Jelly Roll Morton

“…He started his upward climb from there, winding up as a respectable innovator and creator of jazz (although he didn’t invent the music as he claimed)”

— Rex Stewart

Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, more commonly known as “Jelly Roll Morton”, may not have invented jazz, but he was certainly still an important figure to its early development. It could even be argued that he was one of the first “true ambassadors” of jazz music¹. This is evident from many aspects of his professional career², but his innovations to jazz make for an interesting starting point. Morton brought his New Orleans upbringing to the ragtime tradition and most likely preferred performing his own original music³. Gunther Schuller notes that his compositional style was mature by the 1920s, which indicates that he must have developed his ideas much earlier⁴. Harlem stride pianist, James P. Johnson remembers hearing Morton play “Jelly Roll Blues” in New York in 1911. “The place was on fire!”, Johnson reminisced. In 1912, Morton himself notes that by writing out some music for a local pickup band in St. Louis, he was able to help them play “some pretty fair jazz”⁵. Morton was a creative force and a credible composer/arranger at a time when a widely understood “jazz idiom” did not yet exist the way it does today. Well before what has been commonly accepted as the first jazz recording in 1917, Jelly Roll Morton was performing and sharing original ideas across the country, which certainly should earn him the title of “ambassador”.