Jelly Roll Morton – The Complete Library Of Congress Recordings By Alan Lomax (8 CDs, 3 books)

In 1938, Jelly Roll Morton, broke, aging and nearly forgotten at 53, lately playing piano in a Washington, D.C, dive called the Music Box, approached Alan Lomax — all of 23, but already de facto director of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress. What he wanted, he said, was to “correct the history of jazz.”

What that meant, to Morton, first and foremost, was reminding the world that he, the musically trained and endlessly inventive mulatto Creole of Haitian background raised as Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe Mouton, was a key, maybe even the key, founding genius of the jazzed music just then reaching its commercial height as pop swing. (And yes, “jazzed” was the way he looked at it — not as a form, but as a process that could be applied to all sorts of previous tones to make them hot.)

The entire subject was an unlikely one for Lomax to pursue. The preserver of forms he considered pure, maker of rural folklore field recordings, and chronicler of the likes of Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly and Aunt Molly Jackson, had seen jazz, with its urbanity and increasingly commercial impact as, quote, “my worst enemy.” Nevertheless, intrigued by the articulate and very ready-to-talk Morton, he began to record Jelly Roll’s memoirs and keyboard musical examples. Lomax pushed for more of the local context and color detail that interested him and also served Morton’s secondary goals: to restore the memory of his beloved New Orleans, as it had been circa 1895-1915, the devilishly unruly, untidy, profane and miraculous, cross-cultural hodge-podger of a place that made jazz happen; and to re-establish the city’s centrality in the face of fuzzying claims for New York and Chicago by northern urban intellectuals.

Lomax began by asking a lot of typical Alan questions about the “folk” music behind the figures — and then, catching on to what he had in Jelly Roll, quickly backed off, mainly just listening, asking for the occasional slang clarification or scene detail. In three sets of sessions that year, Lomax recorded nine hours worth of Jelly Roll remembering and storytelling, playing and singing, laid down on 54 twelve-inch master discs, intended mainly for the historical archive.

The result happened to amount to astounding entertainment, one of the first significant examples of oral history of any kind, and one of the central artifacts in the history of American music. That’s what’s presented anew in this extraordinary box set — consisting of seven CDs that, for the first time, make Jelly Roll’s Library of Congress recordings available in the order in which they were recorded, in sound as clean as modern technology finally makes feasible — and unexpurgated. (This 1938 discussion of underbelly events and styles and lyrics from 35 years earlier now requires a parental advisory sticker, restoring previously “archive only” classics of smut such as the original lyric of “The Dirty Dozen” and an astonishing half-hour blues murder ballad released with four-letter, ten-letter and twelve-letter words intact.)

To the seven Jelly Roll CDs is added an eighth disc of audio interviews Lomax collected from such other very early jazz notables as guitarist Johnny St. Cyr and bassist Albert Glenny. Also on that disc is a nearly 200-page PDF-file book with a complete, careful transcript of all of the audio material. A new printing of Mister Jell Roll, the rightfully standard 300-plus-page Morton oral history bio/autobio that Lomax culled from this material and published in 1950, is in the box too, along with an often brilliant new book of commentary by John Szwed, the Sun Ra and Miles Davis biographer and authority on cross-cultural Creolization in music.

Szwed’s commentary on the development of complex jazz styles from 19th-century dance music and the so-called rolling “Spanish tinge” rhythm in American music that Morton famously discusses here — the habanera sway that’s later the “roll” in rock ‘n’ roll — is important and fascinating in itself, and food for thought for those limited to finding their meanings and history in lyrics.

And then there’s Jelly Roll Morton’s show and tell. That’s the sound of a man talking who really knows how to do it — paragraphs and paragraphs of it, with unhalting, colorful sense, nearly all the while his boot heels clicking in rhythm, Quiet piano figures, appropriate to the part of the big tale told, pulse the stories and set up the songs he moves into with such ease. He pulls the listener into the world of high-class New Orleans brothels where he accompanied backroom naked dances, to the streets where the jazz bands competed, fought, and worked the funerals. He shows us how tunes from old dances, tunes from French opera, tunes from John Philip Sousa, and older ragtime numbers were made hot by hot bands and by Jelly Roll Morton at the piano. It’s a world of piano professors and pimps, card sharks, polo sharks, itinerant musicians, and con artists — most all of which he’d been himself. After the hours and hours of talk and music, you don’t want the man to stop.

You hear bits of 19th-century quadrille dances turning into “Tiger Rag”, how riffs and breaks became the basis of jazz and much popular music since, the rhythms and sounds of the Indian-impersonating fraternal orders already playing what would become “New Orleans R&B” before World War I — and much on the birth of the blues as a form in the lower-class cat houses and honky-tonks (Jelly’s term) of the city, where the poorly paid piano players were less sophisticated, more straight-ahead.

(That blues started right there and only then spread to the Delta, where untrained rural musicians handled the likes of “Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor” and “Hesitation Blues” as best they could, has always been a strong possibility. When you hear of Morton’s travels through Clarksdale and Helena a generation before Charlie Patton recorded, the point is underscored, if not nailed.)

Morton sings more during these sessions than in all of his recorded career, which was overwhelmingly instrumental. He sings mainly smooth, telling blues, and does so memorably, a creditable male counterpart to the “classic” blues women of his day. The piano playing — dexterous, surprising, able to suggest whole orchestras — is, of course, on the level for which the man would become monumentalized.

There have been times when Morton’s stories were called into question, as if the stories had been more than a little “jazzed” themselves, with too much boasting. That happens less today, partly because further research has backed him (and Lomax) up, and partly because the more you hear from the man, the more the breadth of his knowledge and command of detail fills in the picture. The restoration of Jelly Roll Morton’s important place in American music history is not much questioned now, and that first restoration of New Orleans — as the hot birth bed of jazz, then much of R&B and rock — is, in the wake of his accounts, accomplished. With the restoration of these recordings and this remarkable presentation, we can all follow the roll.