There’s this funny thing that I experience occasionally, when I am researching in the realm of jazz. As I’m reading an article or essay, tucked between quotations and citations, I would frequently come across the name of the late historian, record producer, jazz archivist, radio DJ and collector of stories and tales short and tall, Phil Schaap. Whenever I read quotes or citations of his research, I can just imagine him in his animated way of storytelling, conveying knowledge well beyond the quote at hand. I’m immediately brought back to the days of my childhood. When spending time with my father at Jazz at Lincoln Center, either coming in to work with him, or attending concerts at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, Phil Schaap would be among the frequent faces I would encounter.

I was always fascinated with him and his ability to recall the most minute of details and obscure anecdotes. But as a child I was completely unaware of the fact that I first encountered his name in one of my favorite childhood books Charlie Parker Played Bebop. That book was among the first that I “learned” to read (more likely that I memorized it after the many times my mom and big sister Kenithia would read it to me) and little did I know that the man who that book was dedicated to would in a few years be one of the people at Jazz at Lincoln Center who I greatly admired.

It seemed like there wasn’t a topic Phil didn’t know something about. I would spend hours as a child picking his brain about anything that came to mind, and as I grew, so did the conversations. He would tell stories of his encounters with the pantheon of jazz greats throughout his career in picture perfect detail all the way down to the apartment number on their addresses. He would engage me in historical conversation about weighty topics such as World War II or the CIA assassination of Patrice Lumumba. He would also engage me in pop quizzes full of trivia, and questions designed to stump. I have a funny recollection of him stumping me with a really obscure question and pulling out the finger guns in celebration exclaiming “Boom! Gotcha!” He would never condescend or speak down to me, he always treated me as an equal that would understand all of what he said, even if I didn’t fully grasp it all.

Phil would frequently greet me and my father by our names followed by our birthdays flexing his eidetic memory. “Hello Wynton Kelly Stone Guess, June 24 1993, and Andre Kimo Stone Guess July 24, 1966! Booyah!” Every year on my birthday, Phil would give me a shout out on his radio show.

Below is an on-air shoutout that he gave to my father in 2006 on his 40th birthday, where he graciously mentions me as well.

He would also send me an email as well with a witty message and personalized sign-off.

The first email I received from him in 2011 read:

Dear Not So Little Wynton,

Happy Birthday!!

No matter how old you get, I will hold a place for you in my classroom.

Yours in Wanda Landowska and Donald Lambert,

Phil

It is not lost on me, as a PhD student in contemporary history and a researcher, that I owe a great deal of gratitude to Phil for always having a moment free to indulge my curious mind, challenge my knowledge of jazz history, and give me an historical perspective on my own influences in my playing.

One such instance was his stylistic analysis of my recording of Scott Joplin’s composition “Bethena”.Without telling him the source of the recording, my dad and I simply asked him to guess the performer. In that moment, Phil began to listen intently, picking apart the quality of touch, how grace notes were shaded, and even how rhythms were accented. He was eventually led to the tentative conclusion, that this was someone a lost recording of Thelonious Monk! Though of course he knew that the recording quality was a dead giveaway that in fact was not Monk. This interaction gave me valuable insight into my playing and the pianists who were influencing me up to that point.

He’s one of the people that really shaped my outlook and made this path that I’m on possible. The older I got and the deeper I embraced my academic pursuits, I found myself accumulating the kind of “fun facts” and depth of knowledge across many different fields and disciplines, that I had once believed solely belonged to the domain of Phil Schaap. Writing my thesis, discussing music history, geopolitical history, and social history, I am often reminded of the epic and sprawling conversations I would have with him in the offices and spaces of Jazz at Lincoln Center. And with this blog Wynton Kelly’s Liner Notes I feel myself following in his footsteps. As he would regale me with stories of knowing some of the jazz greats and their peculiarities that came from knowing them personally, I now find myself doing the very same thing about Phil Schaap.

No matter how old I get, I will never forget about the classroom of life that would spontaneously materialize in his presence, nor will I forget one of the people who most encouraged and indulged my pursuit of knowledge.

Daniel John Guess Jr., who performs under the rap moniker Thurgood Bartholomew, has been a consistent presence in Louisville’s hip-hop scene for three decades. He describes Louisville as having “an insane amount of talent,” crediting his collaborations and friendships across the scene with helping shape his artistic path.

He first made his name in Louisville’s underground rap circuit as part of the group Skyscraper Stereo, a group formed alongside Jawon "Chuck Deuce" Dunn, Landry "Dat Boi Dunn" Dunn, and Andrew “DJ AK” Kim, that emerged from the city’s open mic scene before expanding into the nightlife-dense neighborhood of The Highlands, where they performed in venues along Bardstown Road and Baxter Avenue not typically associated with rap.

I had the chance to sit down with him and discuss how he has navigated the age-old challenge of what it means for art to grow alongside the artist. Now as a father, he has had to balance his creative work with the responsibilities of parenthood, while contending with the ways music-making, the industry, and listener tastes have evolved over the course of his career.

Q: You’ve been making rap music since the mid-2000s, through several different stages of your life. When you look back now, what’s stayed consistent and what has changed in the music you make and what motivates you to make it?

Daniel:

I think when it comes to me, I’ve always focused on multi-syllable flows and cadences. I’m not naturally a storyteller and that’s something I’ve been cognizant of as I’ve gotten older.

When I’m at my best, my style is more braggadocio and I’m really just talking shit. But I feel like I’ve been doing this for so long that I don’t want it to become too commonplace in my music. Being a father has also made me want to create things that have more meaning to them. I still enjoy braggadocio rap, but I don’t want that to be the only thing I do.

Lately, I’ve been trying to be a little more daring. I’ve got a song on this EP I just put out called “CRAzy aHh Phone”, where I’m talking about how we’re addicted to our phones and how it’s hurting relationships. I’ve got a song I recently put out where I address people that need to get off the internet, get out of their homes, and touch grass. I’m trying to touch upon some modern issues and speak on some themes that people can relate to.

Despite this, a big part my music, has been about having fun. Skyscraper Stereo was always fun. We were basically like the Black Beastie Boys, you know? House party music. But I understand that there are real issues that need to be touched upon. And I try to make sure I have a nice balance and do a little bit of everything.

Q: Hip-hop is often framed as a young person’s game. What has it meant for you to continue making music as you’ve gotten older?

Daniel:

It’s a complicated relationship. There are a lot of young artists locally that I really am a big fan of like That’s Crazy Camp, Horace Gaither and crew, they’re amazing. There’s this dude named Stxdy that’s been really killing it in the game. When I look at those younger artists and I see their approach, it makes me want to keep my approach fresh. I always want to try to make sure I stay relevant.

There was a period where I seriously considered retiring. Listening to a lot of popular rap on the radio, around COVID, made me question what I was doing. A lot of older rappers talk down on younger rappers, but I didn’t want to be that guy. Everyone has their own approach. Everyone comes from different generations and are speaking their truth. So, I’ve tried to be a little more open minded with some of the younger artists that I may not gravitate to toward like off the bat. I want to just make sure that I’m not the bitter old rapper that just doesn’t like the youngins because they’re doing it different than the way that I’ve always done it.

I work part time for Live Nation, doing security at the Louisville Palace and the Mercury Ballroom, so I’ve had the opportunity to witness so many artists and genres that I would never have chosen to see. It has really broadened my horizons. Seeing their stage presence, I could understand their appeal and it reminded me that there’s so much more to it than just the music.

It reminded me of my shows with Skyscraper Stereo. I feel like our crew was a big part of establishing the scene. There were others that contributed before us and there will be many more in the future. But I’m always reminded that being part of this scene is really all it’s ever been about for me. My individual achievements have never really been as important to me as to whether the scene itself is thriving.

Q: How have your ideas of what it looks like to be a successful artist evolved? How do you currently define success?

Daniel:

Success as an artist, for a lot of people, used to mean getting a deal and making a hit record. Today it has evolved more toward social media. I feel like a lot of people define success now by how many followers you have, how many Spotify plays you have and things of that nature. But I don’t define my personal success by those. My success is more defined by my longevity on the scene.

Skyscraper Stereo just had a reunion show last night and there were so many people telling me things like, “I’ve been listening to you for so long!”, “I can’t believe I’m doing a show with you.” Last night, this guy, Corey, told me, “Man, I’ve been wanting to do a show with y’all since I was like 16. I’m like 30 and now we get to open before y’all.”

At the reunion show connected to the late Brian Puckett and Little Heart Records, Jawon brought up something that really resonated with me. He said, “We may not be driving Porsches and things like that. We may not be, quote unquote, successful artists. But right now, I’m in a room where we get to perform in front of everybody in the city that I respect as an artist. And that’s priceless to me.”

It’s those kinds of things. Monetarily, I haven’t gotten anywhere I would like to get with my career. But I don’t let that stop me from what it is that I’m doing.

I’m not sure where my motivation comes from, but lately, I’ve been very inspired. And I’m just not questioning it. I just I’m just running with it.

I’ve been writing at a crazy pace here lately, writing three or four songs a week, which is unheard of for me. Maybe I’m just worried that I’m going to lose it at some point because I’m getting older and I’m just trying to get it all I can. But for whatever reason, I’ve been really inspired.

How did becoming a father change your relationship to creativity and making music?

Daniel:

It has definitely made creating music less important. I guess rap was kind of my baby for a while. I put so much into it. But to be a present father, I have had to do a lot less of that. I am writing a lot more, but I tend to do that, when they’re asleep.

Sometimes I’ll play my instrumentals around them, and they’ll really love the music that I’m working on. I don’t really let them listen to a lot of my stuff because there’s a lot of language that I don’t really want them to hear.

They’re both pretty musical, too. My daughter just wrote a song about a bee that wanted to be a fairy. And it was really pretty and melodic. And she wrote the whole thing from scratch. I asked her, “You didn’t use a melody from some other song to come up with that?” She’s said, “No, I just made it up from my head.” I guess they just naturally have that talent, too. My son just graduated kindergarten, and he wanted to make a song about that. I think it’d be awesome to keep working with them throughout the years.

Right now, I’m navigating a space to where I can get them more into that type of thing where I can kind of cater to them and let them in on my process without corrupting them. I’m not able to do it as much because of them, but I wouldn’t trade that for anything. I’m crazy about those kids. It’s nice to see that they have that same kind of creative bug and watch that blossom.

Q: When you when you first started on the Louisville scene, what was the scene like when you compared to how it is today? And did things shift once more artists from Louisville started gaining more national attention?

Daniel:

When I first started on the scene, it was a time where there wasn’t much love between crews. There were a lot of a lot of egos. We had a couple of beefs for no reason. Like we had beef over like our name because we had the same name as another group. It was it was a lot more divided.

We were one of the only groups that were part of the open mic circuit that weren’t like hood. Like they were snapping and dancing and shit and we weren’t on that. We had to earn their respect. But eventually we were all brothers, and it was a lot of love.

But I feel like even around that time there was already a shift as far as support for other artists. As we became part of the growing Bardstown Road scene, we saw more artists coming together and supporting one another. And we all did a lot of shows together. Grimey Rhyme Regime was killing it. We did a lot of shows with them. And we did a lot of cross genre stuff, too, especially when we were part of Little Heart Records.

We played Forecastle Festival with Dr. Dundiff and that was crazy. Dr. Dundiff had so many super talented artists and he put them all in one crew. We had people like Jim James from My Morning Jacket come and do the set with us. Dr. Dundiff, had the stage and he could have been like, “OK, I’m playing Forecastle, I’m a rip Forecastle by myself.” But he didn’t do that. He said, “I’m getting so many dope artists from the city to put on a whole showcase to show what they can do.”

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People are doing things like that now. The city is coming together, and everybody keeps the egos at home. You know, there’s a dude goes by Coach Cam, a younger guy. I recently went to see a show with him and a bunch of artists that he’s working with. I feel like they’re keeping that momentum going where you get these big crews of talented people and they all get together and rip shit and there’s no ego.

With the success of people like Jack Harlow, Bryson Tiller and EST Gee, I don’t feel like there’s been much of a shift in the scene with them getting the national attention that they’ve gotten. There’s a lot of talent locally that doesn’t get the same kind of recognition that they have. But seeing artists from Louisville reach that level has inspired a lot of younger artists. If you see so many artists from your area that are doing it big like that, it puts a battery pack in you and makes you think, “Hey, I can do this, too.”

But someone else might tell you they feel differently. I’ve been around long enough to see it shift both ways, but right now it feels like artists are genuinely supporting one another. Social media kind of skews perspectives a little bit. Maybe some people are sitting on their keyboard and feel like that’s not how things are happening. But if you’re out at the shows and you’re rubbing elbows, talking to people, then you understand that there is a camaraderie about what’s happening right now in our scene.

Listening to your recent projects F.R.F.R. and Paper, there’s a sense of renewal and creative momentum to them. Did making those projects feel like a new artistic chapter for you?

