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Album Description
The stories and songs on these recordings are a document of the big bang of jazz music at the dawn of the 20th Century. New Orleans composer, pianist and pool shark Jelly Roll Morton was one of the key figures in the creation of jazz. Alan Lomax was the visionary folklorist who created a legacy that illuminated roots music sounds from around the world. Together, in 1938 at the Library of Congress, they made these groundbreaking recordings--the first recorded oral history in jazz.
Amazon.com
When folklorist Alan Lomax made these epic 1938 recordings of Jelly Roll Morton's reminiscences and piano playing, he was creating the first great oral documentation of early jazz. This material has never been issued with the care, sensitivity and completeness that it gets here, with the complete interviews and musical performances sequenced over seven CDs in the order in which they took place. Morton was almost as great a raconteur as he was a musician, and his accounts of New Orleans in the early years of the 20th century--from bordellos to riots to funeral parades--are vivid, bawdy, and sometimes hilarious. His accounts of the music and his performances, from "King Porter Stomp" to the lengthy "Murder Ballad," provide a brilliant window on the mechanics and progress of jazz in its earliest years. The sound restoration is excellent and the complete package--cover art by R. Crumb, a piano-shaped box, a reprinting of Lomax's groundbreaking book Mister Jelly Roll, and an additional book with an essay by John Szwed and extensive photographs--befits a document of this significance. An eighth CD excerpts interviews Lomax conducted in 1949 with various New Orleans musicians (most notably Johnny St. Cyr) reminiscing about Morton and the early years of jazz. --Stuart Broomer
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Average Customer Review:
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A candid glimpse into musical history, 2008-01-12
I had downloaded a few tracks from iTunes and decided that I wanted more. I wasn't disappointed. This is a treasure trove of first-hand accounts from a great and famous musician of what his life was like. The style and tone of Jelly's speech as much as the stories he told really helped paint a picture of being a musician and just being around in the early 1900s. I wish there were more recorded accounts like this--it's sort of like spending a weekend with my grandpa listening to what it was like for him as a youth. There's a lot of great music here too, and language that will offend many, but it's a rough-and-tumble account of rough-and -tumble times. I couldn't recommend these CDs highly enough to anyone interested in the formative years of jazz, when ragtime was still hot, and New Orleans was an incubator for music that eventually swept the nation. I've listened to the entire set several times, and still listen to parts of it every week.
3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Recomendo, 2007-09-02
Uma das figuras mais geniais e polêmicas da história do jazz foi Jelly Roll Morton, considerado por vários estudiosos o primeiro compositor do jazz. Morton, um mulato de New Orleans que se considerava branco descendente de franceses, iniciou a carreira tocando em bordéis e esteve em quase todas as cidades onde se podia ganhar algum dinheiro tocando jazz. Costumava se apresentar com um cartão onde constava a inscrição "inventor do jazz". Se ele realmente acreditava nisso ou estava apenas brincando, nunca vamos saber. O fato é que Morton foi o primeiro músico a conseguir colocar na partitura alguns dos principais elementos musicais que realmente diferenciavam o jazz de seus ancestrais: spirituals, blues e ragtime. Para aqueles que não apreciam gravações repletas de estalidos e chiados, o álbum traz registros cujo tratamento técnico torna a audição agradável até para as orelhas mais exigentes. Um prato cheio para os estudiosos do jazz.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Even when he did not invent jazz in the year 1904 ....., 2007-01-18
Nearly every jazz-friend has heard about the legendary recordings, Jelly Roll Morton made for the Library of Congress, and that there he declared to have invented this music in 1904 or so....
I play jazz as an amateur since more than 50 years, and I never expected to be able to have these recordings. Now I hear his voice, I hear him play and declare, what he plays. And suddenly an important time of history of jazz, an important musician and composer got to be living for me. It's great, and I wish that every oldtime-jazz musician would listen to the stories he tells.
And I think: it does not matter, whether they are true or not - they in any case are full of a musicians life.
2 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Given as gift., 2007-01-09
This set was requested as a Christmas gift by the recipient. He has said it is great. I respect his judgement and look forward to hearing the records when we are next together (we live at opposite ends of the country).
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
If you care about early jazz, you need this!, 2006-07-01
I believe Duke Ellington once said that to listen to jazz with no knowledge of its history is to miss much of its charm. This is a real treasure of recordings that will broaden and deepen my appreciation of the many charms of jazz for years to come. The recordings themselves, as well as the accompanying notes and book, have already changed my concept of the roots of early jazz, Jelly's contributions to it, and his character as a human being. I no longer believe he was the outrageously self-aggrandizing braggart that some writers made him out to be. While not a flashy virtuoso like Hines or Tatum, there are some gorgeous pianistic moments.
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