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Celebrating Jelly Rollby Jeff Taylor
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Celebrating Jelly Roll
by Jeff Taylor
During his tragic final months in Los Angeles in 1941, gravely ill and deeply resentful toward a music establishment that he felt had cheated him out of a prominent and lucrative career, pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton could hardly have imagined how brilliantly his legend and legacy would survive him. Yet, today, after dozens of books and articles, countless recording reissues, a variety of festivals and tribute bands, and at least two prominent stage productions based (if, at times, rather loosely) on his life, Morton’s reputation as one of America’s most important musicians of the twentieth century, and one of its most endlessly fascinating personalities, seems assured.
Interest in Morton has intensified in the past three years. In 1999, the Chicago Tribune ran three articles starkly outlining Morton’s troubled legal entanglements with his publisher, Melrose Brothers, a company that apparently swindled Morton out of most of his rightful profits. In November 2000, Stephen Kinzer wrote an article in the New York Times with the telling subtitle “The Man Who Made Jazz Hot is Suddenly in Vogue.” Last year saw the publication of Pete Pastras’s important study of Morton’s years in California, Dead Man Blues: Jelly Roll Morton Way Out West. The University of California Press also recently reissued Alan Lomax’s Mister Jelly Roll, a famous book based on Lomax’s 1938 recorded interviews with Morton at the Library of Congress, with a new afterword by Morton scholar Lawrence Gushee. In 2000 the UK’s JSP Records released a beautifully mastered five-CD collection of Morton’s 1926-30 recordings that includes some hard-to-find alternate takes. And perhaps most intriguing, a Danish publisher has brought out William Russell’s massive Oh, Mr. Jelly: A Jelly Roll Morton Scrapbook (Copenhagen: JazzMedia, 1999; $115).
For years jazz enthusiasts had known about a treasure trove of Mortoniana that Russell, a composer, collector and New Orleans jazz expert, had gradually accumulated, though few had been able to examine the materials first-hand. The Missouri-born Russell was one of the prominent voices in Frederick Ramsey, Jr. and Charles Edward Smith’s 1939 Jazzmen, the first serious study of the music’s early history. Russell played a pivotal role in reviving interest in New Orleans jazz in the 1940s, partly through his rediscovery of trumpeter Bunk Johnson. In 1958 he became the first curator of Tulane’s Hogan Jazz Archive, which remains one of the country’s most important resources for the study of early jazz. For over thirty years, Russell methodically gathered articles, photos, correspondence, music, and other materials related to Morton’s life and career. Even more important, he conducted dozens of interviews with those who had known and worked with him, capturing a priceless oral history of both the pianist and his native city.
Oh, Mr. Jelly is one of the results of this lifelong passion. This enormous, strange, flawed but fascinating volume was mostly complete at the time of Russell’s death in 1992. Judging from the publisher’s note, the intervening seven years were devoted to formatting and editing the book, as well as finding a publisher willing to commit to Russell’s original, rather unorthodox vision of the project. The result, of which reportedly only 1,000 copies were printed, is truly a “scrapbook” as the title implies: readers are presented with a varied collection of documents from a wide range of sources, with a mimimum of commentary, and left to draw their own conclusions about Morton’s life and work. The documentation is sloppy at times: for example, the comments from Eubie Blake are partially credited to an interview in 1987—four years after he died! The editorial method should also have been clarified—most interviews are transcribed from tapes, but some come only from notes, and others combine more than one conversation in ways that are not explained. Nevertheless, the book’s publication is an important event in Morton scholarship.
The book assumes familiarity with the basic chronology of Morton’s life, as well as its major players, and those with no prior encounters with the musician may find the volume difficult to approach. Yet for established enthusiasts it will prove deeply absorbing. Since his death, innumerable stories about Morton’s diamond tooth, his pearl-handed revolvers, his women, and his claims to having single-handedly “invented” jazz have obscured aspects of his character and musical gifts that are crucial to appreciating his art. Though the celebrated ego is a familiar presence throughout the interviews, they also often give glimpses of other sides of this complex musician. Morton’s sister, Frances Oliver, who barely knew her brother when she first visited him in Chicago in 1925, tells of a gentle, caring, and protective sibling. In a particularly touching moment, she tearfully recalls Morton playing and singing Berlin’s Always as she came down the stairs of her Chicago rooming house for the last time. And guitarist and banjoist Danny Barker relates a remarkable story of Morton helping to rescue the victims of a serious accident while on the way to a gig in New Jersey.
The insights the musicians give into Morton’s talents are especially intriguing, particularly since the same events are often described from different vantage points. For example, most of those who participated in the historic 1926 Red Hot Pepper sessions for Victor tell, in different ways, of Morton’s deft combination of strong leadership and sympathy for the art of the individual. Guitarist Johnny St. Cyr puts it most succintly when he comments that “he didn’t make you feel like he was the boss and you was a workman. He gave you lots of liberty, but he didn’t want you to get too far from what he wanted” (p. 129). One is struck by the similarity of St. Cyr’s testimony to comments made about Duke Ellington’s role as bandleader, arranger, and composer.
The autobiographical material included in the book complements the famous stories Morton told Lomax at the Library of Congress. Some of the text comes, in fact, from parts of those conversations not recorded on disk but transcribed by Lomax’s secretary, including a fascinating story about Morton’s first meeting in Chicago with pianist Earl Hines (one cannot help but smile at the subtle jab in Morton’s comment: “Earl said he had heard a lot about me and I said I was very sorry I could not say the same” [p. 59]). Interspersed throughout the text are dozens of photos, some quite rare, included Morton’s earliest known portrait (at age 17) and shots of him in blackface with his vaudeville partner Rosa Brown. The book also includes facsimiles of several previously unknown Morton manuscripts of piano solos and band arrangements. But most moving for me is the extensive correspondence, from Morton’s last three years, between the musician and his friend and music publishing partner Roy Carew. Though some readers may find the day-to-day details of Morton’s frustrating final years in New York difficult to wade through, they provide a fascinating glimpse of a musician trying to weather the city’s fickle musical establishment—a business at times indifferent, at others outwardly hostile. One senses Morton’s pride and expectation as he carefully arranges and publishes his song “We Are Elks” to promote at the 1939 Elk’s convention in New York (we are party even to his selection of the colors for the cover page), only to share in his crushed hopes when not a single copy is sold there. Morton’s bitterness toward the music business, often expressed in troublingly anti-Semitic rhetoric, intensifies throughout the correspondence. Yet even in his final letters, their slanted scrawl vividly captured here in facsimile, there remains an indomitable optimism. Just a few weeks before his death, barely able to breathe, he writes of being “so anxious to get things started.” Sadly, Morton did not live long enough to realize his dream, leaving it to Russell and the rest of us who treasure his legacy to celebrate his tragic but brilliant life.
—Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY