Jelly Roll Morton

Jelly Roll Morton — born Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe in New Orleans in 1890 — was the first jazz musician to understand jazz as a composed music rather than a purely improvised one. His piano style synthesized the New Orleans ragtime tradition, blues feeling and the Spanish tinge (the habanera rhythm he picked up from Cuban and Creole music) into a form that was genuinely new. His compositions — “King Porter Stomp,” “Black Bottom Stomp,” “Original Jelly Roll Blues,” “Wolverine Blues” — became jazz standards and were still being recorded by major artists decades after he wrote them.

Morton’s boastfulness was legendary: he advertised himself as “the originator of jazz and stomps” and claimed he had invented jazz in 1902. Most of his contemporaries found this amusing or infuriating; later musicologists found it more useful than embarrassing, since it forced Morton to explain exactly what he thought jazz was and how it differed from ragtime. His long 1938 interviews with Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress — later released as The Saga of Jelly-Roll Morton — are the most detailed account of early New Orleans jazz by anyone who was actually there.

His 1926–1930 recordings with the Red Hot Peppers for Victor are the canonical documents of classic New Orleans jazz: tight, polished ensemble performances with space for individual improvisation, structured with a composer’s ear for form and contrast. They remain among the most sophisticated recorded jazz of their era.