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Inside This Issue George Handy’s Bloos by Benjamin Bierman Bukharian Jewish Music in Queens by Evan Rapport American Hymn Tune Index by Gayle Sherwood Magee Composing Queer, review by Howard Pollack Alvin Lucier, review by David Grubbs |
Nine Priceless Hours with Jelly Roll
Morton Review by Jeff Taylor
Jelly Roll Morton Photo courtesy of Rounder Records In the Spring 2002 issue of the ISAM Newsletter I noted a renewed fascination with the life and music of jazz pianist, composer and bandleader Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton. Now this revival seems to have reached an apex with Rounder Records’s issue of Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings (CDROUN1888/011661-188822, $129.98), which contains all of Alan Lomax’s 1938 interviews with Morton, as well as a CD of interviews with musicians who knew and worked with the artist. The striking red piano-shaped box includes the 2001 edition of Alan Lomax’s 1950 book Mister Jelly Roll, as well as a superb and now Grammy Award-winning booklet featuring biographical notes and comments by John Szwed, along with photos and excerpts from Morton’s extraneous writings. For those unwilling to spring for the whole package, Rounder has issued a version with the CDs and booklet alone (CDROUN1898/011611-189829; $79.99), and plans a compilation of highlights sometime later this year. Excerpts from Lomax’s recordings first saw limited release in 1947, on a series of 78 rpm recordings issued by Circle. Later LP versions were essentially reissues of the 78s, which, along with the poor sound quality of Lomax’s original discs, maintained an inconsistency of pitch due to the variable speeds of the original recordings. In 1994, Rounder issued four CDs of the music from the Library of Congress recordings (Rounder CD 1091-1094) with the sound quality vastly improved and the pitch painstakingly corrected by Morton scholar James Dapogny. But only with the current reissue are the complete, unexpurgated conversations and music—complete with a “Parental Advisory” label!—commercially available for the first time. The story of these recordings is well-known to Morton scholars. Alan Lomax, who along with his father had become interested in making field recordings of vanishing folk music repertories (particularly throughout the South), met Morton during a time when the 47-year-old pianist was performing solo, virtually forgotten, in a seedy Washington club. Though not a jazz fan, Lomax quickly recognized Morton had a fascinating story to tell, and was eager to document his experiences for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. Therefore, over a few weeks in May and June of 1938, Lomax sat on the stage of Coolidge Auditorium—usually a bastion of European chamber music—and guided Morton through a series of reminiscences about his career. For a total of nine hours Lomax’s often unreliable portable recording equipment captured Morton’s indelible descriptions of the long-forgotten musicians, society ladies, pool sharks and pimps who had colored his life. In the resulting recordings Morton’s evocative and highly articulate speaking style at times approaches blank verse, punctuated by pauses to enjoy a bottle of whiskey Lomax had thought to snatch from his office. In his booklet, Szwed includes the young archivist’s own redolent description of Morton’s performance: I realized that
this man spoke the English language in a more beautiful way than anybody
I’d ever heard. … A gravel voice melting at the edges, not
talking, each sentence bowling along like a line from the blues, like an eddy
of a big sleepy Southern river, weaving a legend… (p. 11) A recorded interview with Morton would be priceless to any scholar of early jazz. But Lomax showed his true genius by recording Morton at his instrument. This allowed him, first of all, to offer up timeless renditions of his own compositions. His performances of “King Porter Stomp,” “Kansas City Stomp,” and “Original Jelly Roll Blues”—all tunes he recorded several times, as both solos and ensemble numbers—are classics, capturing his rich, orchestral and often intricately contrapuntal approach to blues and ragtime. And unlike the earlier Rounder issues, the selections are heard in the context of the larger arc of his storytelling. Morton also illustrates and comments on the other music and styles he heard around him, both in his birthplace of New Orleans and in the towns and cities to which he traveled during his many years as an itinerant piano player. His description of an encounter with Memphis piano player Benny Frenchy (“that damned fool can’t hit a piano with a brick”) reveals his sardonic wit, especially when he proceeds to ridicule Frenchy’s style with a few lead-footed bars of empty clichés (Morton, of course, claimed he himself later “brought the house down” with his own performance). And his vocal rendition of the “Dirty Dozens,” with each verse, more filthy than the last, ending with the line “…and your mammy don’t wear no drawers,” vividly captures the lurid nightlife he encountered on one of his early trips to Chicago. In some cases Morton was recalling music he had heard decades earlier, and his memories were no doubt colored by both the intervening years and his own imagination. Still, the fact that Morton was able to both describe and demonstrate his experiences makes these interviews invaluable. The last CD of the set includes a complete transcription of the interviews as a PDF file—a vast improvement over the error-ridden original typescript transcription, copies of which have circulated for years. It is therefore possible to sit down and both read and listen to all the interviews, in their complete form and in the order in which they were recorded. To do so (though perhaps not at one sitting!) is to enter a spellbinding world. The ear quickly adjusts to the poor sound quality, and speaking, singing, and playing all become part of a single unforgettable experience, where the fortunes of one of America’s greatest musicians, as well as those of Jack the Bear, Bad Sam (“the toughest Negro in Memphis”), Skinny Head Pete, Sheep Bite and a host of other characters rise from the haze of Morton’s memory. At the center is Morton’s remarkable musicianship, with a pianistic touch that can move seamlessly from low-down blues to gut-bucket stomp to elegant “high society” dance music and classic repertory, and a singing voice that can be at turns raucous and deeply moving. John Szwed’s notes vividly capture a remarkable historical moment when an energetic 23-year-old crossed paths with a brilliant musician that society had virtually swept aside. And though there is little new information in the biographical sections—Morton has perhaps one of the most meticulously documented biographies of any early jazz musician—Szwed’s rich and accessible comments provide intriguing insights into both Morton’s playing and singing, the later talent too often overlooked by historians. There has been some negative press about the sound processing (the defects are hardly noticeable to me, as I had relied for years on cassettes of ancient LPs checked out of a public library), but these criticisms seem negligible given the enormous significance of this project, which makes available, at long last, one of American music’s most important recorded documents. —Jeff Taylor ISAM home Who we
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