Jelly Roll Morton

Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941) was born Ferdinand Lamothe into New Orleans' Creole community, and he served his apprenticeship in the piano parlours of the Storyville district while still a teenager. He was a restless traveller in those years, working as a pool hustler and vaudeville comedian as often as a pianist, carrying the ragtime, blues and Spanish-tinged dances of New Orleans up and down the country. In 1915 his "Jelly Roll Blues" appeared in print, one of the first jazz compositions ever published, and evidence that he thought about the music as written architecture and not only as something played.

That instinct for arrangement bore its finest fruit in Chicago. Between 1926 and 1930 he led the Red Hot Peppers on a series of recordings for Victor, and sides such as "Black Bottom Stomp," "Grandpa's Spell" and "Doctor Jazz" remain models of small-group jazz: composed passages and breaks fitted around solo space so tightly that nothing sounds either loose or stiff. "King Porter Stomp," written years earlier, went on to become a swing-era standard.

The swing bands he had helped make possible left him behind, and he died in relative obscurity in Los Angeles in 1941. He left behind a remarkable record of himself: the long 1938 Library of Congress sessions with Alan Lomax, part memoir and part demonstration. Slow those performances down, or open a transcription in practice mode, and the logic of his two hands becomes something you can follow bar by bar.