He was known as a braggart and a liar and claimed to have invented jazz in 1902. He traveled around the country, and his piano playing was heard all the way from Los Angeles to New York. Morton was at various times in his life a gambler, pool-hall hustler, procurer, nightclub owner, and itinerant piano player. ” In The Jazz Tradition, Martin Williams noted “the colorful character of Jelly Roll Morton seems to be one of the abiding cliches of jazz history. As Waldo Terry observed in This Is Ragtime, Morton was “a complete singing, joke-telling, piano-playing entertainer, but he was also a key figure in the development of jazz music.
Morton ’s personality has also tended to obscure his very real contributions to jazz.
In his late-in-life Library of Congress Recordings (1938), he recalled his musical past and recreated many of the styles from the first two decades of the twentieth century. Much of what we know about Morton ’s early years is the result of contemporary accounts and Morton ’s own reminiscences, both of which vary in reliability. His contributions to the development of jazz were improvisational as well as compositional and his legacy endures in spite of the fact that he didn ’t make his first commercial recordings until 1923, twenty years after he first appeared on the New Orleans musical scene. In addition to being a composer, Morton was a vocalist, pianist, arranger, and ensemble leader. While jazz historian Gunther Schuller considered Armstrong “the first great soloist, ” he called Morton “the first great composer ” in his book Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development. When one hears of jazz having its roots in New Orleans, some of the first jazz musicians that come to mind are Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton.
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