The History of Jazz (10 page)

The letter is signed, “Jelly Roll Morton, Originator of Jazz and Stomps, Victor Artist, World’s Greatest Hot Tune Writer.”

Similar letters were sent to other parties, and before long Morton had established his position as, if not the inventor of jazz, at least its most noteworthy cause célèbre. Further attention came on the heels of the Library of Congress recordings conducted by Alan Lomax. If the
Downbeat
letter presented Morton as blusterer, the Lomax interviews offered a more compelling account of his achievements. In his playing, singing, theorizing, and reminiscing on these sessions, Morton left behind one of the most spellbinding documents in the history of jazz music. An era comes to life, revivified under the sure touch of his fingers as they glance over the keyboard and sketched with oratorical aplomb by Morton’s hypnotic voice. Whether as huckster or historian, Morton was a persuasive talker, and record companies were again listening, after the long dry spell of the early and mid-1930s. He made the best of these new opportunities. In particular, a series of intimate recordings, released under the name “New Orleans Memories,” showcased not only his strengths as a composer (most notably on “The Crave”) and pianist, but also his less-known skills as a vocalist. His singing here, as well as on the Lomax sessions, is deeply moving and suggests that, under different circumstances, Morton might have made his name in the music world without touching the keyboard.

Morton enjoyed his new status as an elder statesman of jazz for only a few short years. Late in 1940, following the death of his godmother, Morton drove across the country in inclement weather, with his Lincoln and Cadillac chained together. He was concerned that some diamonds that were in his godmother’s possession might be stolen (as events turned out, his fears were confirmed). He stayed on in California, working sporadically as a musician, but soon fell ill. On July 10, 1941, he died in the Los Angeles County General Hospital.

The jazz world still has not come to grips with this complicated figure from its earliest days. Morton has served as the inspiration for a novel and has been depicted in a Hollywood movie, excoriated in a Broadway musical, commemorated in modern dance choreography, and psychoanalyzed in liner notes, essays, and articles. Most of these efforts, however, latch on to one side of this variegated personality, usually emphasizing the braggadocio, the gems and flashy wardrobe, or the underworld trappings, painting Morton as some sort of Crescent City Mack the Knife. Too often the music, which is the
real
diamond in this psychological abyss, gets lost in the process. Even the Broadway musical based on Morton’s life and times,
Jelly’s Last Jam
, conveniently relied on other composers for much of its score—almost as if the Morton persona were sufficient, while the artistry could be safely ignored.

But, in the final analysis, Morton’s position in jazz history depends on none of these superfluities, neither the boasting nor the bordello sidelines. Morton’s most important legacy lies in his body of compositions, recordings, piano rolls, reminiscences, and lucid commentary on the jazz idiom. It is through these that he earned his place as the most consummate craftsman of the traditional New Orleans style.

One of the supreme ironies of the history of New Orleans jazz is that so much of it took place in Chicago. By the early 1920s, the center of the jazz world had clearly shifted northward. New Orleans musicians continued to dominate the idiom, but they were now operating far afield from their native soil. Well before the middle of the decade, a large cadre of major New Orleans jazz musicians were making their reputations in other locales—Jelly Roll Morton left New Orleans around 1908; Freddie Keppard departed in 1914 (if not earlier); Sidney Bechet in 1916, Jimmie Noone in 1917, King Oliver in 1918, Kid Ory in 1919, Johnny Dodds around that same time, Baby Dodds in 1921, and Louis Armstrong in 1922. These moves may have begun as brief stints on the road, but in the end proved all but permanent. The vast majority of the New Orleans diaspora never returned to their home state except for brief visits.

This exodus was anything but a purely musical phenomenon. Between the years 1916 and 1919, a half-million African Americans left the South for more tolerant communities in the North, with almost one million more following in their wake in the 1920s. This vast population shift, which has since come to be known as the Great Migration, encompassed the whole range of black society, from doctors and lawyers to musicians and ministers, from teachers and merchants to artisans and manual laborers. Musicians moved north for the same reasons that motivated other groups: the search for a better life, for greater opportunities to work, to support a family, to enjoy a modicum of personal freedom—options that were much harder for an African American to pursue in the segregated South. As a result, in a host of major cities—Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia—the black population more than tripled between 1910 and 1930.

