piano – jazz, stride, and tango
This week’s Jelly Roll Morton selections are two nice stomps (both in the key of C, incidentally) from his middle band period in the late 20s. The first is “Pretty Lil,” which evidently may have been dedicated to Lil Hardin Armstrong, Louis Armstrong’s first wife, though I now can’t seem to find any substantiating evidence […]
In week 23 of the Complete Morton Project we featured one of Jelly’s tunes dedicated to his off and on partner Anita Gonzalez, and for contrast this week here’s one he wrote for his wife Mabel, who he was married to during his New York years. It’s a peppy tune with some nice sections, actually […]
Today’s entry into the Complete Morton Project starts off with one of Morton’s 1927 band tunes, “Georgia Swing.” This was recorded right after his move from Chicago to New York and the original record features a tuba for the first time in the Red Hot Peppers discography. It’s an interesting shift towards the more popular […]
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 […]
For this week’s Jelly Roll Morton selections, we start off with the final of his four 1929 solo tunes for you, “Seattle Hunch.” This was an interesting recording session which yielded some unfortunately sloppy performances of four great tunes (in addition to this one, there’s “Freakish,” “Pep,” and “Frances“). This one is perhaps the least […]
This week we have another bass sax + fast piano tune from the great Jelly Roll Morton, followed by a very slow minor blues for maximum contrast! We’re starting with “The Naked Dance,” a tune Jelly came up with to demonstrate the type of thing he would play at the various high-class brothels in New […]
Today’s Complete Morton Project tunes commence with “Sweet Anita Mine,” recorded by Jelly in 1929 and named after Anita Gonzalez, with whom Morton had a complex and tempestuous relationship. This is the second piece we’ve done so far dedicated to Anita, the other being the wonderful Spanish Tinge tune “Mamanita” (from way back in Week […]
Moving right along with the Complete Morton Project, we have an unusual offering today – one of Morton’s late period pieces which was unpublished and not recorded by Morton in his lifetime. There are a number of these which are housed in the Historic New Orleans Collection, originally in the collection of an early jazz […]
Well after last week’s Fingerbuster it was hard to decide where to go next, but we’ve returned to Jelly’s late 20s band sides for a particularly cool one, “Low Gravy,” which features a really nice second strain melody originally played by Albert Nicholas and faithfully recreated for us by David this week. This one, like […]
Well, the year is really moving along as we’ve reached week 20 of the Complete Morton Project! To celebrate, we’re featuring Morton’s fast-paced showpiece “Fingerbuster”! We figured it would be pretty awkward to play the melody on clarinet so we’ve busted out the bass saxophone again to accompany the somewhat silly but undeniably exciting piano […]
Andrew Oliver 