The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia Page B

early jazz bands, the ODJB was certainly one of the most wide ranging. Its recordings encompassed jazz, blues, rag forms, and pop songs, as well as arrangements with an additional horn that anticipated the textured voicings of swing music. In their travels, the band members were among the first global ambassadors for hot music; they moved from New York to England, where they gave a private command performance for the royal family, and also journeyed to France, where they helped celebrate the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. The group disbanded in 1925 but rejoined forces briefly in 1936 to record again for the Victor label and go on tour, but this reunion proved short lived. LaRocca would survive another quarter of a century, and though he no longer performed on the horn, he worked tirelessly as an advocate arguing for the ensemble’s historical importance. Inevitably, this zeal in promoting the ODJB as pioneers of the music—no less than the “Creators of Jazz,” as their public billings proclaimed—created a fierce backlash within the jazz world, as would their success in securing a recording contract at a time when so many African American artists were ignored. Yet few bands of that period did more to expose the wider public, at home and abroad, to the virtues of this new music from New Orleans.
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    Jelly Roll Morton, the greatest of the New Orleans jazz composers, also generated controversy by his claims to have invented the music. Indeed, Morton was known to exaggerate about many things, so much so that he has acquired the persona of a blustering loudmouth in most historical accounts. However, a careful study of Morton’s firsthand recollections, preserved by Alan Lomax in a series of taped interviews and performances for the Library of Congress, reveals that this often maligned figure could be, when the occasion warranted, one of the most thoughtful and accurate sources of information on early jazz.
    More often than not, later historical research has vindicated Morton’s assertions as well as validated his recreations of earlier musical styles. Moreover, few jazz figures of any era have matched him in providing insightful commentary into the aesthetic dimensions of the music. Although Morton did not invent jazz, he was perhaps the first to think about it in abstract terms, and articulate—in both his remarks and his demonstrations—a coherent theoretical approach to its creation. On a wide range of topics—dynamics, vibrato, melodic construction, the use of breaks, the essence of Latin music—Morton’s comments continue to provoke thought and demand our attention.
    Yet Morton’s assertions, for all their musical insight, stand out as paragons of doublespeak and evasion on autobiographical matters. Like his fictional contemporary from the Jazz Age, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, Morton had a flair for rewriting his life story to match the dimensions of his ego. He sometimes gave his birthdate as 1885—like many early New Orleans players, adding to his age to strengthen his case for being present at the birth of jazz—and stated that his original name was Ferdinand LaMenthe. In fact, Jelly Roll was born in or around New Orleans in 1890, as Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, and was raised in a strict Creole environment that strenuously resisted assimilation into New Orleans’s black population.
    Morton’s family all but disowned him when he became involved in the world of jazz, with its lowlife connotations and attendant vices. Not that Morton himself was open minded in embracing African American culture. On the contrary, Morton’s tendency to rewrite the past was never more apparent than when he dealt with racial issues. In a typically bizarre aside, Morton explained to Lomax that he abandoned the name LaMenthe for racial reasons—because of ethnic hostility directed at the French! As to his own African roots, Morton was in a lifelong state of denial, pointing