Certainly there were outstanding musicians who stayed behind in New Orleans, and some even had a chance to record in their native city. Hear, for example, the distinguished sides made by Sam Morgan’s band in New Orleans during 1927 with their uncanny anticipation of the later four-beats-to-the-bar Kansas City swing style. Yet, for the most part, ambitious players intent on advancing their careers in jazz during the 1920s had little choice but to look beyond their home turf. In retrospect, we can see that only those who departed made major reputations, both for themselves and for the musical riches of their hometown. In this regard, New Orleans was no different than Memphis, Clarksdale, and the other centers of distinctive local and regional performance styles in the South. Nashville has emerged as the only exception, the one city that could build national reputations for its homegrown talent, and serve as a destination rather than a starting point for celebrated music careers. New Orleans, for all its fame as a city built on nightlife and entertainment, never achieved that level of self-sufficiency. Bechet, Oliver, Morton, Armstrong, and others were able to put New Orleans jazz on the musical map of American culture, but only by leaving the Big Easy behind.

White New Orleans jazz musicians also made the move to Chicago during this period, but in their case the motivation was not to escape racial intolerance, but to tap the larger economic base of the northern city. As in the case of the ODJB, these white ensembles also found it easier to interest record companies in their music, and for a while enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the jazz record market—at least until the tremendous popularity of the first race records revealed the commercial potential of African American performers. Within a few months of the initial recordings of black Chicago musicians, racially mixed bands also entered the studio— although the issue of segregation in jazz was anything but resolved by this move, and would continue to be a focal point for conflicts, personal as well as societal, for many years.

The collaboration between Jelly Roll Morton and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, a Chicago-based unit of white Louisiana instrumentalists, was the occasion for this signal event, the first interracial session in the history of Chicago jazz. The Rhythm Kings had already undertaken recording sessions in August 1922 and March 1923 when, in July 1923, they engaged Morton to serve as pianist and composer for a follow-up date. “We did our best to copy the colored music we’d heard at home,” group organizer Paul Mares later recalled. “We did the best we could, but naturally we couldn’t play real colored style.”
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In Mares’s case, his pungent middle-range cornet solos reflect the influence of his contemporary Joe “King” Oliver, whose band made its first sides in Chicago a few months after the initial Rhythm Kings recordings. Although less rhythmically exciting than King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings featured strong ensemble work, a sure sense of swing, especially at medium tempos, and the impressive clarinet stylings of Leon Roppolo. Roppolo’s work, as demonstrated in his solos on “Wolverine Blues” and “Panama,” avoids the arpeggio-based approach that imparted a mechanical quality to so many other first-generation New Orleans clarinetists. Instead, he offers a more linear, melodic style that would come to exert a marked influence on numerous later Chicago school reed players.

Yet those seeking the hottest jazz in Chicago, circa 1923, inevitably found their way to Lincoln Gardens, the largest dance hall on the South Side, where King Oliver led a band built primarily on the skills of transplanted New Orleans players. Was Oliver the greatest of the early New Orleans cornetists? On this matter, historical accounts are inconclusive. If anything, the deeper one probes, the more one encounters contradictions and unanswered questions. “Most everybody has heard of Joe Oliver and Louis Armstrong,” Preston Jackson has asserted, “but few ever heard of Mutt Carey in his prime. Mutt Carey, in his day, was equal to Joe Oliver.” Carey himself had a different story to tell, remarking that “Freddie Keppard had New Orleans all sewed up. He was the King—yes, he wore the crown.” Edmund Hall, another of the first-generation players, cast his vote for Buddy Petit: “Buddy is a man they’ve never written much about. He kind of what you call set a pace around New Orleans. … If Buddy had left New Orleans to go to Chicago when a lot of the other men left, I’m positive he would have had a reputation equal to what the others got.”
²¹
Or what about Emmett Hardy, the white New Orleans cornetist who never recorded and died of tuberculosis in 1925 at the age of twenty-two? “Emmett was the greatest musician I ever heard,” later wrote Bix Beiderbecke, who had encountered the New Orleans player when Hardy traveled to Iowa to perform in the early 1920s.
²²

