Wynton Marsalis’s Mr. Jelly Lord: a fitting tribute to Jelly Roll Morton

by Fritz Byers

Self-aggrandizing claims of absurd proportion are all the rage these days, and debunking them is its own parlor industry. (Some people make that so easy.) If the robots don’t kill us, these mirror-in-mirror obsessions might. But then, it’s well to remember that this is nothing new. The pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton famously boasted that he invented jazz in 1902. I’m less skeptical about this than perhaps I should be – my instinctive response is, Well, maybe; I ‘spoze it depends on what you mean by jazz.  And since no one has a satisfying definition, I’m inclined to give Jelly Roll his props and create an origin story of my own.

But I can’t resist sharing this Jelly Roll brag with you, from a letter he wrote to Down Beat in 1938 after hearing Robert Ripley’s Believe It or Not broadcast introduce W.C. Handy as the originator of jazz, stomps, and the blues.  At the time, Jelly Roll was pouring drinks in a Washington D.C., bar and being ignored, so you can understand his pique. The letter is long, intricate, and specific. It’s worth your time. You can read here.

But if you’re one of those TL;DR types, here’s the conclusion:

“My contributions were many: First clown director, with witty sayings and flashily dressed, now called master of ceremonies; first glee club in orchestra; the first washboard was recorded by me; bass fiddle, drums-which was supposed to be impossible to record. I produced the fly swatter (they now call them brushes).

“Of course, many imitators arose after my being fired or quitting. I do not hold you responsible for this. I only give you facts that you may use for ammunition to force your pal to his rightful position in fair life.

“Lord protect us from more Hitlers and Mussolinis.”

The letter is signed, “Jelly Roll Morton, Originator of Jazz and Stomps, Victor Artist, World's Greatest Hot Tune Writer.”  

He was broken and largely forgotten (or taken for granted by musicians, dancers, and music fans who bopped, unknowingly, to his tunes) and he still signed his name like a man accepting an award.

Laughable at the time, maybe, but the great thing is how much of his self-judgment turned out to be true. The particulars of who invented this music are infinitely entangled, although we can be pretty sure jazz did not spring from one mind in one year. But on the questions of who first thought to write the music down; to organize its polyphony into a form; to make of New Orleans street music something a composer could sign their name to: the case for Jelly Roll only strengthens the more you delve into things. And I’ll say it if you won’t: Jelly Roll really was the greatest hot-tune writer, even if the world wasn’t ready to say so in 1938.

Sixty-one years later, Wynton Marsalis said pretty much the same thing, not in a letter but in fifteen performances. Mr. Jelly Lord: Standard Time, Vol. 6, recorded over two days in January 1999, is Marsalis’s assessment of Jelly Roll’s claim, and it is an answer that declines to argue or parse; rather, Wynton simply arranges and plays the tunes, fifteen of Jelly Roll’s stomps and blues, treating the compositions not as museum pieces but as scores still capable of surprise. The record is a respectful homage, showing both fidelity to the astounding original tunes and an ear for harmonic variations dormant within the polyphonies of Jelly Roll’s time but brought to the fore in the intervening decades.

I may be merely projecting, because Wynton’s recording is the first thing I heard that clued me in to what I’d been missing as I skipped over Jelly Roll in my rush to get to King Oliver and Louis Armstrong and their seminal roles.  It’s not the only thanks I owe to Wynton for my education, but it’s the one that’s on my mind this week.

The band Wynton assembled for this record is full of faces familiar to anyone who’s listened a lot to him and his cohort: Victor Goines and Wessell Anderson on reeds; Wycliffe Gordon on trombone, trumpet, and tuba; a rhythm section anchored by the bassist Reginald Veal and the drummer Herlin Riley. Plenty of New Orleans lineage here, musicians who carry the city’s sound in their fingers the way Jelly Roll once did and who could be trusted with music that predates them by seventy years.

Interestingly, four pianists rotate through the sessions: Eric Lewis, Eric Reed, Danilo Perez, and Harry Connick, Jr. Each takes a different angle on Morton’s own instrument, so that no single reading of the composer’s pianism takes command. This is a canny bit of programming. Jelly Roll claimed to have invented not just a music, but a whole vocabulary for it, and Wynton’s choice is to show four different musicians speaking that vocabulary fluently, in four different accents.

Each tune on this album holds delights. A few that struck me as I listened just now are the way Wynton uses the familiar “King Porter Stomp” as a showcase for his own muted trumpet against Eric Lewis’s piano; the growl-and-plunger-mute treatment of the lines and counterlines of “Jungle Blues”; and the reverent treatment of Jelly Roll’s most alluring melody, “The Pearls,” which he once described as pearls on a necklace, each strain carefully matched to the next. This reading illuminates the loving care of that architecture.

Wynton is not exactly famous for reticence about jazz history.  I’ve gotten a few lectures first-hand; as I said, he’s taught me a lot. But here, I think his record is a way of letting Jelly Roll’s claims for his genius stand unchallenged and allowing his tunes to make their own case. That’s probably the only argument Jelly Roll would have found entirely satisfying.