Traditional Jazz Piano

Traditional jazz piano begins in New Orleans, in the years when ragtime was loosening into something that swung. Its central figure is Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941), born Ferdinand LaMothe, who played in the sporting houses of the Storyville district and later boasted, with more cheek than accuracy, that he had invented jazz single-handed in 1902. The boast obscured a real achievement: his "Jelly Roll Blues," published in 1915, was among the first jazz pieces ever committed to paper, and his writing showed how the strict, multi-strain forms of ragtime could carry blues feeling and a loose, rolling swing.

Morton called one essential ingredient the Spanish tinge, the habanera lilt he heard in the Creole music around him, and it runs through his best work alongside a striding left hand and a right hand full of breaks and turnarounds. His finest recordings came in Chicago in the late 1920s with the Red Hot Peppers, small-band sides such as "Black Bottom Stomp" and "Grandpa's Spells" that arranged New Orleans polyphony with a composer's care. He died in near obscurity in 1941, a few years after Alan Lomax recorded his long, candid reminiscences for the Library of Congress.

The style rewards patient study. Slowed to a walking pace, these stomps and blues reveal exactly how the two hands lean against one another, and opening a transcription in practice mode lets you take one hand at a time until the swing settles under your fingers.