Jelly Roll Morton: "Plotting His Way Into Jazz" - John Edward Hasse

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Jelly Roll Morton was Jazz music’s first theorist, Morton took on several problems. In just over three minutes, how do you create interest and drama? In a musical style taking shape, how do you prove the full potential of jazz to integrate the planned with the spontaneous, the notated with the improvised?”

His visionary solutions in “Black Bottom Stomp”: think architecturally; carefully plot themes and sections, their lengths and sonorities; differentiate an introduction, 10 choruses, a transition to another key, and a coda.

Vary the rhythms to incorporate two-beat, four-beat, a backbeat, and a five-note Black Bottom dance rhythm.

Juxtapose 11 different textural combinations and vary the volume of each: full ensemble, cornet and rhythm section, cornet and trombone, clarinet and cornet, clarinet and banjo, clarinet alone, piano alone, cornet alone, banjo and bass, percussion alone, and trombone alone.

Hire the best musicians; rehearse them methodically; give each certain space to improvise; punctuate the flow with moments of surprise, such as the cymbal break in the penultimate chorus; direct their recording session effectively; balance the front-line instruments with the rhythm section. Build drama to an inexorable climax.

The result? A bravura recording that still packs an emotional punch.

- John Edward Hasse, curator emeritus of American music at the Smithsonian

The following essay by John Edward Hasse appeared in the Saturday-Sunday, September 8-9, 2018 Wall Street Journal

Mr. Hasse is curator emeritus of American music at the Smithsonian. His books include “Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington” (Da Capo) and “Discover Jazz” (Pearson).

The appearance of this excellent article prompted me to seek out my copy of the Jazz Heritage Series Jelly Roll Morton: Birth of the Hot [514120T] with is 23 tracks from the classic Chicago “Red Hot Peppers” sessions that were recorded at the Webster Hotel and the Victor Talking Machine Laboratori in Chicago in 1926-27 and released on the Victor, Bluebird and “X” labels.

You’ll find Orrin Keepnews’ Producer’s Note and Lawrence Gushee’s insert notes to these historically significant recordings following Mr. Hasse’s essay, a piece that focuses on the visionary problem solving by Ferdinand ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton, jazz’s first theorist, led to his bravura recording of ‘Black Bottom Stomp.’ The concluding video is set to Black Bottom Stomp so that you can sample the actual tune.

© -  John Edward Hasse/Wall Street Journal, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“In an era of outsize personalities with colorful nicknames, the Creole musician Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton was a singular artist. Early on, Morton (c. 1885-1941) worked as a roving snake-oil salesman, card shark, vaudevillian, poolroom hustler, gambler and pimp. He chose a sexual nickname—“Jelly Roll”—and wore a diamond in his gold tooth. Late in life he fought fiercely and publicly to cement his place in music. His ebullient “Black Bottom Stomp” makes his case beautifully. It’s well worth a listen today—or any day.

What makes Morton an enduring historical figure is not the sensational aspects of his story, but his music. He was the first great ensemble leader, arranger and composer in jazz, his works synthesizing diverse elements of African-American music, and his recordings such as “The Pearls,” “Wolverine Blues” and “King Porter Stomp” became a cornerstone of the jazz tradition. His piano style ingeniously transferred early jazz band textures to the keyboard.

In his native New Orleans, Morton got his musical start playing piano in the city’s storied brothels. He later bragged that he “invented” jazz—an assertion that was met with derision by many. Yet by the 1910s he was already helping lead the transition from ragtime to jazz as a piano wizard of the first rank who could transform all sorts of music into jazz — embellishing, paraphrasing and improvising; smoothing out the rhythms of ragtime; and making everything flow and swing. Despite the odds against him — a black man in a white world, making a peripatetic living as he could, often in the nexus between the underworld and show business — he became one of the music’s most important pioneers.

When Morton walked into the Chicago studios of the Victor Talking Machine Co. on Sept. 15, 1926, he had high ambitions. Assembling a crack band of players, mostly from New Orleans, this was Morton’s big chance to prove himself and make his enduring mark through records. His ambition was aided by Victor’s state-of-the-art technology and masterly recording engineers. With his newly named septet, “The Red Hot Peppers,” Morton waxed three pieces, including “Black Bottom Stomp,” named for an African-American dance step from the deep South.

