Artist: Jelly Roll Morton
Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, ( September 20, 1890 – July 10, 1941) known professionally as Jelly Roll Morton, was an American ragtime and jazz pianist, bandleader, and composer. Morton was jazz's first arranger, proving that a genre rooted in improvisation could retain its essential characteristics when notated.
His composition "Jelly Roll Blues", published in 1915, was one of the first published jazz compositions. Morton also wrote "King Porter Stomp", "Wolverine Blues", "Black Bottom Stomp", and "I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say", the last being a tribute to New Orleans musicians from the turn of the 20th century.
Morton was born Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe (or Lemott), into the Creole community in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans around 1890. At the age of fourteen, Morton began as a piano player in a brothel. Around 1904, Morton started touring in the US South, working in minstrel shows such as Will Benbow's Chocolate Drops, gambling, and composing.
In 1912–14, Morton toured with his girlfriend Rosa Brown as a vaudeville act before living in Chicago for three years. By 1914, he was putting his compositions on paper. In 1915 "Jelly Roll Blues" was one of the first jazz compositions to be published.
In 1917 he went to California with bandleader William Manuel Johnson and Johnson's sister Anita Gonzalez. Morton's tango "The Crave" was popular in Hollywood. He was invited to perform at the Hotel Patricia nightclub in Vancouver, Canada. Morton returned to Chicago in 1923 to claim authorship of "The Wolverines", which had become popular as "Wolverine Blues". He released the first of his commercial recordings, first as piano rolls, then on record, both as a piano soloist and with jazz bands.
In 1926, Morton signed a contract with the Victor Talking Machine Company, giving him the opportunity to bring a well-rehearsed band to play his arrangements in the Victor recording studios in Chicago. These recordings by Jelly Roll Morton and His Red Hot Peppers included Kid Ory, Omer Simeon, George Mitchell, Johnny St. Cyr, Barney Bigard, Johnny Dodds, Baby Dodds, and Andrew Hilaire.
Morton moved to New York City and continued to record for Victor. Although he had trouble finding musicians who wanted to play his style of jazz, he recorded with Omer Simeon, George Baquet, Albert Nicholas, Barney Bigard, Russell Procope, Lorenzo Tio and Artie Shaw, the trumpeters Ward Pinkett, Bubber Miley, Johnny Dunn and Henry "Red" Allen, Sidney Bechet, Paul Barnes, Bud Freeman, Pops Foster, Paul Barbarin, Cozy Cole, and Zutty Singleton.
In 1935, his 30-year-old composition "King Porter Stomp", arranged by Fletcher Henderson, became Benny Goodman's first hit and a swing standard, but Morton received no royalties from the recordings.
Further information about Jelly Roll Morton is found here.
Photography credit: English: Bloom photograph studio, Chicago, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
This content was excerpted from the Wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jelly_Roll_Morton, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).
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