"Oh, Mister Jelly": A Jelly Roll Morton Scrapbook (review)

"Oh, Mister Jelly": A Jelly Roll Morton Scrapbook. Compiled by William Russell. Copenhagen: JazzMedia, 1999. [720 p. ISBN 87-88043-26-6. $100.]

"Oh, Mister Jelly" is a pathbreaking example of the "scrapbook" type of jazz book. Photographs and documents have always played an important role in the presentation of jazz history, as far back as Orrin Keepnews and Bill Grauer's Pictorial History of Jazz: People and Places from New Orleans to Modern Jazz (New York: Crown, 1955) and notably in Frank Driggs and Harris Lewine's Black Beauty, White Heat: A Pictorial History of Classic Jazz, 1920-1950 (New York: W. Morrow, 1982; reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1995). The scrapbook format emerged from the pictorial history by concentrating on one person, presenting photographs and letters. These materials would then be printed in a sumptuous edition suitable for housing in rare-book rooms. Chan Parker and Francis Paudras's "To Bird With Love" (Poitiers, France: Éditions Wislov, 1981) set the model with the legendary saxophonist Charlie Parker. With this volume on composer Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton, William Russell has added unedited and lightly edited interviews to the resources, thus enlarging the scrapbook format.

Jelly Roll Morton (1889?-1941) is regarded today as one of the great composers, arrangers, improvisers, and pianists of the early New Orleans jazz era. Throughout his life he was a colorful raconteur as well. The 1947-48 release on Circle Records of most of his 1938 Library of Congress interviews with Alan Lomax, and the transcription of the same material and its publication by Lomax under the title Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz" (New York: Duell, Sloan and Peerce, 1949; 2d ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), enhanced his posthumous reputation as a charmer. Possibly due to that very charm, Morton's claims of achievement seemed too good to believe, and they may have delayed serious consideration of his life and music. Gunther Schuller's chapter on Morton titled "The First Great Composer" (Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development, vol. 1 of The History of Jazz [New York: Oxford University Press, 1968; reprint, 1986], 134-74) was an important early contribution, as was Martin Williams's inclusion of several Morton performances in The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz (Smithsonian P6 11891, 1973, 6 LPs; reissued on CD, Smithsonian RD 033, 1987). Though he was not the "creator of jazz" as he provocatively described himself (Morton, "I Created Jazz in 1902," Downbeat 5 [August 1938]: 3, 31), he was an observant and creative musician in New Orleans jazz during its earliest years of development (1890-1917). He understood the music so thoroughly that he was able to "re-create" it from its musical antecedents; to those listeners who remembered his improvising, he indeed seemed to create jazz anew each time he performed. Some recent views, including some multicultural perspectives, emphasize his use of "Spanish" elements (for an influential study, see John Storm Roberts, The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States, 2d ed. [New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], 24-43). Also important was Morton's informed ability to convert melodies from ragtime and New Orleans formal dance to jazz. This is demonstrated by Morton himself on the Library of Congress recordings (AFS discs 1648B-1649B and 1653B-1655A, available on Morton, Kansas City Stomp, vol. 1 of The Library of Congress Recordings, Rounder CD 1091, tracks 20-23 [1993]; transcribed in Mister Jelly Roll [1949], 76-82). An awareness of this musical converting is required for any speculation on the earliest jazz and blues of the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. His orchestrations for his recordings merit consideration as well, and Williams provides good questions with which to begin in the booklet that accompanies The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz (1973 ed., pp. 17-18; 1987 ed., pp. 38-40).

The quantity of materials in...