Jelly Roll Morton was Jazz music’s first theorist, Morton took on several problems. In just over three minutes, how do you create interest and drama? In a musical style taking shape, how do you prove the full potential of jazz to integrate the planned with the spontaneous, the notated with the improvised?

His visionary solutions in “Black Bottom Stomp”: think architecturally; carefully plot themes and sections, their lengths and sonorities; differentiate an introduction, 10 choruses, a transition to another key, and a coda.

Vary the rhythms to incorporate two-beat, four-beat, a backbeat, and a five-note Black Bottom dance rhythm.

Juxtapose 11 different textural combinations and vary the volume of each: full ensemble, cornet and rhythm section, cornet and trombone, clarinet and cornet, clarinet and banjo, clarinet alone, piano alone, cornet alone, banjo and bass, percussion alone, and trombone alone.

Hire the best musicians; rehearse them methodically; give each certain space to improvise; punctuate the flow with moments of surprise, such as the cymbal break in the penultimate chorus; direct their recording session effectively; balance the front-line instruments with the rhythm section. Build drama to an inexorable climax.

The result? A bravura recording that still packs an emotional punch. The mood is upbeat, optimistic, bursting with energy and exuberance. This is music that makes you want to get up and dance. It rewards close, repeated listening. Whether appreciated architecturally or dramatically, Morton’s accomplishment is remarkable.

“Black Bottom Stomp” reveals a real composer at work. In this and other pieces, Morton achieved a remarkable integration of improvisation, spontaneity and variety. His 1920s recordings with the Red Hot Peppers reached the peak of the New Orleans style of group embellishment and collective improvisation, with its trademark heterophony and polyphony. Morton’s superior musicianship, painstaking preparation, and sense of form and drama set a high standard for all subsequent jazz composers, including Duke Ellington.

“Black Bottom Stomp” is Morton’s masterpiece, above all because he brilliantly creates a study in formal, textural and rhythmic variety. The piece is covered in many music textbooks. In 1999, a transcription of his recording — for performance and study — was published in the series Essential Jazz Editions. In 2006, “Black Bottom Stomp” was added to the Library of Congress’s prestigious National Recording Registry. In 2010, the Smithsonian chose to include it in the authoritative “Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology.” The song has been recorded more than 190 times, by musicians around the globe, but my personal favorite is Wynton Marsalis’s 1999 interpretation that fills out the sound with a larger ensemble, adds more time for solos, and offers a modern take on musical revivalism. “Black Bottom Stomp” is an American classic.”

Orrin Keepnews - Producer's Note to the Jazz Heritage Series Jelly Roll Morton: Birth of the Hot [514120T]

“This single-CD reissue has a deceptively simple format: it offers at least one version of everything that Jelly Roll Morton recorded in Chicago in 1926 and 1927.  It also seeks, by judicious use of the best of contemporary audio-enhancement technology, together with deeply experienced engineering and producing personnel, to reproduce this music as accurately and appropriately as is currently possible.

By accomplishing these modest goals, however, we can take some giant strides towards enabling you to enjoy some of the most remarkable jazz ever created. If I were to claim that it belonged at the top of every list, there would be arguments in favor of certain work by Ellington or Armstrong; some people (myself possibly included) might mention Monk or Bird or Miles. But the case for Jelly Roll has one great advantage: this specific body of music is unquestionably his best, and it serves to support his status as one of the handful of most significant influences in the entire history of the music.

There is a major clue in the title of this CD, which manages to be both clever and apt. (I can say that because it wasn't my idea; "Birth of the Hot" was thought of by my friend Steven Lasker.) The reference to the 1949-50 Miles Davis nonet sides on Capitol should be clear: surely this body of work blazed the same sort of trail for hot music that Miles was to do for the cool world a quarter-century later.