Daniel:

Yeah, definitely. F.R.F.R. felt like a resurgence for me because I was pretty much ready to hang it up. Then I got this pack of beats from L Double U who produced the whole thing. He awakened something in me that had been dormant. Even though I was talking about quitting, I don’t think I really wanted to. There was something about those beats that put the love back into it for me.

And then around the time I was recording F.R.F.R. I met J-Ideas and I did a song with him. And I mean, his production is insane. And he’s such a good dude. He’s an amazing videographer, too. He produced the “Type Shit” and shot the music video. He produced all of the Paper EP and is to produce pretty much all of the next two EPs Rock and Scissors.

Meeting with him and having sessions with him has been a big part of what all the recent momentum that I’ve had and how much I’ve been inspired. His production really brings it out of me. If I’m just chilling and I hear one of his beats, I start writing without even thinking about it. I think that’s really keeping me motivated, just keeping me keeping me driven and excited about, putting out as much material as I can.

There’s also a need to be strategic about what comes out when. That element has changed so much. I feel like people aren’t really concerned about promoting full albums and things like that. I don’t know if we’ve got the attention span for it anymore.

I’m used to doing like three sixteen bar verses and eight bar hooks. Now it’s like people want like two eight bar verses and like four bar hooks. Songs are like a minute long. I’m trying to adapt to that. But I think because of it, I’m putting out that many more songs since I can’t get everything I want to say out in one song.

You’ve released music under different monikers such as Mr. Goodbar and Thurgood Bartholomew. Do those different names represent different artistic phases or sides of yourself?

Daniel:

I first started off as Uneducated Guess and then that evolved into Never Second Guess, which is kind of wordplay. I’m a junior, so I am a second Guess. It’s kind of an ironic name.

But then I turned into Mr. Goodbar, then Goodbar, then that evolved into Thurgood Bartholomew. I’ve got a million aliases as well. Goody Two Shoes, Peppermint Patrick, Big Brother All White Tee.

I think after Skyscraper Stereo broke up, when I decided I wanted to do some more solo work, I felt like I needed to reinvent myself some kind of way. I came to realize that there’s so many rappers using the name Goodbar. When I first came out with it, I didn’t see that many of them. But now if I go to Spotify and search for myself there’s so many other Goodbars. There’s even one dude out of the Bay Area named Mr. Goodbar seems like he has a pretty good following.

I mean, I love it. People still call me that, but I needed something to make me stand out.

The funny thing about Thurgood Bartholomew was that it’s the long version of Goodbar. So it’s Thur-Goodbar-tholomew. It keeps the root of who I am, but it adds a little bit to it. It kind of sounds nerdy and I feel like I’m kind of a nerd rapper.

Honestly, though, I’m not real crazy about Thurgood Bartholomew because it’s so long and it’s hard to spell. If I meet somebody that wants to follow me on Instagram, I have to write it down or send it.

I recently flirted with Kyngpin, like the king of Kentucky (KY) with the pen. That’s kind of a cool name, but I just dropped a project under Thurgood Bartholomew. If I drop the next under Kyngpin, people aren’t going to know how to find me.

We collaborated on the song “Metamorphosis” during an earlier creative period for both of us. Looking back on it now, do you see connections between who you were artistically then and the music you’re making today?

Honestly, that project inspired me because it forced me to touch on some real subject matter and not just talk a bunch of shit. I think collaborations like that have helped me broaden my horizons and not be so one-sided. At the end of the day, versatility is what’s really important to me as an artist. I want to be able to work with anybody and adapt to whatever style or genre the music calls for. I’m pretty eclectic myself. Maybe not country music, though! I know it’s popular for rappers to dabble in country right now, but I can’t stand that shit!

What is your advice for young artists?

Daniel:

Just stay the course if it’s something you’re passionate about. Don’t let anything rattle you. There’s going to be ups and downs. You’re going to hit walls from time to time. You’re going to have writer’s blocks. You’ll have different seasons in your life. Things will happen that may discourage you.

But just put it all on the pen, man. Whatever you’re going through, something’s bothering you, take that time to write about it even if you don’t put it out. Use your art to help you get weather that storm. If it’s something you’re really passionate about, just don’t let anything steer you in a different direction. Stick with it.

Here I am now, it’s been 30 years since I started rapping. I just feel like I’ve gotten better with time. It’s not a young man’s game, contrary to popular belief. If you love this, and you have a passion for it, just create. Do it for the love and don’t expect any money out of it either. That’s my biggest advice! At the end of the day, I don’t think how much money I’ve made is going to define who I am as an artist. And most importantly, stay humble.

As a piano player, Jelly Roll Morton was a composer whose music I had engaged with from a young age. But learning his music always presented a problem for me. Despite how straightforward his songs seemed, from listening to his recordings, and interpretations done by other musicians such as Marcus Roberts, and Wynton Marsalis, when I sat down with the book of transcriptions collected by James Dapogny, the music was more elusive that it appeared. Unlike the ease of learning Scott Joplin, or a piece of classical music, whose notes on the page were fixed, Jelly Roll Morton’s music existed somewhere between a score and improvisation, and it wasn’t always clear which parts were which.

Morton developed a highly idiosyncratic approach to the piano. Some of his pianisms appear alien, especially when read on a page, with an idiosyncrasy akin to Robert Schumann where you would encounter figures entirely unique to him. To learn his music was to step into his shoes as a piano player and inhabit his pianistic world.

When I spoke to Aaron Diehl about Morton’s playing, I was surprised by how closely his experience mirrored my own. Diehl described Morton’s style not simply as jazz piano, but as “a very orchestral form of playing,” one in which “every element of the orchestration” could be heard within the keyboard texture itself. Even for a pianist of Diehl’s caliber, Morton’s music presented unique challenges. “I think Jelly Roll was probably one of the most difficult in terms of balancing many different elements, both rhythmic and melodically.”

One of the first things that becomes clear about Morton’s playing, as Diehl noted, is that it is orchestral in nature. His playing gave the illusion of the collective improvisation of New Orleans jazz bands and voice leading is key to this illusion. As Diehl pointed out, “ It’s not as really straightforward between the right hand and the left hand. They really work in tandem with each other and then it has to be very specific because otherwise it’s easy for certain harmonic movements to seem out of place.”

This was one of the challenges that I always found in his music. There was a very clear melody, but there were a whole host of other notes happening alongside it. It is notable that piano was not Morton’s first instrument. He played violin, guitar and drums before settling on the piano, and the remnants of these instruments can be seen in his approach. The violin and guitar are especially present melodically. Rather than presenting the melody as a single line, as characteristic of the solo repertoire of violin and guitar, the melody and accompaniment are presented together through the use of dyads and triads.

Morton’s melodies are especially reminiscent of the kinds of figures you would find in fiddling. He often plays the melody with the thumb while repeating a pedal note or chord above it or repeats a note with his thumb and plays the melody in other fingers. Omitting these extra notes loses the density of the music and strips it of some of its harmonic nuance. In order to demonstrate some of these ideas more clearly, I recorded several excerpts from Morton’s music during the writing of this article. Take this excerpt from “Freakish”

Other times the melody itself is contained in a series of chords. The entire melody of “King Porter Stomp” is played this way.

When the accompaniment is factored in, this adds up to a music that is at the same time contrapuntal while maintaining a melody and accompaniment. This is where Dielh’s point about voice leading and balance comes in to play. The music is more linearly focused than it is on harmony. If you try to approach it from a standard jazz point of view, playing a melody while thinking about the accompaniment as a set of chord changes, something in the music gets lost.

I still go back to that just to visually see how the voice leading works and try to find different ways of approaching what he’s already established in that particular version because when I think of harmony, it’s definitely more about the line, the movement, than it is about thinking this is G7 going to Ab diminished to A minor or something like that. You can’t oversimplify it like that.

Take for example this excerpt from King Porter Stomp.

There is only one “chord” played in the passage, the C7 in the right hand. But the harmony is still present. It instead emerges from the counterpoint of the fiddle-like melody presentation, and the trombone-like line in the bass. When approaching Morton’s music these kinds of passages cannot be reduced or simplified, as Aaron stated.

The linear focus of his music also makes his music rhythmically challenging. The tresillo and habanera rhythms are often implicit rather than explicit, underpinning the rhythmic accenting of the melody. For example, take this excerpt from “The Pearls”, which has a very rhythmically straightforward tuba-like bass.

Now hear the same passage with a tresillo accompaniment. The tresillo rhythm lines up with the accents of the melody.

This implicit tresillo laid against a 4/4 “pah, pah, pah, pah” gives his music a rhythmic richness, that also contributes to building an orchestral illusion.

Accenting thus becomes one of the most important elements of his playing. When trying maintain the rhythmic accents, especially in octave passages, it is necessary to play them with minimal pedal. You can’t hide behind the pedal to connect the melodic voices together. They instead need to be connected through legato playing. This kind of playing also requires wrist flexibility to be able to play this kind of repetition of chords without tension. Different hand shapes and the use of the wrist to reach notes instead of jumping are important for maintaining legato. The keys Morton favored also contribute to this sensation of playing his music. Pieces like Winin’ Boy Blues in D-flat major or passages of King Porter Stomp moving through G-flat major lend themselves naturally to dense chordal voicings and sliding inner voices, but are more awkward for flowing lines.

Aaron noted that because of his rhythmic complexity, Jelly’s music sits somewhere in between the straight approach of ragtime and the swing of later jazz eras.

“And it’s not quite swung, it’s not quite straight. The tempo always has to be very specific I think because you don’t ever want it to feel rushed. It also can’t be too lethargic.”

The density of Morton’s playing feels more natural to play at a moderate tempo, and feels straining and taxing at a faster tempo. Despite Morton’s own contention that he did not play as fast as many of the piano players around, Morton did play at tempos that were relatively fast for this style of playing. This is where interpretation and the individuality of the performer comes into play. The tempo of his songs can be flexible and are contingent upon the feeling the pianist can evoke at the chosen tempo. A tempo that is lethargic for one person can be right in the pocket for another pianist. Morton’s tempos can be too fast for some, but they were the right tempo for him. Overall the feeling of the music matters the most.

Jelly Roll Morton’s song forms are also much different than how jazz songs evolved to be structured, with a melody and an extended solo section over the melody. His forms are similar to ragtime forms with several contrasting sections which are all repeated. He tends to mix improvisation in with his renditions of the melodies. The improvisation tends to happen in the margins. Aaron described his approach to this aspect of learning Morton’s music:

I think from a combination of recordings that I listen to, I get the melodic material that he likes to keep in. And it’s pretty consistent throughout, and then how he embellishes beyond that. Because again, the soloing, basically, his compositions are one big contrapuntal experience. So the soloing is in between whatever the quote-unquote melody is. Maybe the trumpet has a motif that’s quote-unquote the melody, and then the clarinet is soloing on top of that. And that’s kind of how I think he plays.

The flow of Morton’s soloing tends to be to played freely and then an immediate return to the melody. When playing his music and maintaining the flow his songs, this kind of improvisation structure can feel more restrictive than just soloing over the chord progressions for several choruses.

The deeper I went into Morton’s music, the more I began to realize that the challenges were not merely technical. Morton’s music is a different conception of piano playing than the one most jazz pianists learn and inherit today. This was what fascinated Aaron Diehl most about Morton’s playing. Diehl spoke of his playing as a model for a different approach to jazz piano playing.

I always encourage young pianists, especially jazz pianists, who are more into people like Keith Jarrett or later approaches. I tell them, please go to Jelly Roll Morton. This stuff is just so idiosyncratic, and if you incorporate some of that method, it doesn’t even have to be the exact language, but just that idea of two hands with counterpoint and with an ensemble undertone. I mean, nobody plays like that today, really.

Much of modern jazz pianism, especially after bebop, evolved toward linear conceptions of improvisation. Even solo piano became centered around melodic lines over chordal accompaniment. But what one can learn from Morton’s conception of piano, in its rhythmic and contrapuntal complexity, is how to create the feeling of a dance ensemble.

And people know me for playing solo stride, but I want to kind of think more broadly about solo performance in the quote-unquote jazz context, because Bud Powell, and later people like Herbie, Chick, of course, Keith Jarrett, and certainly now Brad Mehldau. And I’m thinking more about how to create at all times, create the feeling of dance in a solo context.

Like it doesn’t have to be explicit, and always playing some kind of syncopation all the time, but it’s like having that undertone of something that one can dance to, and then taking it one step further. It’s like not only the feeling of dance, but a dance ensemble. And that’s really where the roots of the music are.

The music of Jelly Roll Morton is representative of an older style of playing, but represents the building blocks for what an alternate conception of what jazz piano itself could be.

If you can combine sort of the richness of that orchestral sound and the precision of, instruments blend and orchestration and timbre, phrasing with sort of the more earlier aspects we talk about in the Afro-based traditions, I feel like that’s musical nirvana.

