Jelly Roll Morton (September 20, 1885* – July 10, 1941) was an American virtuoso pianist, bandleader and composer who some call the first true composer of jazz music. Morton was a colorful character who liked to generate publicity for himself by bragging. His business card referred to him as the Originator of Jazz, and he was and is valued as a source of rare information about early jazz, despite his penchant for hyperbole.
Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe was born into a Creole community in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood of downtown New Orleans, Louisiana about 1885 or 1890. *A baptismal certificate issued in 1984 lists his date of birth as October 20, 1890; however Morton himself and his half-sisters claimed the September 20, 1885, date is correct. He was born to F.P. La Menthe and Louise Monette (written as Lemott and Monett on his baptismal certificate). Eulaley Haco (Eulalie Hécaud) was the godparent. Eulalie helped him to be christened with the name Ferdinand. Ferdinand’s parents were in a common-law marriage and not legally married. No birth certificate has been found to date. He took the name "Morton" by Anglicizing the name of his stepfather, Mouton.
Jelly Roll Morton was the first great composer and piano player of Jazz. He was a talented arranger who wrote special scores that took advantage of the three-minute limitations of the 78 rpm records. But more than all these things, he was a real character whose spirit shines brightly through history, like his diamond studded smile. At the age of fourteen, Morton began as a piano player in the brothels of Storyville. He often sang smutty lyrics and used the nickname "Jelly Roll". He rambled around the South and worked as a gambler, pool shark, pimp, vaudeville comedian and as a pianist.
He was an important transitional figure between ragtime and jazz piano styles. He played on the West Coast from 1917 to 1922 and then moved to Chicago and where he hit his stride. Morton's 1923 and 1924 recordings of piano solos for the Gennett label were very popular and influential. He formed the band the Red Hot Peppers and made a series of classic records for Victor. The recordings he made in Chicago featured some of the best New Orleans sidemen like Kid Ory, Barney Bigard, Johnny Dodds, Johnny St. Cyr and Baby Dodds. Morton married Mabel Bertrand, a showgirl, in November 1928 in Gary, Indiana.
Morton relocated to New York in 1928 and continued to record for Victor until 1930. His New York version of The Red Hot Peppers featured sidemen like Bubber Miley, Pops Foster and Zutty Singleton.. Like so many of the Hot Jazz musicians, the Depression was hard on Jelly Roll. Hot Jazz was out of style. The public preferred the smoother sounds of the big bands. He fell upon hard times after 1930 and even lost the diamond he had in his front tooth.
In 1935, Morton moved to Washington, D.C., to become the manager and piano player at a bar called, at various times, the Music Box, Blue Moon Inn, and Jungle Inn, at 1211 U Street NW in Shaw, an African-American neighborhood. Morton was master of ceremonies, bouncer, and bartender. In May 1938 Alan Lomax recorded him in for series of interviews about early Jazz for the Library of Congress, but it wasn't until a decade later that these interviews were released to the public. During the period when he was recording his interviews, Morton was seriously injured by knife wounds when a fight broke out at the Washington, D.C. establishment where he was playing.
There was a whites only hospital close enough to heal him but he had to be transported to a further and poorer hospital because of his skin color. When he was in the hospital the doctors left ice on his wounds for several hours before attending to his eventually fatal injury. His recovery from his wounds was incomplete, and thereafter he was often ill and easily became short of breath. Morton made a new series of commercial recordings in New York, several recounting tunes from his early years that he had been talking about in his Library of Congress Interviews.
He then moved to Los Angeles with a series of manuscripts of new tunes and arrangements, planning to form a new band and restart his career. However, he fell seriously ill shortly after his arrival and died on July 10, 1941, after an eleven-day stay in Los Angeles County General Hospital. According to the jazz historian David Gelly, only a few musicians attended his funeral.
Jelly Roll died just before the Dixieland revival rescued so many of his peers from musical obscurity. (Edited from Red Hot jazz & Wikipedia)
