If there ever was a shrine, a holy spot, for American music, it is Congo Square in the heart of New Orleans, in what’s now called Louis Armstrong Park, next to the French Quarter. Beginning in the late 18th century and continuing, with interruptions, until the Civil War, slaves gathered on Sunday afternoons in Congo Square. Elsewhere in the south, African culture was rigorously suppressed–the Protestant slave owners in other states maintained that ruthless suppression of African traditions was necessary in order to save their victims’ souls. But in Catholic Louisiana, black crowds in Congo Square spent each Sunday singing and playing and dancing to music from their ancestral lands.
Jelly Roll Morton, in his 1938 Library of Congress interview-demonstrations, showed how ragtime, blues, French-Creole dance music, opera arias, folk and pop songs, marches, hymns, and tangos all were transformed into jazz in New Orleans. It’s probably true that jazz, in different forms, was played elsewhere at the turn of the 20th century, but New Orleans proved to be the music’s mainstream. New Orleans had the legendary players; the first recorded jazz was by a New Orleans band; the first genuinely great recorded jazz came from New Orleans musicians. And now the recordings that prove that a half dozen or so New Orleans artists are the greatest early-era jazz musicians, and among the greatest jazz musicians of all, are starting to appear on CD–fortunately, since phonographs are now going the way of Model T Fords.
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Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers were only a recording band. By 1923 Morton had landed in Chicago, and immediately made his first great recordings, a series of piano solos on original compositions. But he couldn’t break into the Chicago club scene; fortunately, the rest of the best New Orleans musicians had also gravitated to Chicago, and Morton had his pick of them for the Victor sessions. Those were the early years of electrical recording, and the Chicago Victor studios set a high standard of excellence–which was only appropriate for Morton’s wonderful bands.
This first band of Red Hot Peppers essentially used the traditional New Orleans ensemble setup: cornet lead melody, clarinet countermelody, trombone rhythmic punctuation and harmonic support, over a rhythm section. (This setup parallels, says curator Bruce Raeburn of New Orleans’ Hogan Jazz Archives, the makeup of Congo Square singers, with their lead voice and two answering voices, one male and one female.) As a composer, Morton constantly modified this prototypical straight-ahead ensemble by altering balance and density and adding duets and solos, breaks, stop time, codas, vamps–in fact, his pieces are packed with these small routines. He’d spent much of his pre-Chicago years playing ragtime, so many of his pieces are in the multiple-theme rag form. Unlike the Dixieland players, Morton wrote out his pieces and even much of his soloists’ music; since this reissue box includes plenty of alternate takes, you can hear that he is the only Red Hot Pepper to consistently improvise his solos.
Characters who are merely fabulous are usually forgotten quickly by history. Because of his musicianship, Morton is remembered, particularly for three great periods of his life: the 1923-24 piano solos, his 1938 Library of Congress recordings–the very best guide we have to just how jazz began–and most of all, his 1926-27 Red Hot Peppers. Because the sound quality of CD reissues in general has been highly variable, the best news here is that the engineers have done a glorious job on The Jelly Roll Morton Centennial; the music is more eloquent than ever. (True, they made one serious blunder by using the same take of “Original Jelly-Roll Blues” twice on one disc, the second time with one note edited out.) Other reviewers have griped about the sound quality, but I find the very faint background hiss in my pressing is no distraction from the wonderful music.
Bechet almost always dominated his musical surroundings like a colossus, which destroyed the possibility of New Orleans-style ensemble interaction. He was a very melodic player; but unlike Dodds, there was no subtlety about Bechet. This man was larger than life, with a ferocious attack, wide vibrato, rhythmic aggression, and big sound that cut through every band he ever played in. At times he was florid and sickeningly sentimental, though not on his Victors. Like Dodds, he was a great blues player, and his “Really the Blues” and “Nobody Knows the Way I Feels Dis’ Mornin”‘ are wonderfully melodic solos. Unlike Dodds and Morton, he adjusted to swing; especially after 1939, he surrounded himself with swing musicians, and he even played ballads, including a sweet “Indian Summer.” Some of these 1940s Victors have a strong atmosphere of late-swing, New York small groups, including a mysterioso “The Mooche” that composer Duke Ellington preferred to his own version.
Johnson not only sustains this rhythmic grace in his eight tracks on Bunk Johnson-Lu Watters/Bunk & Lu (Good Time Jazz CD) but communicates it to the traditional-jazz revival band that accompanies him; again, this is most enjoyable music. Lu Watters usually led that band, and in trumpeter Watters’s eight sides here it sounds comparatively stiff. San Francisco’s Watters was a leading stimulus of the 1940s traditional-jazz revival; he had drilled his band of young players in the early Oliver-Morton-Armstrong repertoire. Authenticity was these players’ aim, and Watters’s “Original Jelly-Roll Blues,” for instance, reproduces the Red Hot Peppers classic fairly faithfully. Though the traditional-jazz revival kept some older musicians employed, eventually it led to nostalgia mongering and amateurism. The straw hats-garters-red suspenders Dixieland phenomenon was the result. Several modernized New Orleans and other musicians join in the 1955 Kid Ory/The Legendary Kid (Good Time Jazz CD); this band and the semiprofessionals of The Firehouse Five Plus 2 Goes South (Good Times Jazz CD), from the early 50s, used to play on a simulated Mississippi riverboat at Disneyland.