After presenting the full span of Morton's five Chicago sessions—17 Red Hot Peppers selections and two trios—there was CD room, just barely, for four more. Accordingly, some arbitrary (but, I trust, unassailable) choices were made, and additional versions of Sidewalk Blues, Dead Man Blues. Grandpa's Spells, and Cannon Ball Blues have been appended. (For the sake of clarity, take numbers are clearly attached to both versions.) Of course there are existing alternates of several of the other Chicago recordings: the rule for this reissue has been always to select the initially issued version. (If any doubt remains, check the discography here, remembering that the very last digit of the master number—i.e., "-2" or "-3"—indicates which take it is.)

— Orrin Keepnews

Insert by Lawrence Gushee to Jelly Roll Morton - Birth of the Hot: The Classic Chicago "Red Hot Peppers" Sessions 1926-27.

“Widely (and justly) believed to be some of the finest performances in the New Orleans ensemble style, the splendid recordings of Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers made in Chicago in 1926 and 1927 for the Victor Company were a rare confluence of artistry, technology and commerce.

Morton had returned to Chicago from the West Coast in early 1923, riding on his hit, Wolverine Blues. He made two band records for the technologically challenged Paramount race series, sat in with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings when they recorded three of his tunes for Gennett, and then recorded half a dozen piano solos of his own composition. Their sales were no doubt good, since another nine piano solos were recorded in June 1924. Along with some 10 early disc recordings of James P. Johnson, they are the most important early testimony to jazz piano playing — with the occasional exception of piano rolls from Johnson, Morton himself and the young Fats Waller.

More band recordings made for a number of labels followed; they range from the acoustically catastrophic to the just barely listenable — although not lacking musical interest. The musicians involved vary from one session to another; the music is unmistakably Morton's, but the execution doesn't do it justice.

Very soon after his arrival in Chicago, Morton came into the orbit of the Melrose Brothers Music Company, an ambitious young firm about to become a specialist in "hot" orchestrations by a stable of skillful arrangers: Elmer Schoebel, Mel Stitzel and others. (In later years, Morton claimed he had been one of them.) Melrose is often credited with setting up the Gennett recording sessions for King Oliver, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and the Bucktown Five all of which used Melrose publications almost exclusively. Certainly it was not unusual for publishers and recording companies to cooperate in this manner.

Having had a smash hit with Wolverine Blues, Melrose surely hoped that Jelly Roll would repeat that success; Milenberg Joys certainly qualifies. (Credit is shared with Paul Mares and Leon Roppolo of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings.)

Also, a good many of the Gennett piano solos were published; a folio collection was even planned.

Morton's ability to notate his music in a manner acceptable for the printing press has sometimes been questioned. His first publication, Jelly Roll Blues, done for Will Rossiter in Chicago in 1915, gives arranging credit to the ubiquitous F. Henri Klickmann, whose work Morton regarded long after the fact as interference; also, many of the Melrose orchestrations are credited to others. My guess is that Morton sometimes provided first drafts which were made more "normal" or easily playable by others; at other times he offered something more finished. The situation is complicated, since some orchestrations clearly precede the recording, while others take it into account by, for example, including a solo from the record.

Victor had recorded only sporadically in Chicago prior to 1926. Okeh and Brunswick ruled there (with a substantial assist from nearby Paramount and Gennett) — and Victor had little interest in "race" artists. In the late fall of 1925, Okeh began a major program of recording blues and jazz by black performers in the Windy City — the best known examples being the first issues from Louis Armstrong's Hot Five (at first still not employing the new Bell-Western Electric "electrical" process). In March 1926, Vocalion began their series of electrical recordings by King Oliver's Dixie Syncopators. In July, Columbia recorded Lil Armstrong's superb band, using the alias of "New Orleans Wanderers" when released in the otherwise lilly-white general series; these were also electrical, but far superior to the over-modulated Olivers. (Four other sides, under the name of "New Orleans Bootblacks," were unaccountably held back and appeared in the race series two to three years later.) These are marvels of fidelity, revealing for the first time the true power of the New Orleans collective style, mostly using traditional tunes and routines but with a Chicago accent.

Conceivably, these recordings alerted Victor or their newly hired expert on "race" and "hillbilly" material. Ralph Peer, to the commercial potential of a hot Chicago band ot New Orleans musicians; they also would have been aware that Oliver's tunes had mostly come from Melrose. Exactly how it came about is not known; no matter, Morton was handed the opportunity of a lifetime; to record for the technically and commercially most savvy label in the country while his creativity was at its zenith.

