Read Online The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia - Free Book Online Page B

assertions to the contrary, was typically less than virtuosic; his claim to have invented jazz hardly merits serious debate. Nonetheless, in terms of overall artistry, Morton’s achievements were considerable. These 1926 Victor recordings find Morton at the peak of his creative powers. In performances such as “Sidewalk Blues,” “Black Bottom Stomp,” “Dead Man Blues,” “Grandpa’s Spells,” “Smokehouse Blues,” and “The Chant,” he tilled a fertile middle ground between the rigid compositional structures of ragtime and the spontaneous vivacity of jazz improvisation. This style would soon become anachronistic—in fact, it may already have been so by the time these recordings were made—as jazz came to forget its origins in the multithematic ragtime form. In this context, Morton’s work represents both the highest pitch and final flowering of this approach.
    Although his artistic vision dominates these sides, Morton benefited from the presence of a seasoned group of New Orleans players. Trombonist Kid Ory, a Creole born in LaPlace, Louisiana, at some point between 1886 and 1890, had been a successful bandleader in New Orleans before taking his music on the road. In Los Angeles, in 1922, his band released the first New Orleans jazz recording featuring black musicians, and in 1925 he moved to Chicago where he participated in several of the most important studio dates in jazz history, working not only with Morton on the seminal Red Hot Peppers dates, but also recording with Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, among others. His frequent colleague Johnny St. Cyr, born in New Orleans in 1890, was one of the first jazz string players. St. Cyr was trained as a plasterer, but a musical career beckoned after he taught himself to play a homemade guitar. As a performer with Fate Marable’s riverboat band, St. Cyr traveled extensively, finally settling in Chicago in the early 1920s, where he also recorded with Armstrong and Oliver. In these years, St. Cyr often played a hybrid instrument, a six-string guitar-banjo, which combined the guitar’s neck and fingerboard with the banjo’s body. Other members of the 1926 Red Hot Peppers included cornetist George Mitchell, clarinetist Omer Simeon, bassist John Lindsay, and drummer Andrew Hilaire.
    Jelly Roll continued to record frequently during the remainder of the 1920s. The members of his band changed regularly, but, regardless of the sidemen or the evolving musical tastes of the American public, Morton’s ensembles were at their best when working within the aesthetic constraints of the classic New Orleans idiom. Noteworthy Morton recordings from the 1920s include an invigorating 1927 trio session with clarinetist Johnny Dodds and drummer Baby Dodds, a tantalizing 1924 duet date with King Oliver, and Morton’s 1923 work with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings—a historic event that not only produced fine music but served as a milestone in countering the segregation of black and white jazz players in the recording studio—as well as ongoing performances as a solo pianist. As with so many of the artists from this period, Morton’s recording career came to a sudden halt with the Great Depression, but even under happier economic circumstances his music would almost certainly have fallen out of favor. Jazz had become a soloist’s music, and the structured, collectivist aesthetic of Morton’s finest work was not in keeping with the prevailing tone of the Swing Era.
    Morton had his own, somewhat paranoid interpretations of his fall from the limelight after his Victor contract ran out in 1930. At times, he blamed a conspiracy of music industry insiders (led by ASCAP and MCA) for his problems; on other occasions, he asserted that a voodoo curse was the main culprit. In any event, Morton made only one recording during an eight-year stretch during the 1930s. If he maintained any degree of notoriety, it was as the composer of the “King Porter Stomp,” a piece popularized through the