WELL, it’s just about the halfway point here in the Complete Morton Project with my friend and collaborator David Horniblow and we have a special surprise this week for one of Jelly’s hilarious 1926 novelty tunes, “Hyena Stomp.” We tried to play this one as a duet but couldn’t capture anything near the vibe of the original, so we recruited our friends Michael McQuaid (clarinet/alto) and Nick Ball (drums) from the Vitality Five to help us out! The tune itself is quite catchy, reminiscent of the great “King Porter Stomp,” and Nick did an oustanding job on not only the drumming, but the role of band hyena as well:
And secondly, to calm down after that, a tune Morton published and co-wrote with Mel Stitzel in 1930 but never recorded. It was published in James Dapogny’s amazing compendium of transcriptions in the 1990s from which we’ve created a version. It’s a simple little tune which evidently was written to fulfill a publishing contract:
Phew! Stay tuned for the 2nd half of the year!
Andrew Oliver 