Jelly Roll Morton as a figure has often appeared to people as someone attempting to position himself at the center of jazz history. His claims to have invented jazz appear as hyperbolic and boastful and can feel polemical even today. But when one takes the time to sit down and play his music, to engage with it directly, it becomes clear that his claim was less about literal authorship and more about the world, the people, and the history contained within his playing, the world of New Orleans. To engage with his music is to engage with that history, and even today over a century later, there is still a lot Jelly Roll Morton can teach about what jazz was, and the possibilities jazz can be.

When Jelly Roll Morton arrived in Washington D.C. in 1935, his fortunes had declined considerably. After years of frustration with the New York entertainment industry and the changing direction of popular jazz, he was still undeterred in trying to find a receptive audience to his music and his message.

Just a year after arriving in Washington, Morton walked straight into the radio station WOL and requested an audition. After hearing him play, the station immediately offered him a nightly slot. As the Washington Daily News recounted:

“Friday afternoon he walked into WOL and asked for an audition. He gave no name. Just asked for a piano. He got it. A few bars, and WOL knew he was someone. His name was asked and given…So now, if you want to know where your present “swing” came from, you can hear “Jellyroll” regularly. He goes on tonight at 8:30 and will be heard every night this week at times governed by convention broadcasts. Next week he starts a series, “The History of Jazz”. It should be good listening.”

The significance of Morton’s time in Washington goes beyond notions of a forgotten musician of a bygone era seeking his just recognition. Morton understood himself as a historical witness to the emergence of jazz in New Orleans and increasingly saw it as his responsibility to explain where the music came from, how it functioned, and what distinguished it from the broader commercial world of swing orchestras and dance bands that were categorized under the label “jazz.”

By the time Alan Lomax encountered Morton in Washington and invited him to record at the Library of Congress in 1938, Morton had already begun publicly historicizing jazz through radio lectures and musical demonstrations. Morton arrived at the Library of Congress with the same theatrical bravado that had defined his public persona for decades. Elegantly dressed, he reportedly introduced himself to Lomax with the line:

“I’m Jelly Roll Morton, I’m the inventor of jazz, and they’re stealing my music.”

In another context, the claim might have sounded absurd. But like the people at the WOL radio station, Lomax knew there was something more to Morton, and throughout the weekly recording sessions, Lomax gradually came to understand the importance of what he was documenting.

In the Library of Congress recordings, Morton lays out a detailed conception of jazz involving rhythm, ensemble interplay, riffs, ornamentation, improvisation, and performance practice. In many ways, Morton was confronting a problem that still remains unresolved today: what exactly is jazz?

This article examines Morton’s own explanation of jazz and the musical logic underlying it, in order to better understand how one of the music’s earliest practitioners understood the language of jazz.

Jazz as a Language

As an analytical lens to analyze Jelly Roll Morton’s definition of jazz, I will utilize some ideas from music theorist Robert Gjerdingen from his book Music in the Gallant Style. Gjerdingen begins his book with an important idea for understanding music from different eras. Just as social cues and conventions change over time in a specific society, the same idea applies to musical language. One can learn the music of a particular era, but there are elements to how the music was interpreted, performed and improvised which were particular to this time period.

Gjerdingen uses the commedia dell’arte tradition as a metaphor. There were stock speeches, phrases, and gestures that went into acting, so that an actor would understand how to play the myriad of different characters. These plays were written based on an overall skeleton of scenes, where a specific beat will occur similar to how we would understand a lead sheet in music today.

Gjerdingen argued that music in the 18th century and into the 19th century in European classical music, also operated on this kind of system, where the bits and pieces of the musical language, such as melodies, ornaments, cadences, bass progressions, and stock harmonic sequences were internalized. This gave musicians a common language in which they could improvise full pieces together.

Gjerdingen uses the term “schema” to describe the stock musical figures and conventions internalized by musicians through repetition and practice. These schemata formed a shared musical vocabulary, allowing performers to recognize patterns, anticipate musical movement, and improvise within a common style.

Understanding the context of how the musical language was deployed was especially important to New Orleans music because of its use of collective improvisation. Like the commedia dell’arte, which was made up of stock characters, who had particular mannerisms, phrases, and speeches associated with them, the instruments in a Hot Five or Hot Seven New Orleans ensemble had similar roles within the collective improvisation. The trumpet, being the loudest lead instrument, took on the main melody with strength, vigor and finesse, while the trombone took on outlining and emphasizing the bass notes in a song. The clarinet provided counterpoint to the trumpet line, nuance to the harmonies the trombone was emphasizing, and provided texture to the song, filling in the space between the bass and lead instruments. Within these roles, there were stock phrases, licks, cadential phrases, and melodic figures particular to each instrument that would have been internalized by these musicians. They each understood their role in the music, and how that role shifted depending on the style of the song.

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One can understand the frustration Jelly Roll Morton must have felt when encountering the jazz music being played in New York, where this musical etiquette, in the application of the musical language, as he knew it in New Orleans, was not being respected. When Jelly Roll Morton and other New Orleans jazz musicians complained about aspects such as how loud people played and the harmonic and melodic abstraction of jazz musicians, it's not simply older musicians complaining about the innovations of younger musicians. The very musical language they dedicated their life to, and the respective schemata that make up that language were being disregarded yet the name of the music remained the same. In this article, I will utilize this idea of “schema” from Gjerdingen to examine Jelly Roll Morton’s own definition of jazz music to try and illuminate some elements that Morton described that were common to this language.

The Rhythm of Jazz

When describing to Alan Lomax how he defined jazz, Jelly Roll Morton first makes the distinction between jazz and ragtime.

“All these people played ragtime in a hot style, but man, you can play hot all you want to, and you still won’t be playing jazz. Hot means something spicy. Ragtime is a certain type of syncopation and only certain tunes can be played in that idea. But jazz is a style that can be applied to any type of tune. I started using the word in 1902 to show people the difference between jazz and ragtime.”

For Morton, this was important. It’s not as much a distinction in the musical language, but rather in the feel and rhythm of the music. Ragtime, being a music derived from 2/4 and cut time marches, is mostly felt in two—oom-pah. Within this feeling there are syncopations usually in the melodic lines.

The music of New Orleans was divided into four beats instead of two. You can hear the difference in this feeling in Morton’s stomping foot that often accompanies his playing. Instead of an ebb and flow of “oom-pah, oom-pah” there is a constant “pah pah pah pah”. This feeling is crossed with what Morton calls “the spanish tinge”. The “spanish tinge” was an important element of bass rhythms in New Orleans and was important for as Morton says giving “a great background. It was the grounding element to the constant “pah pah pah pah” rhythm of the music.

The name “spanish tinge” is a broad allusion to its Afro Caribbean origins and is a product of the cultural melding between New Orleans and its Caribbean and Latin American neighbors as well as the history of Spanish colonization of Louisiana in the 18th century.

The rhythm of the “spanish tinge” enters New Orleans through several points in history. The first is the Afro-Caribbean influence in the music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk. This influence can be seen in compositions such as Souvenir de Porto Rico, and Danza, pieces which he composed during his travels throughout the Antilles islands, most famously Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico.

The second point of entry comes from the popularity of the Cuban dance musical form the danzón. In their book Danzón: Circum-Caribbean Dialogues in Music and Dance ethnomusicologist Robin Moore and cultural theorist in sound and music of Latin America Alejandro L. Madrid, they point to the influence of danzón music performed by ensembles called orquestra típicas, which was “one of most influential forms of Latin American dance music, with enthusiasts in Costa Rica, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, New Orleans, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere.” These ensembles consisted of instruments such as violins, bass, clarinet, trombone and cornet, alongside percussion instruments such as timbales, the güiro, which featured a prominent cinquillo rhythm. Though as the music developed in Cuba into the 20th century, smaller ensembles began to become favored, larger ensembles of brass and woodwinds called danzoneras, were favored in Mexico.

It was these ensembles from Mexico which would be particularly popular in New Orleans. During the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in 1884 on the site of modern day Audubon Park, the 8th Cavalry Mexican Military Band elicited an ecstatic reception for the six month run of the exposition. The band would return to New Orleans several times over the next two decades. The band was so popular that compositions performed by the band such as “Lazos de Amor” were featured in the catalogues of local sheet music publishers in New Orleans during this time.

Danzón repertoire, like their American brass band counterparts, consisted of marches, popular dance forms, and popular music of the time. The performance practices also share a similarity with that of early jazz as well featuring improvisation and improvisational ornamentations of melodies. As Moore and Madrid write:

Danzones have almost always been composed and notated by trained musicians, but often allow performers to interpret the score with a certain degree of melodic and rhythmic improvisation more characteristic of traditional/folkloric repertoire. The pieces feature European harmonies, yet both melodic lines and percussion patterns incorporate rhythms characteristic of West African traditions, as mentioned.

This can be heard in an early recording made by Pablo Valenzuela and his orchestra.

A third point of influence comes from what people in New Orleans referred to as the “Spanish” population of the city, which largely consisted of people from Iberia, and across Latin American and the Caribbean, and the Philippines. Many of the Creoles of New Orleans, white and black, came from a mixed Hispanic and French background. The hispanic part of the identity over time got subsumed in the broader term "Creole", especially amongst white creoles who sought to distinguish themselves from Americans during the early part of the American administration of Louisiana. Among some of the early New Orleans jazz musicians of Hispanic origin were musicians such as trombonist Edward “Kid” Ory, tubist Martin Abraham also known as “Chink” Martin. It is worth noting that both of these musicians played bass instruments. Their contributions were formative to how the bass was handled in New Orleans jazz.

The way that the “spanish tinge” manifests in the music of Jelly Roll Morton is through the habanera, tresillo and cinquillo rhythms. In his explanation of the "spanish tinge," Jelly Roll Morton plays his first composition, “New Orleans Blues” which goes back and forth between a tresillo and habanera rhythmic accompaniment.

This kind of accompaniment was an important part of how Jelly Roll Morton played the blues. In his performances of common blues ballads, such as “The Murder Ballad” he utilizes this combination of tresillo and habanera rhythms in the accompaniment. In this context, New Orleans Blues can be seen as a codified version of one of the ways Jelly Roll Morton played the blues.

Songs such as "The Crave", "Creepy Feeling," are more direct allusions to the Latino origins of the “spanish tinge”. They’re more compositions in the model of songs like “La Paloma” , than in a blues style with “spanish” rhythms. “Tia Juana” is another song in this model with overt references to Mexican music in the ringing thirds first section of the melody. It is worth noting that this song was published 2 years after Morton’s frequent visits to Tijuana during his stay in Los Angeles between 1917 and 1923, where he would play piano at a black American owned bar in Tijuana called the Kansas City Bar, for which he named his song “Kansas City Stomp”.

The “spanish tinge” is still a core rhythmic element of New Orleans jazz to this day, most prominently found in the tresillo patterns of bass drum rhythms in second lines.

Jazz as Vocabulary

In Morton’s definition of jazz, he gives a central importance to what he calls “riffs”. If jazz, for Morton, is a musical language, then the riff is one of its primary units of meaning.

“Always have a melody going some kind of way against a background of perfect harmony with plenty of riffs—meaning figures. A riff is something that gives an orchestra a great background and is the main idea in playing jazz. No jazz piano player can really play good jazz unless they try to give an imitation of a band, that is, by providing a basis of riffs.”

From Morton’s description of a riff, he’s not simply referring to a “riff” or “lick” as we understand it to be, which is a prepackaged musical idea utilized in a style. For Morton, riffs referred to the particular use of melodic figures in New Orleans collective improvisation. Riffs were used for their distinctive melodic quality and how easily they could be used over harmonies without clashing with other lines, or drawing unwarranted attention.

The musical language of early New Orleans jazz emerged from the interaction of European, African, and Caribbean traditions within a shared social and cultural environment. Musically, this meant that many of the figures and ornaments, common in 19th century European, American, Caribbean and Latin American music, across opera, salon repertoire, brass bands, and popular dance forms, were already part of the sonic world these musicians inhabited.

In 19th century New Orleans, this language was transmitted through the city’s musical institutions of theaters, the opera house, brass bands, and ballrooms, as well as through pedagogical traditions, connected to France, and rooted in the Creole communities. Much of this repertoire was itself shaped by Italianate pedagogy, which shaped much of Europe’s wider pedagogical traditions.

As a result, the materials that appear in Jelly Roll Morton’s playing are best understood not as direct borrowings, but as absorbed elements of a broader musical language, recontextualized within the framework of New Orleans jazz, particularly through its encounter with the blues inflected, percussive traditions of the city’s uptown black American community.

One place where the use of riffs was readily apparent was in cadences, which close musical phrases. Cadences, short harmonic progressions that signal the close of a phrase, function as punctuation, such as semicolons or periods. In classical music, they generally have specific voice leading implications which shape how melodic phrases end during the cadence.

