African-American Music History Series: Jazz

Описание: Today I tell the story of Jelly Roll Morton, a larger-than-life personality who claims to have “invented jazz” and, along with a few colleagues, created the basic recipe for which all American music would later add their spices into. But in order to tell this story I need to rewind to a New Orleans City Council decision in 1817. In this year the New Orleans City Council decided to establish Congo Square as an official sight for slave dances, where enslaved Africans were allowed a space to bring their instruments and practice any traditions without obstruction. This was extremely uncommon for the times, as places like South Carolina and Georgia explicitly banned slaves from playing any kind of instruments, because slave owners had figured out that Africans could use them to communicate messages non-verbally with each other. In New Orleans it was a different story, French settlers were enamored with the music and dance that happened in Congo Square, and townspeople would regularly go to watch. It was at Congo Square that this great meeting place of African tradition and culture would start to slowly absorb French, Spanish, Caribbean, and Irish musical concepts and instruments into its orbit. It was at Congo Square that the crucible of all American music would be born. Now we fast-forward to 1890 when Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe was born in New Orleans into a Creole community. At age 14 he started playing piano in a local brothel and adopted the stage name “Jelly Roll” which in modern slang essential means “Pussy”…. which is hilarious. His style of ragtime with the “Spanish Tinge” mixing in local flavors like Second Line was to be developed by the other New Orleans musicians of the time including Buddy Bolden and “Big Eye” Louis Nelson Delisle into a style of music that would later be called “Jazz.” Jazz music would be a sort of musical darwinism where the cornerstone African traditions of polyrhythm and polyphony would accept European influences that could easily be absorbed into the fold, and would reject influences that could not. Also at the center of the jazz ideology was the African tradition of music as an ongoing way of life rather than a singular performance, which blurred the line of performer and audience member. Researcher Ted Gioia makes the interesting point that “Here we perhaps come to realize the hidden truth in the double meaning of the word "instrument," which signifies both a mechanism for subduing nature and a device for creating sound.” The idea that this music was part of a larger lifestyle and didn’t just live and die on a stage would carry over to its successors of rock, funk, house, and hip-hop. Anyway so Jelly Roll started touring his sound around the American South in 1904 and kept moving North through Chicago and New York, influencing everyone who heard him. In 1915 he published what is widely acknowledged as the first printed Jazz tune, “Jelly Roll Blues” right when the word “jazz” was passing its way through the public consciousness as a new art form. Jelly Roll led a very Netflix drama-worthy kind of life, but his legacy is of a prolific composer and ground breaking pianist who was at ground zero when America was deciding what it wanted to sound like.

Now here's “Jelly Roll Blues” by Jelly Roll Morton