[Music] hi I'm Terry Waldo and today we're going to talk a little bit about Jelly Roll Morton the inventor of jazz [Music] you [Music] that was the pearls Jelly Roll Morton claimed that he invented jazz and I think he's got a pretty good argument he was the first guy to have jazz hits he was the guy that brought jazz to Chicago many other places in the country which ultimately resulted in King Oliver and Louie Armstrong really setting the world out of fire and he was a genius and he's really an underappreciated genius he's the one we don't talk about too much and most of the people that were in the jazz world in the after he he said I set it on fire didn't like him the piece that I just played for you was called the pearls and that's one of his very inventive piano solos he first started out in New Orleans and he was playing in the red-light district down there which we called storyville which existed from about 1897 to 1917 and he was working in the houses of ill-repute down there and soaking up all the music that was around him which included the classical music all the pop tunes everything that everybody wanted to hear them down there and of course the marching bands which were playing in in a different way than what we think of as ragtime which was the popular music of the of the time and jelly roll claimed that he took ragtime and invented a new style by playing it in a different way that was if you know ragtime ragtime was basically a two beat feel with syncopation in the right hand like that but it but Jelly Roll Morton changed even the way he tapped his foot he said rather than tapping into one and two and one two he tapped his foot in four one two three four one two three four which is the way the bands had been playing in New Orleans so we think of that as being sort of an essential element of jazz so you noticed in the piece I played the pearls a lot of it was in really four beat but even when he was playing and in two beats he would put all of these things in that that sort of imitated the the bands and would change it to having of sort of a four beat feel mmm like now you notice what I'm doing with the left hand here I'm putting in an extra line he's not just playing this that boom chick field or even a 4/4 sometimes he's throwing in little things here which are really another line and what he said he was doing was all the time when he was playing on piano he was imitating the bands all the parts the trumpet playing the melody the clarinet playing a harmony and maybe a trombone playing these this counter melody in the middle here and the bass lines all that sort of stuff so jelly rolls playing reflected that and in a way that maybe nobody else did at the time so when you hear his tunes he's got that going he also he was the first guy to really really write down the blues and have been to be playing in blues his first composition was called the New Orleans blues [Music] well the thing you notice about that it's got a Habanera feel to it he's not just playing blues like he's got a he put that Spanish feel and he said that he put that into everything that he played you had to have some of a Spanish tinge I believe as the term but that was his first piece of music that he composed it's that unusual piece it's a Habanera but it's also a blues so he also composed the first big jazz hits you might recall a king Porter stomp which was a big hit for Benny Goodman he had many hits like King Porter stomp that were popular on the radio and the sad thing was his publisher the the Melrose Brothers quit paying him any royalties on any of these big jazz hits and they were making records and and all over the radio and then he could not get into AZ cap which was paying obviously for the recorded performances and and all of these radio things because it was black and they finally let him in and for ten years of performances that were broadcast they paid him $200 so Jelly Roll Morton ends up literally starving to death in New York and in the late 30s he fortunately for us would made a series of recordings just solo piano for the Library of Congress in 1938 and they're the greatest set of recordings that explain what happened in New Orleans the inventions of jazz there were things that nobody knew anything about and they're they're quite poetic when you hear him talking even it just the way he talks is musical and he explained how he put together all of these things he explained how he did the big band ideas of Swing that is that he played what he called riffs so if the sax section is playing this that's a riff and over top of that there might be a soloist playing the melody on top of that so that idea came from Jelly Roll Morton the idea of breaks if he's playing a piece of music Satan that's a break and he'd had the whole band stopped and that became also essential for swing music and as we explained before the idea of Swing the way he conceived of it as having that four beat feel and also not playing that straight up and down ragtime if I was playing that same kind of a lick if I was playing a ragtime I would have planned [Music] that's a ragtime field but if I'm playing it with a little bit of Swing feeling I'm brewing [Music] part of the problem with jelly rolls music I think was that nobody else could play it the way he could when he made his recordings and he made some magnificent recordings with a group he called the red hot peppers which was a bunch of musicians that were put together only for recording purposes mostly in Chicago although later in New York but he made the best example of what we call New Orleans jazz and that was his idea but if he couldn't find guys from New Orleans to play he really couldn't do it and so the whole idea of what he was trying to do in all of his field nobody and hardly anybody can play like Jelly Roll that's even true today to really get his style right in the play all of that is extremely difficult so I mean it's no wonder that they they sort of had a hard time with him when he came to New York he ran into the likes of guys like James P Johnson and all of these wonderful players the bands you've got Fletcher Henderson and and Duke Ellington doing the big band stuff and so what he had come up with everybody considered to be old-fashioned he was also somewhat of a braggart you know he claimed the invented jazz and he claimed he gotten all this stuff started well he really did he really did but nobody wanted to believe that people like James P Johnson though knew him and had seen jellyroll play as early as 1911 and knew that he was on to something and that he had provided something for our great heritage of jazz so that's the story of Jelly Roll Morton