That Everlasting Jelly Roll
“Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.” ― Arthur Rimbaud
It has been two years since I moved my newsletter to Substack and began writing longer pieces and experimenting with different kinds of content and media. Thank you for coming back and continuing to hopefully find something worth while!
It is the magical stuff that could be the basis of the next best picture of the year: a man walks into a smokey nightclub in the late 1930s…a music enthusiast out to catch some live sounds and a stiff drink…and sitting at the piano…slumping over and disheveled…is a familiar looking face with an even more familiar sound, sullenly dancing around the keys of his companion instrument. Is it…COULD IT BE…the self-proclaimed founder of Jazz playing the musical form he helped bring into the world, a form based on chaotic improvisation and driving barroom melodies that blew out of the big easy not too long ago? Damn, that was a sound that had been made redundant and passé by the simpler, poppier music that had come from the Cotton Clubs and Savoys Ballrooms and Trocaderos? No one played that stuff anymore.
Could the phantom on the piano be Jelly Roll Morton?
After the set, Jelly Roll limps to the bar and talks to our protagonist, gets him to buy a round of drinks for a piece of the story of New Orleans Jazz. Of the brothels of Storyville USA, where he grew up. Of Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet. He talks over the heckles from a darkened corner of the club: why can’t you stop playing that old crap. And Morton winces a smile while continuing to weave his story to his one fan who has shown up that evening, one more person to help carry on his legacy and maybe even bring him back to an audience that forgot about him.
In 1937 Jelly Roll Morton went to Washington DC in an attempt at a career revival. Music had passed him by, with him stubbornly refusing to adjust his craft to give the people what they want. In DC, he found himself a radio show and a regular club gig, both for the purpose of telling his story. And lucky enough for him, the DC adventure connected him with Alan Lomax who understood the significance of Morton’s career to the history of music, to his greater impact on American culture. He was both one of the inventors of jazz and the idiom’s ancient mariner, being one of the few still alive who was so deep in it.
The following year, in 1938, as Lomax did for so many others (Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie), he recorded long stretches of Jelly Roll Morton, in this instance with the artist sitting at the piano, telling his stories as he played a soundtrack of Jazz behind them. Collected in the Grammy-winning boxset Jelly Roll Morton, The Complete Library Of Congress Recordings, the hours of interviews are a master class in the birth of Jazz, told in a way that only Morton could do it; the seasoned storyteller from Storyville whose was not only there for the Jazz big bang, but lit the fuse to make it happen. The recordings are some of my favorite ever made. Sublime.
Jelly Roll Morton died in obscurity just a few years before the revival of the sound he created, a revival that brought back the likes of Kid Ory and ushered in a new crowd including Turk Murphy, who I got to know when growing up in San Francisco. That olde tyme music was back, with the sound of Jelly Roll Morton carrying through bands’ covers of his classic tunes like Black Bottom Stomp, Dr. Jazz, and Jelly Roll Blues.
Today marks Jelly Roll’s 132 birthday and while the big comeback evaded him during his lifetime, it seems his shadow across Jazz and other musical genres just keeps a’growing. True art transcends time and place. Happy Birthday Jelly Roll Morton.
How Toni Morrison Wrote Her Most Challenging Novel
“Released from the constraints of traditional narration, as if having caught her breath, Morrison became her own instrument, letting the story tumble from her. Letting the eye choose its own gaze.
When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church.
Maybe that’s what makes the first paragraph of ‘Jazz’ one of the most gorgeous and compelling in American literature. The fact that it wasn’t written or crafted so much as it escaped from its author, like breath from lungs.”
Andy McKaie helped usher in the modern golden age of music reissues, working in the mid-80s to bring great artists…like those in Chess’ catalog…to a whole new generation. The obit gives a good understanding of how much he really did...and he was supposedly a great guy as well. RIP.
Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka wins 2022 Booker Prize
“The 2022 Booker Prize was given to The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, written by Sri Lanka's Shehan Karunatilaka….The panel of judges hailed Karunatilaka's novel as ‘a searing, mordantly funny satire set amid the murderous mayhem of a Sri Lanka beset by civil war.’”
NASA's James Webb Telescope just unveiled an image of the Pillars of Creation
That James Webb Telescope continues to bring us such sights of beauty from deep space.
Bob Koester speaks about Delmark Records and the Jazz Record Mart
Friend and former Music PR man Cary Baker has transcribed pieces of conversations he had with Delmark Records’ founder Bob Koester from ~1982….includes great photos of bluesmen (taken by Baker)…
“I moved [to Chicago] with the help of John Steiner. He had a label called Steiner-Davis (SD) Records and recorded Red Norvo, Baby Dodds, etc. And in 1949, he bought the old Paramount label from Grafton, Wis. Including the Black Swan label. He had Riverside Records also, although not doing anything with it. He was going to sell me the record company. I had capitalized myself a little bit. I bought a car to move here, with two one-way trailer rentals that held everything I needed: Lots of records and empty jackets…Til I bought a folding bed from Erwin Helfer, I used to sleep on cartons of of LP jackets with some blankets.”-Bob Koester
See the Stunning Lobby Cards Keeping Silent Movies Alive
“…lobby card collector Dwight Cleveland has teamed up with Dartmouth College’s Media Ecology Project to digitally preserve his collection of over 10,000 lobby cards from the silent film era. ‘There’s so much media that is in danger of disintegrating, just literally turning to dust.’”
Haegue Yang, Creator of a ‘Hairy Carbonous Dweller’, Wins Benesse Prize
“Yang exhibited sculptures of otherworldly beings as part of her ongoing series 'The Intermediates', which she started in 2015. Handles on the sculptures allow them to be moved, ringing bells reminiscent of those used in spiritual rituals…Yang had demonstrated cross-cultural knowledge and a moving regard for materiality and tradition in works expressed through a playful visual language.”
Stupid Meditation On Peace
BY ROBERT PINSKY
“He does not come to coo.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
Insomniac monkey-mind ponders the Dove,
Symbol not only of Peace but sexual
Love, the couple nestled and brooding.
After coupling, the human animal needs
The woman safe for nine months and more.
But the man after his turbulent minute or two
Is expendable. Usefully rash, reckless
For defense, in his void of redundancy
Willing to death and destruction.
Monkey-mind envies the male Dove
Who equally with the female secretes
Pigeon milk for the young from his throat.
For peace, send all human males between
Fourteen and twenty-five to school
On the Moon, or better yet Mars.
But women too are capable of Unpeace,
Yes, and we older men too, venom-throats.
Here’s a great comic who says on our journey
We choose one of two tributaries: the River
Of Peace, or the River of Productivity.
The current of Art he says runs not between
Banks with birdsong in the fragrant shadows—
No, an artist must follow the stinks and rapids
Of the branch that drives the millstones and dynamos.
Is peace merely a vacuum, the negative
Of creation, or the absence of war?
The teaching says Peace is a positive energy.
Still something in me resists that sweet milk,
My mind resembles my restless, inferior cousin
Who fires his shit in handfuls from his cage.
***This newsletter is dedicated to the memories Ronnie Van Zandt, Steve Gaines, and Cassie Gaines. Gone 45 years today.
Thanks for the recognition of Jelly Roll Morton and the discussion of my uncle Alan's extensive series of recordings which earned two Grammy Awards. Morton also received the Lifetime Achievement Award from NARAS and hs been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Aln's book, MISTER JELLY ROLL is an exceptional red and it should also be noted that these interviews were an very example of Oral History. So great of you to remind us all of Jelly Roll's amazing genius! John Lomax III