In the last years of his life, Jelly Roll Morton composed music that might have changed the course of jazz–had anyone been willing to listen to it.
But by the late 1930s, Morton had been discarded by the jazz industry he had helped create, and his final compositions were left unheard. Over the weekend, William Russo’s Chicago Jazz Ensemble played the first performances of this music outside of New Orleans, where these glorious scores received their belated world premiere in 1998 (nearly 60 years after Morton’s death, in 1941).
Like those historic concerts in New Orleans, Russo’s local premiere pointed to the originality and adventurousness of Morton’s final works. That they were written when the composer’s health, career and finances were crumbling render these revolutionary scores all the more remarkable.
In both the New Orleans and Chicago performances, it was Morton’s “Ganjam” that left the most profound impression. The strange chord progressions, exotic scales, unorthodox structure and daring use of dissonance make “Ganjam” the most forward-looking big-band jazz composition of the pre-World War II era. Though the piece bears passing resemblance to Juan Tizol’s “Caravan” (as Russo noted in his introductory remarks), the popular Tizol work is structurally simplistic and harmonically tame by comparison.
To their credit, Russo and his ensemble produced lush orchestral colors in “Ganjam’s” deep-blue passages and unabashed, crashing dissonance in the block chords that mark the climax of the piece. This was a strong account of a groundbreaking work, even if Russo and friends chose a tempo that was a bit too brisk.
Morton, after all, wrote this music in the sleek dance-band manner of the late 1930s, and orchestral pieces such as “Ganjam” require a slightly more relaxed, easily swaying manner. Moreover, Morton was born and raised in New Orleans, and his music typically conveyed a distinctly Southern languor that underlies “Ganjam.”
Even so, Russo’s “Ganjam” proved striking, as did his revelatory account of the little-known march “We Are Elks.” This is the piece that Morton penned for an Elks convention in New York, in 1939, hoping that sales of the sheet music would deliver him from severe poverty.
But like every dream Morton nurtured at the end of his life, this one evaporated before his eyes: He invested his last pennies in printing sheet music of “We Are Elks,” but he didn’t sell a single copy at the convention.
Though the piece is built on the four-square rhythms of a generic march, Morton enriched the form with intricate inner voices, clever secondary themes and an unusually rich chordal language. Russo and the band brought out these subtleties, and then some, arguing persuasively for the intellectual rigor of the work.
Less convincing, however, was the Chicago Jazz Ensemble’s reading of “Mr. Joe,” taken at an inappropriate, double-time tempo. Morton preferred a far slower pace, as is apparent from the solo piano version of “Mr. Joe” he recorded toward the end of his life.
Nevertheless, Chicago listeners owe a debt to Russo, who went to considerable effort to obtain Morton’s final scores and play them in various venues, including the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie on Saturday night. Performances such as these place the Chicago Jazz Ensemble among the elite repertory bands in America.
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To hear Morton’s last pieces and read the Tribune’s series “Jelly Roll Blues” on the Internet, go to bancodeprofissionais.com/go/jellyroll.