In the context of the collective improvisation of New Orleans jazz, using specific riffs for cadences would be useful as a point of coalescence for all of the different instruments, and would reinforce the voice leading and counterpoint specific to the roles each instrument plays. They’re most often found to this day at the end of songs, punctuated by the hi-hat hit.

The cadential phrases are ubiquitous in Morton’s piano playing. These two examples are from “King Porter Stomp”, while this example is from “Freakish”. They’re also heard in his hot five ensembles as well, such as this example from his rendition of the W.C. Handy tune “Beale Street Blues”. This following excerpt of “Dippermouth Blues” from King Oliver’s Creole Band, is an example of its wider use in New Orleans as a whole during this period.

One of the types of riffs that distinguishes Jelly Roll Morton’s writing and piano playing from other jazz pianists of his era was his use of bass riffs. Morton was adamant that bass riffs were an integral part of piano playing stating to Lomax, “No jazz piano player can really play good jazz unless they try to give an imitation of a band, that is, by providing a basis of riffs.” Lomax attributes Morton's love of bass lines in his playing and composition to the influence of Morton’s father Ed La Menthe, who was a trombonist.

“This was a real discovery. Jelly Roll had mentioned playing trombone occasionally but the influence of his father ran deeper. Obsessively, in almost every line of his compositions, Jelly Roll wrote bass figures in tailgate style and sonorous, bursting melodies; trombone phrasing is the Jelly Roll trademark...”

The bass riffs added a layer of contrapuntal complexity to Morton’s playing and composition. There are even imitative passages within his improvisation giving his playing this kind of jazzy baroque quality. In his introduction to Mister Jelly Roll, Lomax gives Morton the epithet of the “American Vivaldi”, and rightfully so.

What the bass riff also gave was the impression of an entire band at the piano. Morton found this imitation so necessary that he repeats it in his explanation of the elements that make up jazz. For him it was a crucial part of piano playing. This way of approaching the piano may come across as somewhat foreign or even archaic to modern jazz piano playing, but in the 19th and early 20th century, the piano often had the role of filling in for bands and orchestras, whether it be at social events such as dances and balls, or in the pit of a theater, like the Lambert brothers Lucien and Sidney played when they were children. It would make sense that Jelly Roll Morton wouldn’t have wanted to lose all of the nuances and sophistication of hot ensemble playing in New Orleans while performing this music at the piano.

In his ensemble compositions, Morton would include these bass riffs in the trombone and tuba. “Wolverine Blues” has his most common riffs in the bass accompaniment to the melody, while “New Orleans Bump” features an opening bass riff and very active bass line in the tuba. The trombone line features Morton’s bass riffs in his arrangement of King Oliver’s song "Doctor Jazz."

Many of the musical figures Morton deploys as riffs make use of ornaments, such as grace notes, trills, mordents, tremolos, and turns. These ornaments form part of the schema of Jelly Roll Morton’s music.

One of the ways Morton used grace notes comes from blues playing, where he shades a blue note into a major third, as he does in the melody of New Orleans Blues. Morton really hammers this note accenting the dissonance.

The three-note grace note figure in the melody of Black Bottom Stomp does the opposite. It accentuates the major quality of the major third in the first half of the melody, which is in the key of B flat major. This contrasts with the second half of melody and the solo section in G minor.

Morton utilizes this three-note grace note figure within his improvisation. It can be heard in his solo in Black Bottom Stomp, but can also be heard in the melodies of songs such as King Porter Stomp.

Trills were also common ornaments. The transition melody in “The Pearls” features a prominent and tasteful use of a trill while the melody of the second section of “The Crave” features a tremolo utilized in a similar manner.

Morton’s use of turns in his melodies and improvisation is especially evocative of 19th century music. Turns were common ornaments in 18th and 19th century melodies but throughout the 19th century, they evolved into a cliché akin to something today in jazz as the infamously clichéd “lick”. Turns were used for their sentimental qualities.

In Morton’s music they take on an ornamental role but also allude to their sentimentality rhetorically. This improvised line from “The Crave” is made up of ornamental turns. This same riff is also featured in “Creepy Feeling”. The subsequent section of “The Crave”, is filled with affective, sentimental uses of turns.

Another common melodic figure of the 19th century Morton utilized, was the “yearning” motif, a melodic figure which appears widely in 19th-century operatic repertoire, but was a central motif in Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. While associated with Wagner, such figures were part of a broader Italianate melodic vocabulary that circulated widely in the 19th century.

To give an example from a New Orleans composer, this motif can be heard in the waltz L’Americaine, Grande Valse Brilliante by Charles Lucien Lambert.

This motif appears in Jelly Roll’s music, but divorced from its bel canto associations, generally used as a riff fragment rather than a melodic moment or focus. It can be heard clearly in the break in the melody of the Pearls, opening melodic figure of King Porter Stomp, and in a cadential phrase in “The Crave”. The use of this figure gives the melodic passages a more “genteel” quality and may have been allusions to this kind of music of 19th century New Orleans.

There’s a particular riff that Jelly Roll Morton deployed frequently throughout his piano playing which is made of a combination of this “yearning” motif and another common melodic fragment utilized in waltzes. These two examples come from the waltzes of Johann Strauss II. The Morton riff is used in melodies he composed such as “Shreveport Stomp” and “Freakish” as well as in his improvised solos.

The full extent of Morton’s utilization of riffs and his command of this musical language can be seen in this solo passage of “Winding Boy Blues”. Notice the long flowing melodic lines, and how fluidly he connects these riffs, ornaments, and flourishes in the context of the blues.

During Morton’s travels across the country, one of his central criticisms of jazz piano players he encountered was the lack of riffs, or their improper application. Morton would praise early swing pianist Bob Zurke for his tasteful use of riffs. This highlights the importance Morton gave to riffs as a foundational feature of the musical language of jazz.

“I’ve seen riffs blundered up so many times it has given me heart failure, because most of these modern guys don’t regard the harmony or the rules of the system of music at all. They just play anything, their main idea being to keep the bass going. They think by keeping the bass going and getting a set rhythm, they are doing the right thing, which is wrong. Of all the pianists today, I know of only one that has a tendency to be on the right track and that’s Bob Zurke of the Bob Crosby Band. Far as the rest of them, all I can see is ragtime pianists in a very fine form.”

Observe the way Zurke in the song “It’s a Hap Hap Happy Day” phrases his melodic lines and makes use of the riffs and cadential phrases common in Jelly Roll Morton’s music. In this song one can hear the overlap between early swing and New Orleans jazz.

Jazz as Performance Practice

Alongside the musical language of jazz, there is an element of the music that Jelly Roll Morton called “novelty”. He gives a few examples of novelties which became a central part of how jazz was performed.

Most people don’t understand the novelty side of jazz. Vibrato—which is all right for one instrument but the worst thing that ever happened when a whole bunch of instruments use it—was nothing at the beginning but an imitation of a jackass hollering. There were many other imitations of animal sounds we used—such as the wah-wahs on trumpets and trombones. Mutes came in with King Oliver, who first just stuck bottles into his trumpet so he could play softer, but then began to use all sorts of mutes to give his instrument a different flavor.

Novelty can be best understood as showmanship. Jazz was about entertaining and putting on a show for the audience. It involved all kinds of extra-musical elements such as dance, in which the music was designed to respond to. Just as riffs, cadences, and ornaments formed part of the shared musical language of jazz, breaks, growls, mutes, sound effects, and dramatic contrasts formed part of its performative vocabulary.

One important novel addition the early jazz musicians added to their music was the “break”. Breaks are a part of jazz to this day and were an integral part of swing band performances. They’re the moments where the music comes to a sudden halt and a soloist is allowed to shine for just a split second. Morton’s use of breaks were not limited to ensemble performance though. He also wrote them into his piano music. A good example of a break written within the melody of a song is the main melody of “The Pearls” as referenced earlier.

Other examples of novelty within Morton’s music are his use of theatrical openings and sound effects. The introductions to songs such as “Steamboat Stomp” and “Dead Man Blues” are examples of this theatricality to the music, establishing a dramatic atmosphere before the main ensemble enters. Musical sound effects and extended techniques are also used within the performance such as the buzzing cymbal sounds in “Jungle Blues”, the growled clarinet solo in “New Orleans Bump”. These effects combined with multi-part forms of songs with interludes, dynamic range, and varied solos over this form including, trading solos, give these jazz songs a feeling of spontaneity and vitality to them, transforming performance into an experience.

Seen in this light, novelty was not separate from the musical language of jazz but part of its larger expressive language. These performance conventions formed another layer of the shared vocabulary that musicians internalized and audiences came to expect. Morton’s conception of jazz went beyond melodic figures, rhythm and improvisation into matters of texture, pacing, timbre, dramatic tension, and elicited audience responses.

Though Morton often criticized the direction jazz had taken elsewhere in the country, many of the elements he identified remained central to later jazz orchestration and performance. Duke Ellington’s music in particular demonstrates how these earlier New Orleans performance practices could be expanded into large-scale composition without losing their expressive foundations. The haunting vibrato of Ben Webster and Johnny Hodges, the dramatic contrasts in dynamics and texture, the use of growls, mutes, and orchestral color, and the multi-part structures of suites such as Black, Brown and Beige, Such Sweet Thunder, or The Queen’s Suite all develop principles already present in Morton’s conception of jazz.

Thinking back to Ellington’s comments on Morton, one senses that beneath Ellington’s occasional dismissiveness was a recognition of Morton’s importance as a composer and arranger. Ellington did not abandon the language Morton described, but rather he expanded its possibilities. The schemata of early New Orleans jazz, the rhythmic feel, riffs, breaks, ornamental figures, ensemble interplay, and performative conventions Morton spent his life describing, became the foundation upon which later composers built increasingly ambitious forms of jazz expression.

Below is the first movement of Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige. With Morton’s definition of jazz in mind, observe how Ellington builds upon these foundations while developing a unique compositional voice of his own.

The first part of this series traced the social world of the Louisiana Creoles that produced Jelly Roll Morton. This world was shaped by the complex history of free black and Creole communities in New Orleans, whose education, economic power, and cultural traditions created a unique and distinct way of life within the city.

The Civil War marked a decisive turning point in this history. In the aftermath, the community of people, who had lived in between the margins of the racial and social norms of American society, found themselves, for a brief moment at the center of a new political order. Reconstruction represented an important moment American history across the former Confederacy, as the nation committed itself to realizing the democratic ideals which had long existed in contradiction of the reality of slavery. In Louisiana Reconstruction became an experiment in democracy, where black Americans and Creole people of color actively participated in the governance of the state.

This moment of possibility, however, would prove short lived. Its violent collapse led to the dismantling of not only political power, but the social and economic foundations of Creole life in New Orleans. Yet what was lost did not disappear entirely. The practices central to this world of education, collective participation, and cultural blending, persisted, finding refuge within the domain of music.

The Creole Democratic Experiment

The Civil War saw the destruction of the order established in Louisiana prior to and during the Confederacy. The free black and colored Creole population with its education and economic power, and their militias aiding in the Union victory in Louisiana, were positioned to fill the power vacuum left behind in the wake of the Confederate defeat.

This struggle for control of the power vacuum would begin in 1866 with the reconvening of the 1864 Louisiana Constitutional Convention which had previously voted to establish equal rights and universal male suffrage. The group of Creoles, white Americans, black Americans and recently enfranchised blacks would be met with the beginning of a campaign of white supremacist violence, empowered by the mayor of New Orleans John T. Monroe. The events that followed would become known as the Massacre of 1866. In the essay “Creole Poets on the Verge of a Nation”, Caroline Senter wrote of the massacre:

“When the group began its assault on the assembly, the conveners rushed into Mechanics’ Hall for shelter but ended up trapped inside against the gunfire. One Creole of color was shot while offering a white flag of surrender; other people jumped from second floor windows. In the end, several dozen people were killed and many others wounded.”

Senter would point to this moment as a crucial turning point politically and culturally in Louisiana. The massacre would have wide reaching consequences. Following the sweeping Republican congressional victory, the project of Reconstruction would be instituted across the former Confederacy. As part of the military led Reconstruction, the new regional military commander of Louisiana General Philip Sheridan, would dismiss mayor Monroe and begin building a new government for Louisiana.

But the struggle for democracy was not just confined to political institutions. The massacre led to a strong cultural response by the Creole community of New Orleans, led by the newspaper the Tribune de la Nouvelle-Orleans, the first black daily newspaper in the country, established in 1864. The Tribune led a cultural initiative to push the ideals fought for in the constitutional convention into the foreground of public consciousness.

“In editorials, political news stories, fiction, and poetry published between 1865 and 1868, the Tribune sought to catalyze a nation devoted to racial equality and male suffrage.”

The literature of which poetry was the most prominent reflected the unique historical and cultural experience of the Creole people. Living under French rule until 1803, the Creoles had a direct and tangible connection to both the French and Haitian revolutions, with some having emigrated directly from Haiti. They were written in the French literary traditional of romanticism which was connected to the French and Haitian Revolutions. These revolutions were used as metaphors for the political possibilities of Reconstruction.