Whatever the virtues of these and other neglected figures, Oliver stands out as the New Orleans cornetist who left behind the most impressive body of recordings— recordings that, in many ways, help us understand what the other early figures of New Orleans jazz might have sounded like in their prime. Oliver’s band may have lacked the ingenious arrangements of the Red Hot Peppers, or the understated elegance of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. But its hot, dirty, swinging sound comes closest to the essence of the jazz experience. Its appeal draws from its rawness, its earthiness, its insistence. If Jelly Roll’s music has aged like a fine wine, Oliver’s still cuts to the quick like a jug of bootleg moonshine.

Oliver, for his part, was neither the most melodically inventive nor the most technically skilled of the New Orleans cornetists. Yet he remains, in many ways, the measuring rod by which we can gauge the work of other New Orleans brass players. His throaty, vocal sound inspired many imitators and represented, both conceptually and historically, a meeting ground of earlier and later jazz styles. Hence, Oliver’s playing carried within it a clear link to a long list of underrecorded (or unrecorded) early New Orleans cornetists such as Manuel Perez, Freddie Keppard, Buddy Petit, and Buddy Bolden; it also looked ahead to the work of later players influenced by Oliver, not only the most famous musical son of New Orleans, Louis Armstrong, but also a host of brass players schooled in the Chicago tradition as well as the cadre of growling and moaning soloists in various Ellington bands, all of whom are clear descendants of King Joe. In his summation of the past, Oliver could integrate into his playing both the spontaneous (Bolden) and studied (Perez) traditions of early New Orleans brass playing, and in his anticipation of the future we can draw connecting lines all the way to Wynton Marsalis and beyond. By almost any measure—historical, musical, biographical—Joe “King” Oliver stands out as a seminal figure in the history of the music.

We know little about this performer’s earliest years, and contradictory sources make even his date of birth a matter for speculation. It may have been as early as 1881 (according to his World War I draft registration card) or as late as 1885 (based on U.S. Census data). In any event, Oliver came of age in New Orleans during a period in which marching bands played a prominent role in the city’s social activities. By his midteens, Oliver was playing with these ensembles, and an early apprenticeship with Perez in the Onward Brass Band was perhaps a crucial step in his musical development. Oliver’s work retained the influence of these ensembles to the end, as shown by the marchlike elements in performances such as “High Society” and “Snake Rag.” In 1918, Oliver left New Orleans, and over the next several years he performed not only in Chicago but as far away as California. In 1921, Oliver returned to Chicago, where his Creole Jazz Band drew an enthusiastic following, among both musicians and the general public, during an extended stint at Lincoln Gardens, a dance hall on East Thirty-first Street.

For the Lincoln Gardens engagement, Oliver used the same frontline players who had traveled with him to California: Honore Dutrey on trombone and Johnny Dodds on clarinet. But in a surprising move, Oliver now decided to add a second cornet player to the band. This duplication of roles was an oddity at the time— indeed, as it would be in a combo today—but it was an especially peculiar change for Oliver. In California, by contrast, he had relied on violin and saxophone in his attempts to give a richer texture to the group’s sound. One might think Oliver would follow a similar path in Chicago or, at a minimum, hesitate to hire another cornetist, if only because of the risk that his own role as star cornetist in the band would be lessened.

In fact, something of this sort soon happened. As fate would have it, Oliver’s choice for this new spot in the band, Louis Armstrong, an ascending star then still largely unknown outside New Orleans, would come to outshine not only Oliver, but the whole first generation of jazz musicians. Some have stressed Oliver’s appreciation of Armstrong’s talent as the motivating factor in this move; others have pointed to Oliver’s desire to enhance the musicianship of the Creole Jazz Band. Perhaps Oliver’s sense of his own declining skills as a cornetist—gum problems would eventually force him to abandon the horn—spurred him in this direction. Whatever the reason, Oliver acted quickly: within a few weeks of securing the Lincoln Gardens gig, in July 1922, he sent a telegram to Louis Armstrong requesting his immediate presence in Chicago.