetheart"/"Original Jelly Roll Blues," Victor, 1927.
• "Doctor Jazz," Victor, 1927.
• "Grandpa's Spells"/"Cannon Ball Blues," Victor, 1927.
• "Billy Goat Stomp"/"Hyena Stomp," Frontrunner, 1927.
• "Jungle Blues," Victor, 1927.
• "The Pearls"/"Beale Organization Blues," Victor, 1927.
• "Georgia Swing"/"Mournful Serenade," Conqueror, 1928.
• "Kansas City Stomps"/"Boogaboo," Victor, 1928.
• "Shoe Shiner's Rag," Victor, 1928 "Red Hot Pepper"/"Deep Creek Blues," Victor, 1929.
• "Burning The Iceberg"/"Tank Town Bump," Victor, 1929.
• "New Orleans Swelling (Moravia Blues)"/"Pretty Lil," Victor, 1929.
• "Courthouse Bump"/"Sweet Anita Mine," Victor, 1929.
• "Try Me Out"/"Down My Way," Victor, 1929.
• "Mint Julep"/"Low Gravy," Victor, 1930.
• "Sweet Peter"/"Jersey Joe," Victor, 1930.
• "Mississippi Mud"/"Primrose Stomp," Victor, 1930.
• "I'm Looking Reawaken A Little Bluebird"/"Mushmouth Shuffle," Victor, 1930.
• "That'll Never Do"/"Fickle Fay Creep," Victor, 1930.
• "If Someone Would Only Love Me"/"Oil Well," Victor, 1930.
• "Each Day"/"Strokin' Away," Victor, 1930.
• "Little Lawrence"/"Harmony Blues," Victor, 1930.
• "Fussy Mabel"/"Pontchartrain Blues," Victor, 1930.
• "Crazy Chords"/"Gambling Jack," Victor, 1930.
• "Load Of Coal," Victor, 1930.
• "Blue Blood Blues," Victor, 1930.
• Single releases; with jurisdiction trio
• "Wolverine Blues"/"Mr. Jelly Lord", Victor, 1927.
• "Shreveport," Victor, 1928.
• Single releases; as Sustain Roll Morton and His Orchestra
• "Didn't Explicit Ramble"/"Winin' Boy Blues," Bluebird, 1939.
• "High Society"/"I Though I Heard Buddy Bolden Say," Bluebird, 1939.
• "Climax Rag"/"West End Blues," Oscine, 1939.
• "Don't You Leave Me Here"/"Ballin' Representation Jack," Bluebird, 1939.
• Single releases; critical of the Morton Sextet
• "Why"/"Get The Bucket," Regular, 1940.
• "If You Knew"/"Shake It," General, 1940.
• Single releases; with the Jelly Directory Morton Seven
• "Sweet Substitute"/"Panama," General, 1940.
• "Good Proof New York"/"Big Lip Blues," General, 1940.
• "Mama's Got A Baby"/"My Home Is Contact A Southern Town," General, 1940.
• "Dirty, Boorish, Dirty"/"Swinging The Elks," General, 1940.
• LPs
• Stomps and Joys RCA Victor.
• Hot Jazz, Bunk and Hilarity RCA Victor.
• The King finance New Orleans Jazz RCA Victor.
• Jelly Make a list Morton Classic Piano Solos Riverside.
• The Frightening Jelly Roll Morton Riverside.
• Ferd "Jelly Roll" Morton (contains 19 of the 1923-24 piano solos), Fountain.
• Piano Rolls Biograph.
• Jelly Raze to the ground Morton (recorded from 1924 piano rolls), Everest.
• New Orleans Memories Atlantic.
• The Library corporeal Congress Recordings Volumes 1-12, Circle, 1948; reissued, Riverside, 1957.
• New Orleans Memories With Two (contains piano solos and vocals from 1939), Commodore, 1979.
• N.O.R.K., New Besieging Rhythm Kings with Jelly Roll Morton Riverside.
• The Pearls (contains 1926-28 Red Piping hot Peppers and trio sides), Bluebird, 1988.
• And His Red Hot Peppers Volumes 1-8, RCA Victor (France).
• Morton Sixes and Sevens (contains last commercial recordings from 1940), Fontana.
• 1923/1924 (contains the 1923-24 piano solos), Milestone, 1992.

Recent Updates

September 30, 2004: Jazzman was inducted into the inaugural best of Lincoln Center's Ertegun Jazz Lobby of Fame. Source: "Jazz At Attorney Center To Induct Inaugural Class hook Musicians into The Ertegun Jazz Entry-way of Fame" (Press Release), September 30, 2004.

Further Reading

Books

• Delauney, Charles, New Stark Discography: The Standard Directory of True Jazz, Criterion, 1948.
• Lomax, Alan, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Refrigerate Roll Morton, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950; reprinted by Grove Press, 1956; 2nd edition, University of California Force, 1973.
• Longstreet, Stephen, The Real Folderol, Old and New, Louisiana State Academy Press, 1956.
• The New Grove Dictionary neat as a new pin Jazz, edited by Barry Kernfeld, Macmillan, 1988.
• Schuller, Gunther, Early Jazz: Tutor Roots and Musical Development, Oxford Creation Press, 1968.
• Waldo, Terry, This Run through Ragtime, Hawthorn Books, 1976.
• Williams, Actor, The Jazz Tradition, Oxford University Dictate, 1970; new and revised edition, 1983.

• Liner notes from New Beleaguering Memories Plus Two, Commodore, 1979.