These Creole writers saw Reconstruction as part of a national project similar to these revolutions. From an idealistic view, in their multiracial experience as a people, Creoles embodied the nation’s ideals of the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and freedom regardless of social position or race. These Creole writers saw themselves as being in a unique position as Americans to reimagine what the post-Civil War United States could be. The literary program the Tribune launched was first and foremost a nation building project. The newspaper functioned not only as a source of information but as a space of shared civic imagination, uniting its readers in a collective vision of democracy.

This literary consciousness was also mirrored in direct political involvement of Creoles within the project of Reconstruction in Louisiana. As the Union military assumed control of the state following the Massacre of 1866 under General Philip Sheridan, among the people appointed to government positions were colored Creoles. This led to the first instance of legal voting registered by a black individual in the history of the United States at the Constitutional Convention of 1868, were blacks and colored Creoles voted for their delegates to represent their interests. Alice Dunbar-Nelson in her history of the Creole people,"People of Color in Louisiana”, wrote:

“He appointed a new board of aldermen, some of whom were men of color, and in the next month this council appointed four assistant recorders, three of whom were colored, and two colored city physicians. In this month, September, 1867, the first legal voting of the colored man under the United States Government was recorded, that being their voting for delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1868.”

This Constitutional Convention ratified the Fourteenth amendment in Louisiana, with more than half of the members in attendance being blacks and Creoles people of color. This would mark the high point for the democratic aspirations of blacks and Creoles in New Orleans during construction. The Tribune reported the significance of this moment:

“This will be the first constitutional body ever convened in the United States without discrimination of race or color. It will be the first mixed assembly clothed with a public character. As such, this convention has to take a position in immediate contradiction to the white man’s government. They will show that a new order of things will succeed the former order and that the long-neglected race will effectually share in the government of the state . . .”

It is of note that among the people in attendance of his moment was the grandfather of Jelly Roll Morton, Henri Monette, who would have been beside many others from his community, the grandfathers of the first generation of jazz musicians in New Orleans.

This moment of triumph over the institutionalized white supremacy in Louisiana would be short lived. The ideals espoused by the writers of the Tribune would also come into conflict with the racial ideology of the United States and the hugely polarized political climate surrounding race. Political coalitions would begin to take shape directly aimed at the otherness of the French and Haitian cultural and artistic expressions of the Creoles. The Tribune came under fire from all directions as Creoles were under intense pressure to assimilate into American norms. They became problematic for the Union, growing tired of its commitment to Reconstruction as a whole, and the resurgence of the southern planter class whose ideology and ideals were directly threatened by a successful integrated democracy. As Caroline Senter writes:

“As racial and regional alliances formed after the war, the newspaper came under increasing attack from Creoles of color, African Americans, and white Creoles and Americans. Non-Creole African Americans in Louisiana aligned with northern, Protestant African Americans, and chose a clearly marked racial position encouraged by northern and southern whites….Eventually losing its base of support within a community pressured to assimilate, the paper ceased publication in 1868. The poems show us that the rigid racial delineation which enabled the subsequent subordination of black citizens under Jim Crow was beginning to occur even at this early stage in Reconstruction.”

The convention set into motion a political upheaval amongst whites in Louisiana which would lead to the downfall of the Louisiana State legislature and the dismissing of all black public officials in 1874, following the state’s repression of the white supremacist rebellion of the Battle of Liberty Palace.

Despite the collapse of Creole political power, the democratic vision articulated during Reconstruction did not disappear. Deprived of institutional expression, it persisted in cultural form, in the musical culture of New Orleans.

The Creole Musical World

To give context for the emergence of jazz, it is necessary to understand the Creole music infrastructure, within New Orleans before and after the Civil War and what they contributed to the overall music culture of New Orleans. Alongside the many musical traditions within New Orleans, existed an economy around the training of professional musicians, the performance of “concert” dance music, and publication of sheet music, which supported a wider entertainment scene.

Lester Sullivan in his essay “Composers of Color of Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: The History Behind the Music” describes this music as follows:

“Essentially genteel entertainment music on the European model, it is now sometimes called “concert” music, but a person was as likely to encounter this music at the theater as at the concert hall. Likewise, the term “salon” music does not always apply, because some of it was dance music, frequently heard in the ballroom. The genteel sheet music repertoire in New Orleans in the 1800s consisted almost entirely of dances for piano, piano scores of marches with occasional instrumental indications, and songs with piano accompaniment. The emphasis was on dance.”

Sullivan made a point to not confuse this 19th century genteel music with how classical music is regarded and understood today. Generally in the 19th century, the separation between popular music and art was not as clear and rigid as it is understood today. Even within what we would understand as classical music, there was a spectrum of music from popular entertainment like comic opera and operetta, to serious composition such as symphonies and Grand Opera and often the line was blurred between them.

The 19th century genteel music is often overlooked within New Orleans music history, but demonstrates the kind of musical infrastructure and institutions that existed and gives greater context for the class of musically trained artisans that made up the Creoles up to the early days of jazz. This also gives insight into the musical pedagogical tradition that existed within the city.

The white Creole pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who I have written about previously is an example of a composer in this model. Though he was influenced by the different music traditions that existed alongside the formal classical education he received, the framework in which he composed remained European in reference, whether he was composing a polka or a bamboula. Louis Moreau Gottschalk also demonstrates that the combination of European forms and African-derived rhythms already existed within this musical world prior to jazz.

A parallel to understand this music would be the 19th and early 20th century music in the wider Caribbean and Latin American world, which combined African rhythms with European forms such as the polkas, waltzes, tangos, maxixes, and marchinhas of a Brazilian composer such as Chiquinha Gonzaga, widely considered one of the first choro composers.

It is important to understand New Orleans as part of this greater Afro-Atlantic musical continuum rather than being limited to an American phenomenon. Italian musicologist Luca Cerchiari in his article “The “French tinge”. Jazz and its Paris-New Orleans connection” argued that “it is necessary in dealing with early jazz in New Orleans, to consider the fact that jazz was born as a synthesis of previous and parallel musical genres, of written and oral sources, of European, African and Caribbean traditions.”

The concert musical traditions in New Orleans and pedagogy within the Creole music world can be seen in the training and careers of musicians such as Edmond Dédé and Charles Lucien Lambert. Their education reflects a system of musical training amongst the Creoles of color which was integrated into a wider western musical tradition extending back to France and the prevalence of musical institutions within New Orleans.

Dédé, for instance, studied under the Italian-born composer Ludovico Gabici, the Creole conductor Constantin Debergue of the Philharmonic Society, and the French Prix de Rome laureate Eugène Prévost, who directed both the Théâtre d’Orléans and the French Opera. Similarly, Lambert and his half-brother Sidney were trained by their father, Charles Richard Lambert, himself an important musical instructor, and developed their skills performing in the orchestra pit of the Théâtre d’Orléans.

This musical world extended beyond New Orleans itself. Dédé continued his studies at the Paris Conservatoire before establishing a career in Bordeaux, a city with strong commercial and cultural ties to New Orleans at the time, while Lambert built a career spanning Paris and Rio de Janeiro, where he contributed to the development of piano traditions through his teaching of figures such as Ernesto Nazareth; Lambert himself later became a member of the Brazilian National Institute of Music.

Sullivan credits Lambert with instilling in Nazareth a love of a style of American piano playing associated with Gottschalk, who also lived and performed in Rio de Janeiro at the time, called style pianola, which is loosely known today as “salon music”.

“Now that Nazareth’s piano music is enjoying a revival on recordings, it has become increasingly evident that he may have gained from Lambert not only his love for Chopin but also an inclination toward the style pianola, which, coupled with Gottschalk’s pioneering use of American color in his compositions, suggests a line of influence from Lambert pere and Gottschalk to Nazareth…”

During a return visit in 1893, Dédé performed with the pianist William J. Nickerson, a product of this same musical tradition, who would later become the teacher of Jelly Roll Morton. The careers of these musicians show an interconnected musical world and traditions that linked New Orleans to France, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and which would ultimately form the musical foundation inherited and transformed by later musicians such as Morton.

The Rise of the Brass Band

While this pedagogical tradition provided a foundation for musical life in New Orleans, the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction reshaped the social conditions of the city. The traditions of the theater, ballroom, and salon did not disappear, but were incorporated into different settings, forming the practices and repertoire of the growing prominence of brass bands across New Orleans.

There was a growth in the availability of instruments from the Confederate army in pawnshops across the city, and Creoles of color were part of the population who could afford musical instruments and lessons for their children. The bands that would begin to form were part of a wider growth of brass and military bands that were becoming fashionable throughout the United States. The New Orleans bands would have been formed in this mold, but its musicians would have been trained more in French music traditions as previous eras of Creole musicians were. As shown before, many of the musical teachers throughout the 19th century were themselves trained in a French tradition, studied in France directly, or studied with a teacher who had. Luca Cerchiari noted:

“French was Mathieu-Auguste Panseron (1795-1859), a singer and vocal teacher, whose method for solfège was widespread in the New Orleans musicians’ community, including creole and black early jazz instrumentalists. It was more than likely that many of the components of the renamed New Orleans brass bands and marching bands used to study on such methods.”

Cerchiari also places the bands in a greater context of the growth of brass bands and marching bands across the United States following the Civil War beginning with John Philip Sousa’s United States Marine Band. These bands formed an important and distinct part of the wider American musical tradition and identity of this time period. The repertoire of these bands would have been diverse from marches to European dances, arrangements from operas and classical compositions, and popular songs such as the songs of Stephen Foster.

New Orleans and the surrounding areas transformed into a world of music, with the propagation of brass bands and string orchestras. All the various cultural and musical influences that floated around the Creole quarter began to coalesce into the growth of a distinct musical tradition. As Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson’s wrote of the Creole people, their music was very much like her description - “is like the famous gumbo of the state, a little bit of everything, making a whole, delightfully flavored, quite distinctive, and wholly unique”. Alan Lomax described the tradition and the many ingredients that contributed to its development in late 19th century New Orleans:

“A strong tradition took form, and was passed on to eager apprentices, continually enriched by cosmopolitan musical currents from everywhere, and yet maintaining its local character. French opera and popular song and Neapolitan music, African drumming (still to be heard at voodoo dances on Congo Square where Jelly was born), Haitian rhythm and Cuban melody, native Creole satiric ditties, American spirituals and blues, the ragtime and the popular music of the day—all these sounded side by side in the streets of New Orleans and blended in the rich gumbo of New Orleans music. The people made a fine human gallimaufry, too.”

The blending of musical traditions was not something unique to the history of the development of jazz, but reflected a broader condition of American musical life in the nineteenth century. In a society shaped by immigration, migration, slavery, and cultural exchange, different musical systems were continually brought into contact. American brass bands, for instance, routinely combined marches, operatic excerpts, and popular melodies, while the musical life of New Orleans existed as a dense convergence of African, Caribbean, European, and American styles. What distinguished early jazz was not the mixture itself, but the way musicians worked with it. As Jelly Roll Morton often suggested, jazz was less of a style defined by repertoire, than it was a way of playing, a method of transforming existing material.

How early jazz musicians transformed the nineteenth century genteel music

To understand how this process of transformation operated in practice, it is necessary to look at the musical forms that early jazz musicians inherited. In his interviews with Alan Lomax, Jelly Roll Morton offers a clear example of this process, describing how the song Tiger Rag was transformed from a French dance popular in New Orleans known as the quadrille.

The term quadrille originates from 17th century military parades where men on horseback performed maneuvers in square patterns. This eventually evolved into a dance when it was introduced into France in the 18th century. The dance was known as the “quadrille des contredanses”, involving four couples, in which a “head” couple performs a dance figure which is repeated by the “side” couples. Musically, a quadrille involves several melodies based on popular dances or popular songs.

Jelly Roll Morton’s explanation of the quadrille aligns with this general outline. There was a head melody that was played to announce to the party that people should find their partners. After a repetition of this head melody, a different melody over a waltz was then played, followed by a mazurka, a cut time dance, and several other dances that Morton doesn’t name. Eventually these different dances were brought together into a multi-strain ragtime form and transformed. Despite Morton’s claim of authorship, the song itself is generally considered a collective creation of different musicians over time. The general structure of the song as we know it today is a structure Morton often uses in his songs. His specific influence is probably more in the structure and pianisms than in the actual composition itself.

What Morton does show though is the transformation of popular dance music, which in the 19th century would have spanned from European dances like waltzes, mazurkas, and polkas, to American dances like jigs, cakewalks, and two-steps. These dances were transformed over time into songs such as Tiger Rag.

It is also important to note that improvisation was a skill that was prevalent amongst musicians of the 19th century. The European classical traditions of improvisation, which developed out of Italian partimento traditions, were still taught, handed down from master to pupil, and formed an important part of teaching at conservatories such as the Paris Conservatory. Improvisation in this time was expected of musicians and was still an important part of performance. These dances, rather than being set compositions, as we would imagine them today, would have been common melodies and songs, improvised over and iterated upon, ornamenting and transforming the melodies.

