Last week Mr Sackerson asked me how many musicians adopted the name Jelly Roll. I don’t know and I don’t suppose anyone else does. But I do know the most well known one was Jelly Roll Morton who famously claimed to have invented jazz. That is probably an exaggeration but he was certainly one of its first ‘superstars’ to come out of New Orleans which is certainly the home of jazz in the late 19th and early 20th centuries combining African rhythms with European folk music.
“Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, known professionally as Jelly Roll Morton, was an American blues and jazz pianist, bandleader, and composer of Louisiana Creole descent. Morton was jazz’s first arranger, proving that a genre rooted in improvisation could retain its essential characteristics when notated.
“Jelly Roll Morton got his famous stage name from a combination of an adopted family surname and a risqué musical moniker. Born Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, he took the last name Morton as an anglicized version of his stepfather’s surname (Mouton) while playing piano in his teens. He adopted the nickname “Jelly Roll”—which was common early 20th-century sexual slang—while performing piano in the brothels and red-light districts of New Orleans.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jelly_Roll_Morton
Doctor Jazz - Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers - 1926
The Crave - Jelly Roll Morton
Original Jelly Roll Blues - Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers - 1926
Jelly Roll Morton - Tiger Rag
Pearls
Tank Town Bump
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