Did Jelly Roll invent jazz?
zajal
Congress, he was infamous for being a guy who went around saying he'd
invented the entire idea of jazz, by combining the harmonic languge of
ragtime and the blues, the rhythmic swing of the latter, and a dose of
what he called "the Spanish tinge," which we now call "clave." He also
brought to the music a singularly creative presence - his "Jelly Roll
Blues" for example is anything but a traditional blues; while it uses
12-bar phrases, it is harmonically more akin to Mingus than to the
Delta blues.
Objective discussion of early jazz is a problem, because there are no
recordings. We know that the term "jazz" was used in Storyville in the
first decade of the 19th Century, evidently as a slang term for
intercourse, but the musical use of the word seems to have been very
loose. The first recordings called jazz were by a quintet of white
musicians from New Orleans, in 1917, who called themselves The Original
Dixieland Jazz Band. What they were playing was surely akin to the
music they had heard in New Orleans, although I think it is what Jelly
Roll refers to as "hot" improvised ragtime.
One important distinction is that jazz was a form which supported
improvisation. Research has confirmed that much early band music was
not jazz, and did not intend to be jazz. It might, however, have taken
elements of the blues, such as the "swing" feeling (the substitution of
compound for simple division of the beat), and added it to hymns,
marches or rags. Then there was minstrel show and circus music, which
all Southern musicians played: W.C. Handy was a minstrel band cornet
soloist who started his own band in Memphis. He published an
instrumental composition called "Memphis Blues" in 1912; this was
neither jazz nor blues, but more like a "cakewalk," a form similar to
ragtime.
Some scholars think that ragtime began to take on blues influences
between 1912 and 1915, when the 4-string (tenor) banjo and the
saxophone became popular instruments. Whatever we call it, however,
this "proto-jazz" was being played not only in New Orleans, but Kansas
City, St. Louis, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angles, and finally Chicago
and New York. What do these places have in common? They were all
visited by Jelly Roll when he left New Orleans in 1907.
Nor was all the music played by Creole and black musicians the same. A
lot depended on the locale. Buster Smith: "Of course most of us played
that sweet stuff once in a while. It was all according to the kind of
audience you had. You couldn't play our kind of music in some of the
big places, the 'high-collar' dances. No, they wanted that hotel
music. We found out our stuff was too rough."
In any case, all the great musicians who were playing proto-jazz before
1923 made their first recordings years later. King Oliver, Freddie
Keppard, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll, Sidney Bechet, Bennie Moten - all
started recording in 1923, the year that Bessie Smith also made her
first blues recordings. And some of the greats never left New Orleans,
like Bunk Johnson and Buddy Bolden.
But once jazz had become a distinctive and salable commodity in the big
cities, the form began to progress to what we now know.
Was Jelly Roll right? Well, none of his contemporaries wanted to
acknowledge that he'd "invented" the style of music they were playing.
But Gunther Schuller, author of _Early Jazz_, states "specially in
purely musical matters...he possessed not only an accurate memory but a
composer's ability to make discriminating distinctions. For this
reason his statements about...early jazz in general are extremely
valuable."
Jelly's racism - a problem for us - was doubtless also a problem in
his relationships with musicians as well, although he is known to have
given demonstrations/lessons to Lillian Hardin and her black beau,
Louis Armstrong. Still, as a Creole, he had an obvious disdain for the
'black Negroes' and their music, and it spills over into his
commentaries. He was born early enough (1885) to have grown up in an
atmosphere in which the social and ethnic distinctions had not yet been
broken down by the confluence of Creole and black music in Storyville.
Schuller: "It is clear that to Jelly jazz, ragtime, and the blues were
at the turn of the Century still three distinctively separate musical
categories. Of these, he apparently felt that ragtime and blues were
unalterable traditions (neither of which, significantly, he claimed to
have invented)."
Also, much else that Jelly said has been corroborated by other
testimony. For example, James P. Johnson: "First time I saw Jelly was
in 1911. He came through New York playing that Jelly Roll Blues of
his...Of course, Jelly Roll wasn't a piano player like some of us down
here. We bordered more on the classical theory of music," a statement
that confirms what Morton claimed: he did not play regular ragtime, but
played "jazz."
Joseph Byrd