An example of this kind of improvisation in the classical music canon can be found in the form of theme and variation, especially by virtuosic pianists such as Frederic Chopin and Franz Liszt. Chopin’s Berceuse or Liszt’s Variations on a Theme by Paganini are great examples of the ways in they would have improvised and the pianisms they would have deployed. There even exists a transcription of Chopin’s improvisation over his famous Nocturne in E flat major. The transcription was recorded by Polish pianist Raoul Koczalski. Heavily ornamented melodic passages also give insight into the kinds of figures and pianisms that would have been common at this time. If one looks at the music of composers such as Austrian composer Johann Hummel , Czech composer Jan Ladislav Dussek , Irish composer John Field, the common musical language across Europe, becomes more apparent, rather than attributing it solely to composers prominent in today’s repertoire like Chopin and Liszt.

The kind of embellishments pianists like Jelly Roll Morton would make operated on a similar principle but with major stylistic difference. If you substitute the idea of “riffs” which Jelly Roll Morton explains are typical melodic figures that were used to create and ornament melodies. One can hear this clearly in his rendition of Tiger Rag in how it differs from his demonstration of the song’s origins. It can also be seen clearly in how he transforms Scott Joplin’s famous rag, Maple Leaf Rag, which features many “riffs” Morton deployed across his music.

This kind of transformation was not limited to the piano tradition, but applied to the instruments common in New Orleans bands, like the clarinet, trumpet, and trombone developing distinct ways of playing these instruments and improvising. Perhaps one of the most important and consequential instrumentalists in the development of jazz as a music was the cornetist Buddy Bolden. Much like Morton described, Bolden improvised and embellished over popular songs and standard structures adding elements from blues and music of the church. Bolden brought a rough edge to the music of early jazz. He was the most popular musician in New Orleans around the turn of the century and the kind of playing we associate with the New Orleans jazz trumpet playing in figures like King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, with the strong vibrato, bending of notes and the use of mutes for wah-wah effects was developed by Bolden. Though no recordings of Bolden survive today, one can see his direct influence on King Oliver’s playing like his “wah-wah” solo in Dippermouth Blues. In this recording amongst the collective improvisation, one can also hear the prevalence of the “riffs” that Jelly Roll Morton used in his own playing, once again showing the common language that the musicians in this time were pulling from.

Crossing Canal Street

In the narrative of jazz history, the red-light district of Storyville is often identified as the birthplace of jazz. Despite the Jim Crow segregation laws of Louisiana, the brothel houses that catered to white clientele would allow black musicians to perform. Madam Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall employed a teenaged Jelly Roll Morton, a fact that famously led to Morton’s expulsion from his grandmother’s home.

Yet to understand Storyville as the singular birthplace of jazz is to misunderstand its historical role. Jazz did not suddenly emerge there but rather, Storyville functioned as a point of convergence, where existing musical, social, and economic forces were brought into contact.

As writer and New Orleans native, Randy Fertel argues, in his Substack article NOLA Jazz and its Neighborhoods: The Role of S. Rampart St. , Storyville’s significance lies in its position between a network of neighborhoods, close in terms of proximity, but far apart in terms of their social worlds. The geography and social tensions shaped the development of jazz as a music.

New Orleans as a city is divided by Canal Street, which separates the French speaking Creoles from the Americans, whom the locals referred to as “Kaintucks” because of the prevalence of people from Kentucky flowing into New Orleans down the Ohio and into the Mississippi river. Fertel writes:

“The Creoles marked the distinction by comparing their commitment to savoir vivre—how to live well—to the American commitment to savoir faire—how to make and do, especially how to make the American dollar…So Canal Street marked the boundary between two worlds: the Creole, French speaking world that looked fondly back to colonial times, and the English speaking American world that excitedly looked ahead to American capital and empire.”

Fertel also notes that Canal Street also separated musicians between those who could read notated music scores, mostly of colored Creole origin, and musicians who could not, the descendants of the enslaved in New Orleans, and those emancipated in other parts of the South, who migrated to escape the growing brutality of the Jim Crow regimes.

The Creole musicians were the inheritors of an institutional musical system tied to musical literacy, and a cosmopolitan Afro-Atlantic world. The uptown musicians had developed out of the rhythmic and expressive traditions rooted in Congo Square and survived through the Spiritualist churches following Congo Square’s permanent shutdown in 1856.

Fertel emphasizes that the geography of the city and the social divides led to several birthplaces of jazz with Southern Rampart Street, and Back a’Town being central to this. Back a’Town was the unofficial black Storyville, that existed before Storyville’s 1897 opening. The specific hubs such as Back a’Town, Economy Hall, Storyville, provided spaces that bridged neighborhoods, which were close in proximity, but far apart socially.

By the 1890s, as Lomax describes, the economic position of the Creole population had deteriorated significantly. Having been displaced from their traditional trade and artisan “day jobs” many Creole musicians were compelled to turn to music as their primary means of livelihood. At the same time, black American musicians were entering the same labor market, competing for the same jobs. Storyville, one of the hubs of social convergence in the divides of New Orleans, is one of the places where this competition became unavoidable. It offered regular and relatively well-paid work to musicians willing to perform in its dance halls and brothels.

This environment was marked by tensions shaped by the city’s history. As Lomax notes, Creole musicians often held on to their caste prejudices, which dated back to the French and Spanish colonial eras, even as their own social position eroded. At the same time, black American musicians from uptown asserted their presence through the sheer excellence of their performance abilities. In a world where musical talent was one of the main social currencies, ability had to be recognized regardless of background. The music spoke, first and foremost.

Fertel captured this moment symbolically in an encounter between Jelly Roll Morton and a nine year old Louis Armstrong on South Rampart Street, where Armstrong would walk along with his “spasms band”, a kind of band often made of children, who played instruments made from household objects. Armstrong’s singing was so striking that a friend brought Jelly Roll Morton from Storyville across Canal Street to hear him.

Reflecting on the significance of this moment, Fertel writes:

“So, in my imagination I take that moment when Jelly Roll witnessed Little Louis’s spasm band as the moment when the downtown Creoles began to wonder if they had something to learn from uptown.”

While no one moment can be credited with being the exact starting point of jazz, there is symbolic significance in this moment, not just in the convergence of two parallel music and social worlds. But also the symbolic meeting of jazz’s early great ambassadors, one bringing the music outward from New Orleans across the country, the other who would bring it with him across the world.

In the opening of Mister Jelly Roll, folklorist Alan Lomax frames Jelly Roll Morton as both a foundational figure in jazz history and one of its most persistently misunderstood. Central to his narrative was the legitimizing of Jelly Roll Morton’s claim to have invented jazz. This is a claim that is often repeated when addressing Morton as a figure, often in a way to deride the claim that any one person could have invented a music as far-reaching and important to the history of the nation’s culture. Despite the American love of the individualist hero, the singular genius in storytelling and historical narratives, it was always hard for people to take seriously this claim of Jelly Roll Morton.

Lomax provides the context necessary to understand what Morton was actually communicating through these seemingly boastful claims.

“When Jelly told his audience that he had invented jazz, he was speaking up for his hometown in New York’s Harlem, which so often has taken all the credit for black cultural innovations. Jelly had squelched Handy for asserting that jazz was born in Memphis. And here in Harlem, where the carriers of the great tradition were few, where big bands with horn sections were replacing the lacy counterpoint of New Orleans, he was sticking up for his hometown. He was grieved and shocked when he saw his musical acquaintances jumping on the bandwagon, which he and his hometown friends had started to roll, without learning to speak the language of jazz in classic New Orleans style.

Though it is widely understood that jazz comes from New Orleans, it is often misunderstood what it means for jazz to have come from New Orleans. It wasn’t a matter of a singular origin point of something that would spread nationwide, but rather the story of a city and the people of that city in all of the splendor and tragedy. Jazz for New Orleans is the pride of its people’s history.

Morton’s claim, then, was not simply personal mythology, but a defense of a musical world that included figures such as Buddy Bolden, whose legendary cornet playing helped define the earliest sounds of the city, King Oliver, who carried that tradition forward into the early recording era, and Sidney Bechet, whose virtuosity brought New Orleans style to international audiences.

From this perspective, one can begin to understand the frustration Morton must have felt upon arriving in New York, only to encounter a jazz culture increasingly indifferent, if not hostile, to the traditions from which he emerged. In a city that was rapidly becoming the commercial and cultural center of jazz, earlier New Orleans styles were often dismissed as outdated or “corny,” and Morton himself, never one to temper his self-mythologizing, was met with ridicule as much as recognition.

This tension is perhaps most visible in the remarks of Duke Ellington from a conversation Ellington had with Leonard Feather where he said of Morton:

“Jelly Roll was a writer. He had more published music than anybody else. Other than that, I don’t know anything about him as a performer, you know, he couldn’t play no piano…I heard him play piano but he was, he played piano like one of those high school teachers in Washington. Matter of fact, high school teachers played better jazz.

As Stanley Crouch observed in his essay, “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans” despite Ellington’s distaste, Ellington remained deeply shaped by Morton’s music. The foundations Morton had laid for works of Ellington such as Creole Rhapsody and Black, Brown, and Beige, both works written within Morton's lifetime after Morton's appearance in New York, are evident. In these works Crouch points out how Ellington furthered the identity of jazz, “pulling together concert sophistication and the omni-directional singing, dancing, and street vitality given special aesthetic power by the blues.” Even figures who rejected Morton were shaped by the tradition he represented.

But when Morton had arrived in New York in 1928, what he found was a similar music, which was indeed related to New Orleans, but was born of a different tradition and history. Lomax describes the roots of the music being played in Harlem at the time of Morton’s arrival:

“The roots of Harlem’s entertainment tradition were rather in the minstrel show, modernized for Broadway. I say this, not in criticism of the elegant artists of Harlem—Fats Waller, Rosamund Johnson, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and all the great men of bop—but only to cavil at the inhospitable treatment that New York gave to the great music of New Orleans and its cantankerous proponent, Jelly Roll Morton.”

It may seem like a pedantic distinction, but the jazz music that grew out of Harlem stride grew out of a related but distinct tradition, shaped by different social and theatrical lineages. Both styles have partial roots of ragtime music, possibly one of the first commercial music craze of the United States, but the history of New Orleans and the influences that were allowed to coalesce, from the drumming traditions of Africa, the Afro-Caribbean, the popular music from across Europe, classical musical traditions instrumental and operatic, were all important elements unique to a city with a colonial history unlike any other in the United States.

Within this history carries the story of struggle and perseverance of the many groups of people that made up the city’s black population: enslaved from all across West Africa and the French and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and later from other American state, free blacks who had purchased their freedom, free blacks who had immigrated from across the Caribbean and North America, and the colored Creole population, of which Jelly Roll Morton is possibly the most famous.

Jazz growing during the days of the failure of Reconstruction of Louisiana, for which was a project that Louisiana’s black population actively participated in and shaped, carried within it the resiliency and democratic aspirations of a people who were brutally repressed under the boot of a resurgent white supremacy. It is within this convergence of peoples, histories, and cultural forms that jazz emerges, not as the invention of an individual, but as a fundamentally collective and democratic expression.

Jelly Roll Morton carried with him this vibrant history and culture wherever he went. He was one of jazz’s earliest ambassadors who had a very clear idea of what jazz was and had an established narrative of its history. As Alan Lomax put it, Jelly Roll Morton saying he invented jazz was his way of proclaiming “Jazz is from my hometown. I was rocking the cradle of jazz before you guys were born.”

In this series on Jelly Roll Morton, I wanted to examine jazz as he understood, composed, and played it. This article, broken into two parts, examines the historical world that produced Jelly Roll Morton, centering the black and Creole communities of New Orleans, in order to understand jazz as the expression of a complex, deeply rooted social and political history. To understand what Morton believed he was defending, one must understand the social world that produced both him and the music he claimed.

The Louisiana Creoles

For many Americans outside of Louisiana, the existence of the Creoles complicates conventional American understandings regarding the categorization of race, ethnicity, and culture. We tend to throw all of these complex ways in which identity is formed into the essentialized category of race. This is further reduced to the binary of black and white. Though the country is defined by its diversity of cultures, ethnicities, and “mixed” peoples, this binary tends to flatten our understanding of ourselves.

“Creole” is a protean term existing somewhere between white and black. It appears differently to different people and can mean different things depending on the context. The word originally came from the Portuguese, crioulo, a word used for a slave raised in the owner’s house. The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups defines Creole in Louisiana as the following:

“Louisianians of French and Spanish descent began referring to themselves as Creoles following the Louisiana Purchase (1803) in order to distinguish themselves from the Anglo-Americans who started to move into Louisiana at this time….In the United States, in the 20th century, Creole most often refers to the Louisiana Creoles of color. Ranging in appearance from mulattos to northern European whites, the Creoles of color constitute a Caribbean phenomenon in the United States. The product of miscegenation in a seigneurial society, they achieved elite status in Louisiana, and in the early 19th century some were slaveholders. Many, educated in France, were patrons of the opera and of literary societies.”

