My Jelly Roll Soul

Jackie McLean and John Handy (alto sax), Booker Ervin (tenor sax), Pepper Adams (baritone sax), Jimmy Knepper and Willie Dennis (trombone), Horace Parlan (piano), Charles Mingus (bass) and Dannie Richmond (drums). From the album Blues & Roots (1960).

Jelly Roll Morton was an American pianist and composer who played ragtime and traditional jazz. When he was 14 he started playing in a brothel in New Orleans, his hometown, in 1904 he toured South America and from 1912 to 1914 he played vaudeville. He played in Los Angeles from 1917 to 1922, but returned to Chicago in 1923 and made his first recordings, both as a soloist and with jazz groups. In 1926 he got a contract with the record company Victor, which allowed him to assemble his first band, the Red Hot Peppers. In 1928 they moved to New York, also recording solo and in trio.

With the arrival of the Great Depression he lost his contract with Victor and had financial difficulties. In 1935 he moved to Washington D.C., where he worked as a manager and pianist in a nightclub. In 1938 the important ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax heard him play and invited him to interview and record for the Library of Congress, which assured him a place in the history of jazz. Morton was stabbed and not treated properly for racial reasons, and he also suffered from asthma. Eventually he died in a hospital in 1941 at the age of 50.

The introduction is made by Pepper, Mingus and Richmond, and then the rest of the group joins in to expose the theme, which seems to have been composed in the mid-1920s, but in the second exposition they incorporate the swing. Knepper begins his solo with an impeccable execution accompanied only by Mingus and Richmond, but then Parlan joins them. Then it’s precisely the latter who plays adding elements of blues and rhythm and blues in his discourse. Next Mingus starts playing walkin and McLean comes in with a brief, but very well structured solo. Mingus follows him with an accessible and friendly melodic line, and then maintains a dialogue with Richmond before the re-exposition of the theme.