Obviously, Jelly Roll needed musicians who were familiar with the New Orleans style. But they also had to read music with more than a little facility, since written arrangements of some complexity — call them compositions — were the basis of all the performances. The degree to which recorded and published versions correspond varies, with many changes introduced during rehearsal or at the recording session itself. It would require a lengthy essay to unravel all the details. According to Omer Simeon (who provided reams of information in later interviews), Morton, while punctilious with respect to all ensemble passages as well as introductions, transitions and endings, was happy to receive suggestions from his players, as well as allowing them freedom in their solos. The balance between band and sideman is peerless; furthermore, Morton shows that he was also a great accompanist.

Jelly Roll had toured with a band in late 1925 and early 1926, recording for Gennett as Jelly Roll Morton's Incomparables. Apart from obscure cornetist Ray Bowling, none of the sidemen are known — but none of them were picked for the Victor sessions. Three of his musicians came from Lil Armstrong's recently disbanded Dreamland Syncopators: George Mitchell, Kid Ory, John St. Cyr, and, I suspect John Lindsay, who had moved to Lottie Hightower's band as a trombonist. Andrew Hilaire probably was working for Charles "Doc" Cook's big band. The kid of the group, Simeon, New Orleans-born but Chicago-bred, and a pupil of Lorenzo Tio, Jr., was with Charles Elgar's big band either in Chicago or in Milwaukee, just an hour and a half away by train.

After a few rehearsals at Morton's South Side apartment, the first recording session began at 9 a.m. on September 15. Since Victor was not to have its own Chicago recording studio until the following year, reverberant space was found in the Webster Hotel on the near North Side. Three takes each of three tunes were cut over the next four hours. The two up-tempo numbers, Morton's Black Bottom Stomp (first published a year earlier as Queen of Spades) and Mel Stitzel's The Chant, were played with a verve and grasp of contrasting variety and climactic shape never before heard on jazz recordings.

While much of this comes from Morton's grasp of musical form and his care in selecting and rehearsing the sidemen, surely much credit is due the complete rhythm section — for the first time a full complement of four, with John Lindsay's rich string bass the motor force of the whole ensemble.

With Smokehouse Blues — credited to composer Charles Luke, but really a version of the archetypical Salty Dog — and Stitzel's modernistic novelty, which soon enough settles down to eight straight-ahead E-flat blues choruses, these three recordings set a standard sometimes equalled, but never surpassed in any of Morton's band records.

A week later, three more tunes, including a pair of relatively new pieces by Jelly Roll, were recorded by the same musicians (plus another two clarinets to make up a trio for the first two). They all are ornamented with dialogue or sound effects which have on occasion perturbed critics as unworthy of Morton — even leading to amputation of the offending parts on reissues. They forget how much of a vaudevillian entertainer Jelly Roll always was. Hokum aside, the ingenious variety of texture and formal construction is not to be denied, and the up-tempo Steamboat Stomp almost achieves the energy level of Black Bottom Stomp. Even Dead Man Blues, formally just a blues in B-flat, sticks in our memory: George Mitchell's warm middle register is at its best, and the cumulative clarinet-trio, trio-plus-trombone, loose-ensemble-out pattern works without a hitch.

On December 16, this band met once again for an extraordinarily fruitful session of five tunes: one of them Morton's first published work from 10 years before, Original Jelly-Roll Blues: one from 1919 credited to the Spikes Brothers (although Morton claimed some input). Someday Sweetheart, and one apparently authored by Joe Oliver for all thai it sounds like Morton, Dr. Jazz. The overall sound is a bit different from the first session, since St. Cyr plays prominent guitar on all tunes, and Hilaire — a drummer much admired by Zutty Singleton and Preston Jackson — is more audible.

Some commentators have found Someday Sweetheart syrupy to the point of nausea with its two fiddles and bass clarinet solo. To these ears, much of the problem is with an overly busy arrangement which makes for a mediocre performance. That Jelly Roll was exploring new possibilities didn't keep the recording from sinking without trace after the initial Victor issue, not surfacing again until 1950.