The term “Creole” is wrapped in the history of colonization and slavery and with Louisiana’s attempt to reconcile its history into clear categories. To understand what it means to be Creole in Louisiana, one must first understand what it meant to be black.

Unlike in the rest of the United States, in Louisiana, to define “Negro” or black was always a difficult task, subjected to differing legal and cultural norms, and expectations born from Louisiana’s complex history. New Orleans native Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson in her essay “People of Color in Louisiana” wrote of this issue:

“The possible title of a discussion of the Negro in Louisiana presents difficulties, for there is no such word as Negro permissible in speaking of this State…By common consent, it came to mean in Louisiana, prior to 1865, slave, and after the war, those whose complexions were noticeably dark. The gens de couleur, colored people, were always a class apart, separated from and superior to the Negroes, ennobled were it only by one drop of white blood in their veins….To the whites, all Africans who were not of pure blood were gens de couleur. Among themselves, however, there were jealous and fiercely guarded distinctions: “griffes, briques, mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, each term meaning one degree’s further transfiguration toward the Caucasian standard of physical perfection.”

The instability of these racial categories was not incidental, but the result of Louisiana’s colonial history under French and Spanish rule. The Spanish were the first to import slaves into the state. Louisiana as a territory began to import slaves from the Spanish West Indies, namely Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. The most predominant ethnic groups consisted of Congo, Bambara, Yaloff, and Mandingo slaves.

Originally brought in to Louisiana for the laborious task of working the land, the growth of the enslaved population, combined with widespread sexual relations, often coercive, between enslavers and the enslaved, produced an increasingly mixed population.

“The slave population began to lighten in color, and increase out of all proportion due to the importation and natural breeding among themselves. La Harpe comments in 1724 upon the astonishing diminution of the white population and the astounding increase of the colored population.”

Sensing the problematic growth of this population of “people of color”, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville created the “Code Noir”, a 54-article set of regulations governing the status, treatment, and conduct of enslaved people in the colony of Louisiana. Though this legal code led to the social ostracization of the enslaved population, there were provision that would prove consequential for the development of the Louisiana creole.

While the Code Noir enforced racial hierarchy, it also created legal pathways that allowed a free population of mixed-race individuals to emerge and grow.

“The slaves had to be instructed in the Catholic religion. Slaves appointed by their master as tutors to their children were set free. Moreover, manumitted slaves enjoyed the same rights, privileges and immunities that were enjoyed by those born free.”

Thus a population of free “negroes” and “mullatos” began to grow, and over time took on the term “creole”. “Creole” as an identity has been difficult for people within the state to pin down. Louisiana, like many of its Caribbean cousins, was a racially fluid society, where race was more defined by perceptions than ethnicity or genetics. But over time, Creole began to be defined as “a native of the lower parishes of Louisiana, in whose veins some traces of Spanish, West Indian or French blood runs”.

Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson so elegantly puts it: “The true Creole is like the famous gumbo of the state, a little bit of everything, making a whole, delightfully flavored, quite distinctive, and wholly unique.”

This population would go on to develop their own distinct cultural world in nineteenth-century New Orleans. It is within this world that new forms of music, performance, and social expression would begin to take shape.

The Rise in importance of the class of free blacks to Louisiana

An important decision, made out of necessity, that would prove important for the democratic aspirations of the black population of Louisiana, would be the state’s use of the enslaved in the defense of the colony. The first precedent was set by Governor Étienne de Perier whose major concern when he assumed power was the ongoing conflict with the Choctaw. Choctaw raids exposed the vulnerability of the colony and inspired fear across the populace.

Understanding that many of the Africans in the colony themselves were warriors, with the Bambaras being the most fierce, Governor Perier, organized a small militia of enslaved. Perier first targeted, a friendly tribe surrounding Louisiana, the Chouca and subjected them to a campaign of extinction as an intimidation tactic to the surrounding tribes. This also was a tactic in further isolating the enslaved African by creating a state of hostility between them and the indigenous tribes.

Perier’s precedent of arming the enslaved population, though intended to solve the issues facing the colony regarding the indigenous and the potential issue of them uniting with the enslaved against the colony, opened up the real possibility of the enslaved being able to fight for their freedom. From this military impression rose what Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson described as an aristocracy of free blacks.

“Here is the very beginning of that aristocracy of freedom so fiercely and jealously guarded until this day, a free person of color being set as far above his slave fellows as the white man sets himself above the person of color. Three explanations for this aristocracy seem highly probable: Some slaves might have been freed by their masters because of valor on the battlefield, others by buying their freedom in terms of money, and not a few slave women by their owners because of their personal attractions. It makes little difference in this story which of the three or whether all of the three were contributors to the rise of this new class. It existed as early as 1724, twelve years after the first recorded slave importation.”

This population of free blacks with a military background led to these militias of the enslaved being commanded by free blacks. After the French ceded ownership to Spain in 1763 as a result of the Seven Year’s War, the the Spanish continued this reliance upon the militia of enslaved blacks commanded by free blacks.

During the early years of the US administration in Louisiana, the free black population, would also grow in importance to the commerce and wealth of Louisiana with the arrival of refugees from the island of Hispaniola, fleeing the violence of the Haitian Revolution and Caribbean theater of the Napoleonic Wars between France and Spain. These immigrants not only increased the population of free blacks, but also brought with the, the knowledge of sugar cane growth, and the production of molasses and rum. This convergence would lead to the growth of New Orleans as a major commercial hub.

When the United States took over administration of the colony, with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the US Governor William Claiborne faced the issue of how to handle its black population. Blacks had been central to the settling of the colony, its commerce, and its defense, giving them a central position in Louisiana as a whole. One couldn’t bring the heavy hand of racial separation as an easy solution to the issue of Louisiana’s diversity. The kind of diversity which was alien to American ideals governance. Governor Claiborne understood that he was effectively being tasked with integrating a foreign nation into the country. Dunbar-Nelson described the what the Americans encountered:

“Writers describing the New Orleans of this period agree in presenting a picture of a continental city, most picturesque, most un-American, and as varied in color as a street of Cairo. There they saw French, Spaniards, English, Bohemians, Negroes, mulattoes; varied clothes, picturesque white dresses of the fairer women, brilliant cottons of the darker ones. The streets, banquettes, we should say, were bright with color, the nights filled with song and laughter. Through the scene, the people of color add the spice of color; in the life, they add the zest of romance”

When the Napoleonic Wars finally came to the shores Louisiana, with the war of 1812 between the United States and the British Empire, the US administration followed the same strategy of defense as the Spanish and the French before them. The black population, free and enslaved were vital to the defense of New Orleans organized by Andrew Jackson, repelling the British invasion, in one of the few American victories within the conflict.

Following the War of 1812 the positions of free blacks and Creoles in Louisiana began to solidify and grow socially and economically. With this growth of this community, more free blacks from other regions of the United States began to immigrate to New Orleans, as the city became a “haven of refuge” from the norms of American racial segregation.

The work that defined this community of free blacks and colored Creoles was skilled labor in crafts and trade professions. Historically within Louisiana, many of the free blacks and colored Creoles worked the same jobs as slaves, and often alongside them. Between free blacks and slaves existed an exchange of expertise, especially from the slave population who brought specific expertise from Africa.

The most significant distinction between them, however, lay in legal and economic access. Like whites, free blacks and Creoles could own property, enter contracts, and participate in the open market reflecting an integration into the colonial system of Louisiana.

This integration extended to the institution of slavery itself. Free blacks and Creoles in New Orleans owned enslaved people at higher rates than their counterparts elsewhere in the United States. These relationships were varied. Some purchased enslaved family members to protect them from sale, while others participated in slavery as an economic enterprise.

This dual position, both marginalized by race and empowered within the local economy reveals the fundamentally contradictory nature of Creole society, a tension that would shape its cultural identity in the decades to follow.

Trades, skills and businesses were often passed down in families going back generations. Enslaved Africans and Creoles dating back to the 18th century under French rule were often selected and valued for specific skills, which were then transmitted across generations within Louisiana. In her essay “Visible Means of Support: Businesses, Professions, and Trades of Free People of Color”, New Orleans historian Mary Gehman writes:

“They had been selected in Africa for their knowledge of iron or woodworking, agriculture, food preparation, and nursing because they were better able to adapt to the tropical climate and primitive living conditions of the Louisiana swamps than were the skilled workers brought from France.”

Unlike slaves in other parts of the South, those in colonial Louisiana were encouraged to hire themselves out on municipal projects such as digging canals, building forts and levees, and constructing government buildings.

Slaves used this income to augment their already undocumented income from sales in order to buy their own freedom. As was a right given through the “Code Noir” a slave could petition for the right for their value to be assessed and this amounted to the sum they owed their master for their freedom.

At the highest echelons of society, there were influential families that worked as tailors, there were real estate moguls, and plantation owners. These wealthy free blacks and Creoles often rubbed shoulders with the wealthiest whites in Louisiana.

Other industries that had large concentrations of free blacks and Creoles were cigar makers, builders, architects, manufacturing, shoemaking, leather working. Mary Gehman gives a list of occupations held by free people of color from the 1850 New Orleans census.

The 1850 New Orleans census lists 1,792 free people of color in fifty-four different occupations, including 355 carpenters, 325 masons,156 cigar makers, 92 shoemakers, 61 clerks, 52 mechanics, 43 coopers, 41 barbers, 39 carmen, and 28 painters. Only 279, or about 9.9 percent, of free blacks were listed in the census as unskilled laborers. There were also blacksmiths, butchers, cooks, cabinetmakers, upholsterers, overseers, and stewards…Among the free women of color are listed 189 seamstresses, 21 dressmakers or modistes, and 10 hairdressers.

In 1850, New Orleans had the largest population of free people of color in the Deep South, around 9,905 individuals. This group that owned over $2 million in property, a figure that explains why the white planter class felt so economically threatened.

One can see these occupational traditions reflected in the people whom Jelly Roll Morton would grow up around near the end of the century decades later. Alan Lomax gives an extensive, but by no means exhaustive list of the trades these musicians worked. This is a small excerpt of that list:

“Papa Bechet, who played flute for fun, was a shoe-maker. Leonard Bechet, who played trombone in Silver Bell Band, is a maker of fine inlays…Papa deLisle Nelson, was an amateur accordianist, and a butcher. Louis deLisle (Big Eye) Nelson, maybe the first “hot” clarinet, worked as a butcher’s apprentice. Papa Dominguez, a fine classical bass, was a cigar-maker…Bab Frank, led the “first hot band” with his piccolo, ran restaurants….F. P. LaMenthe fooled with slidin’ trambone, but made money as contractor

The prevalence of these occupations and the economic diversity amongst the free people of color in New Orleans led to a cultural flourishing within these neighborhoods. Dunbar-Nelson cited the prominence of three major streets as a testament to this growth. This area is known today as the French Quarter, and is the center of New Orleans, culturally and economically.

Congo Square in the Creole quarter is where the slaves would congregate on Sundays as part of the provisions within “Code Noir”. This is where composers such as Louis Moreau Gottschalk would have first encountered African music and dances such as the bamboula. This was a spot of importance for the musical history of the city, preserving African musical traditions.

Camp Street, which would grow into one of the major streets of business in New Orleans got its name from the street being the location where free black migrants from the Haitian Revolution would live, as well as it being the location of the New Orleans slave market. The first gaslights were installed in the Camp Street Theater in 1833.

Julia Street was another street of commercial importance as it connected the city with Lake Pontchartrain and the greater trade within the Gulf of Mexico. Today the street is known for its number of art galleries.

French Opera House, which opened in 1858 was an important cultural space within the area where people of all different varieties of black and white would come to hear opera. It is where Jelly Roll Morton was first inspired to play the piano.

White backlash against the place of free blacks in New Orleans

With the growing economic importance of blacks, free and enslaved, and Creoles in New Orleans, the persistent issue of how to deal with the reality of the centrality of blacks to Louisiana. This growth was met with a reactionary backlash. The rising colored Creole aristocracy was seen as a threat by the class of white plantation owners in the state, especially with their close contact with the enslaved population. A flourishing black section of the city was not just a threat to the profitability of slavery, but to the institution as a whole. They feared the democratic ideals of freedom and meritocracy being engendered in these communities would inevitably lead to these ideas taking hold amongst the enslaved.

Following the 1811 German Coast Uprising, the largest slave rebellion in US history, the white ruling class of Louisiana sought to first diminish the influence free blacks and Creoles held over slaves and eventually economically isolate them.

Contact between free blacks and slaves was banned along with the migration of free blacks into Louisiana. The old codes of treatment guaranteed by the original “Code Noir” were revised as slavery in Louisiana transformed into an even more cruel institution with the intent of total subjugation of a large population of blacks, enslaved and free within Louisiana.