Jelly-Roll Blues is also somewhat fussy as a composition, not unlike other blues of 1915-16, such as Euday Bowman's Kansas City Blues. The players seem often not on the correct wavelength and the tempo falters. On the other hand, the two up-tempo tunes, Grandpa's Spells and Dr. Jazz, are splendid performances, the latter giving us Morton's ecstatic singing for the first time.

Six months passed before Morton recorded again on two successive weeks in June. Victor had by then set up a regular recording studio with "proper" lively but echoless acoustics. Only Morton and Mitchell continue from the 1926 band; Lindsay's string bass is replaced by Quinn Wilson's excellent but less agile tuba: the technically superior Bud Scott fills the guitar chair and is recorded with extraordinary prominence. Johnny Dodds, though a less modern and rhythmically less flexible replacement for Simeon, plays with incisive edge; his brother's often obtrusive presence behind the drum set was very possibly a mistake. Finally, Morton took a giant step away from the traditional New Orleans ensemble in bringing in alto saxist Paul "Stump" Evans.

The brickbats heaved at the saccharine Someday Sweetheart and the vaudeville hokum of Steamboat Stomp are more than matched by the critical dyspepsia resulting from the "vocal effects" on the first two June cuts. Since the man producing these sounds had been billed as "Laughing Lew LaMar" as far back as 1908, it seems quite possible that his and Jelly Roll's paths had crossed many years earlier. Were the hyena and billy goat pieces perhaps commissioned by LaMar?

Oddly, this first 1927 session has three of its five tunes in minor keys, always congenial to Morton. With the further addition in Jungle Blues of an obsessive bass ostinato, we hear a dark intensity which helps us understand why Jelly Roll contested Ellington's priorly in the "jungle style." Wild Man Blues, inexplicably copyrighted as Ted Lewis Blues, had already been recorded by Louis Armstrong twice, once with the Hot Seven, a second time with Johnny Dodds' own band, Morton's version is by contrast rather cheerful, marked by some embarrassing drops in tempo occasioned possibly by Baby Dodds' use of most of his available traps — at his leader's instigation, it would seem. On the plus side is spectacular playing by Evans, but that was not enough to secure issuance at the time: its first appearance was on Bluebird in 1939.

The final Chicago session included only two tunes by the band: Beale St. Blues (written by W.C. Handy, but for which Melrose had published an orchestration) and Jelly Roll's spectacular piano display piece, The Pearls, which comes off amazingly well as a band arrangement despite its complexity. Surely, Jelly Roll couldn't have been running out of material? In any event, Morton and the Dodds brothers continued as a trio during the rest of the afternoon. The 1916 Wolverine, recorded as a duo with clarinetist Volly de Faut two years previously, has great ragtime drive — in fact it is the most propulsive of the day's four recorded performances. The subsequent Mr. Jelly Lord has the clarinetist playing untypically sotto voce, backed by his brother's mechanical backbeat with brushes. Twenty-five years later. Baby Dodds asserted that even in such an ostensibly informal situation, such details were Morton's choice.

Over the next three years, Morton recorded some 58 additional tunes for Victor—usually as leader—all in the New York or Camden studios. After a first session in June of 1928, which still used Melrose copyrights, there began what one might call the Peer-Southern Music era with much of the material of a more modern cast, sometimes with full three-man sax sections, sometimes with three brass. There's plenty of musical interest there, but never again did Morton lead a recording band that was so sympathetic to his musical concepts nor so brilliantly expressive as in 1926.

Although Victor ceased recording Jelly Roll after October 1930 until the "revival" sessions of 1939. they thought well enough of his work to keep it in the catalog and to keep reissuing it through 1938. By that time, Morton had made his epochal documentary recordings for the Library of Congress, and. he hoped, was about to become once again the recording star he had been.”

—LAWRENCE GUSHEE

[Lawrence Gushee is a professor of music at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a noted jazz critic. Among other distinguished projects, he has annotated several classic reissues for the Smithsonian Institution, including an album by Jelly Roll's contemporary King Oliver. He is a recognized authority on the work of Morton, making this an appropriate time for his first contribution to the Bluebird reissue series.]