Despite this campaign, the population of free blacks and Creoles, persisted in growing in wealth and education. With their status being threatened these became a point of pride within the community. This is something Jelly Roll Morton would hold onto a century later when describing his family history to Alan Lomax.

My great-grandfather’s name was Emile Pechet—he was considered one of the largest jewelers in the South. My great-grandmother was Mimi Pechet—she traveled quite extensively and died when I was grown, at around one hundred years old. As soon as I can remember those folks, they was never able to speak a word in American or English. My grandmother, her name was Laura. She married a French settler in New Orleans by the name of Henri Monette—a wholesaler of fine liquors and cordials—that was my grandfather. And neither one of them spoke American or English.

When describing his family notice how he held on to status symbols in their trade, and the language they spoke. They were “Frenchmen” a he would refer to them, who did not speak “American” or “English”. He felt the need to set himself and his people apart from the usual American paradigm. Morton was speaking from an era where the position and prestige of Creoles had been diminished, and this memory of privilege was what he had left to hold on to.

The next part of this article will pick up the narrative with the Civil War, which would be the turning point in the story of free blacks and Creoles that would lead to the heights of their societal aspirations, helping shape the Reconstruction effort after the war, and the lowest point, when Reconstruction would fail, and the decades long campaign to ostracize the free black and Creole community would experience a powerful resurgence. It is from the collapse of this world, from its aspirations and its repression, that the music of jazz would emerge.

In Part 1, Guga walked us through the garden of his home in São Paulo, where trees, bees, and even a spider named Adelaide coexist in a cultivated ecosystem not unlike the one he and Elisa Mori map in A Tree of Brazilian Music. We explored the roots of that tree, from indigenous and African traditions to the music of Portuguese colonial life, and the ch…

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In January, my travels across the Americas led me to the front of a “typical mid-century home” in São Paulo, but it became apparent to me that this is no “typical” home. Rising from the horizon of the top of the staircase, trees gradually revealed themselves. There are around 40 different trees in the garden area that wraps in and around the house, with…

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When I was a teenager, one of the things that drew me toward composing my own music was my love of harmony. I spent countless hours studying chord changes and complex voicings in jazz, as well as the harmonic motion in classical music from composers like Liszt and Wagner. But much of that theory still felt abstract until I studied Stevie Wonder.

To say …

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Q: Since this is a retrospective on Black Codes (from the Underground), I wanted to know where you thought Black Codes sat within your legacy compositionally and your playing.

Marsalis:

It’s hard for me to say what my legacy is, to be honest with you. I’m 64 now, and I did the record 41 or 42 years ago. I think I was 23 when we made that recording.

But a lot of the songs on Black Codes have similarities to the songs that my father played in the early 1960s on a record called The Monkey Puzzle. But I didn’t even notice the similarities to those songs until much later. When I was writing the songs on Black Codes, I wasn’t thinking about it.

But I guess those songs on The Monkey Puzzle was so ingrained in my consciousness, since they recorded that album, I think, in 1962, when I was one. But they played it a lot. The record was on, and I would see their gigs when I was a really small baby.

So there’s similarities in a lot of the songs, like the use of the 3/4 bar. Black Codes is based on the melody of James Black’s “Magnolia Triangle”. It’s like a kind of reorganization of that melody with the “Hey Pocky A-Way” bass line from the Meters. That’s from a different time.

And all those kinds of things that are in there resemble the music my daddy and them were playing.

Q: Yeah, it seems like at the time, from talking to some of the band members, reading a lot about reviews and things that came out around the time, it seems that there was a fixation on, or a lot of people pointed to the inspiration from Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Well, mainly Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter.

Marsalis:

Well, you know, of course, John Coltrane’s and Miles’ influence is in everything. I mean, how can it not be in something you do if you come after them?

I guess the type of solos I was trying to play from a thematic standpoint is related to the way Miles played, based on how Louis Armstrong played. Anybody who knows the history of music tries to play like him. Even at that time, I knew enough of Pops to try to play coherent solos.

A more abstract song like “Aural Oasis”, that is like a Wayne Shorter song with the use of minor 11 chords and that kind of sound. And something like

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Four decades since the release of Black Codes (from the Underground), much of the controversy surrounding Wynton Marsalis as a figure has mostly subsided allowing people to appreciate the music on the record. For younger musicians that were either children during the 1980s or were born years after, their introduction to the album, and Wynton Marsalis as a figure has been less informed by conflict and more by his music and the career he has built in the time since.

When I spoke to musicians from the generations below Wynton Marsalis, every one of them had glowing praise for the album Black Codes. There was a sense that what we consider “modern jazz” began with this album. Trumpeter Keyon Harrold called the album “one of the quintessential albums of modern jazz.” That highlights the importance that context provides.

At a time when much of the jazz scene was oriented toward the future and focused on how fresh or new something sounded, Wynton’s band stood apart with their belief in “playing to the future by studying the past.” In hindsight, and with the context of how jazz would evolve in the following decades, Black Codes can be seen as part of a wave of albums by emerging artists of the Young Lions generation, records that would come to define the sound of jazz for years to come.

Black Codes was one of the standout early albums of this generation, and its strong influence was felt immediately by the next wave of musicians. As drummer Ryan Sands notes, the album “kicked on a lot for Roy Hargrove, Joshua Redman, Christian McBride, and everybody after that. It set the tone for a new ensemble playing.” The influence isn’t just framed as Marsalis’ influence either. The playing of Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland, Charnett Moffett, and Jeff Watts were all cited as major influences on jazz as well as persona inspiration.

The Nuanced View of Wynton Marsalis

Younger musicians tend to hold a more nuanced view of Wynton Marsalis—one that time has afforded them. Unlike in the 1980s, Wynton now has a forty-year body of work through which both his musical and ideological ideas have evolved. It’s easier for younger artists to recognize the merits of his vision, even if they don’t fully agree with it. Saxophonist Julian Lee recalled his first reaction to Black Codes:

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When Black Codes (from the Underground) released on June 9, 1985, it was received with a lot of praise and recognition. Even at this time, it was understood as an important landmark for Wynton Marsalis as a musician, being an album composed of originals instead of jazz standards. It’s easier to understand this album as a personal artistic statement rather than just another good album.

After its release, it peaked at number 2 on Billboard’s Jazz Albums chart and broke into the Top 200 overall. It also won two Grammy Awards in 1986 for Best Jazz Instrumental Group and Best Jazz Soloist.

The Breakup of the Band

Interestingly the album was released just a week before Sting’s debut solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles, which featured Branford Marsalis and Kenny Kirkland in the band. Following this decision by both musicians to leave the band and play on this album, Wynton eventually hired Marcus Roberts to fill the piano spot and Robert Hurst would later take the bass chair with the band downsizing to a quartet.

This moment has always been central to the discussion of Black Codes. One cannot miss the irony of an album that speaks of the ills of commercialism and its influence on music as a form of “voluntary slavery” being marked by two musicians from the band, including Wynton’s brother Branford, playing on a pop rock album.

Often getting left out of this moment are the musicians Branford and Kenny Kirkland themselves. It becomes more of what this moment symbolizes for Wynton’s rhetoric and the irony of it all, and less about two musicians making decisions for their own careers. For Kenny Kirkland, it should come as no surprise. He was a musician that has always displayed an openess to play across many different genres. This was not his first foray into pop music.

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In art and music, much gets made about the importance of the central figure, the singular mind behind the creation. In classical music the composer sits at the center. Their compositional and authorial intent is what matters above all else. It’s easy to take this mentality of the “auteur” composer and apply it to music such as jazz. Especially in the case of someone like Wynton Marsalis. But in playing up the “composer” in jazz, one often diminishes the collective effort of the band and the imprint each individual brings to the music.

Like many jazz bands before his, Wynton Marsalis’ music has always been personnel dependent. I would go as far to say that his compositional ear is shaped by the musicians at his disposal. His composition style changed drastically in the late 1980s when Herlin Riley joined the band in place of Jeff Watts. Just listen to the different in how Herlin Riley performs “Black Codes” vs. Jeff Watts in the original recording. All of this to say that when examining the music of Wynton Marsalis, it is imperative to also examine the contributions of the members of the band. In the case of Black Codes: Wynton Marsalis, Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland, Charnett Moffett, and Jeff Watts.

The Synergy of Wynton and Branford

One of the defining features of Wynton Marsalis’ early recordings is his relationship with his brother Branford. One of the reasons critics have felt it necessary to play the brothers off of one another has to do with the Yin and Yang like dichotomy they form as musicians. There is an anecdote that Branford gave me that I feel encapsulates their dynamic well.

I dragged Wynton along into the R&B thing for a little while, but he didn’t really appreciate it. But because I grew up playing R&B and playing in nightclubs, which was lucky because you couldn’t do that at the age we were, now. We were luckily born in the, 60s and we played in the 70s. And you start to develop this relationship and understanding with the energy that the audience has and how to manipulate that energy.

If you couldn’t and people weren’t dancing, you would lose your job. So it didn’t matter how good your band was.

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Editor’s Note

The first two articles in this series of each installment will be free to everyone. The complete series, including the exclusive unabridged interview with Wynton Marsalis, will only be available to paid subscribers.

Assembling a series like this takes months of interviews, research, and writing. If you’d like to journey with me through the e…

Read more

Editor’s Note

The first two articles in this series of each installment will be free to everyone. The complete series, including the exclusive unabridged interview with Wynton Marsalis, will only be available to paid subscribers.

Assembling a series like this takes months of interviews, research, and writing. If you’d like to journey with me through the entire project and support this type of in-depth music journalism, please consider signing up for a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

The Young Lions of the 1980s

The 1980s are often an overlooked period in jazz history. Emerging from what many considered the “dark age” of the 1970s, this was a decade when a wave of young musicians began to establish themselves, though most had yet to release the recordings that would cement their status as jazz greats in later years. The ’80s were a time of transition, shaped by the unique cultural and musical atmosphere at the start of the decade. At the heart of this shift was a group of rising talents known as the “Young Lions”—musicians such as Donald Harrison, Kenny Garrett, Kevin Eubanks, Wallace Roney, and, of course, the Marsalis brothers, Branford and Wynton.

There was a lot of energy and enthusiasm surrounding these young musicians.

“Alongside Miles Davis coming out of his “retirement” of the 1970s, it felt like [there was] a renaissance, [like we were] on the cusp of something really great. Everything was open,” said trumpeter, educator and author Mondre Moffett. The next generation of musicians had the luxury of being surrounded by many of the seminal greats of the music. Moffet’s younger brother Charnett played bass on the Black Codes recording, at the ripe old age of 17.

Drummer and composer Jeff “Tain” Watts, the drummer on Black Codes, recognizes the importance of being a part of this continuum. “Most of the greats, except for Bird and Coltrane, were around. So you would see Dizzy Gillespie… you could go see Ray Charles, Lionel Hampton, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald all in the clubs and talk to them. I think it was a really healthy time.”

Moffett saw this infusion of young new voices as just an extension of what had been happening in jazz all along. “It was a great feeling. It was centered all around young people, young players. But that really wasn’t anything new, because jazz has always been centered around the youth in that way.”

Branford Marsalis, Wynton’s older brother and saxophonist on the album, offered an important perspective on the atmosphere that allowed jazz to reemerge in the hands of younger musicians.

He noted that the success of jazz in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s was shaped in part by the racial politics of the era. Talented figures like Fletcher Henderson—who held a degree in chemistry—were often blocked from advancing in other professions due to discrimination, and so turned fully to music. But as opportunities expanded in later decades, many who might once have pursued jazz instead followed new professional paths.

“A lot of brothers and sisters became doctors and engineers, and that drained the talent pool. And then a lot of people followed the more lucrative paths of pop music, because despite the myth about popular music, the better natural players will gravitate to that direction unless they have an acute love of jazz. There’s a small percentage of people who have an acute love of anything that they do, whether it’s athletes or musicians or writers or whoever it is.”

Branford argues that by the 1980s, the landscape had shifted just enough to create what he called a “slim avenue” for young, ambitious musicians to carve out space in jazz. In his view, this was a rare window, one that simply didn’t exist a generation earlier. Looking back he realizes that if he had arrived in New York twenty years before, he would have faced the same roadblocks his father, Ellis Marsalis, encountered when he tried to break in.

“My dad goes to New York and Tommy fucking Flanagan’s there. And Wynton Kelly’s there. McCoy Tyner’s there. Dexter Gordon is there. John Coltrane is there. Coleman Hawkins was still alive. Lester Young was still alive. I could go on and on and on. Billie Holiday would have just died. Bird had just died in ‘54.”

By the time the Young Lions emerged in New York, the jazz world was still feeling the aftershocks of the 1970s. The center of gravity had shifted as major figures like Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock pursued fusion and commercially successful crossover projects. The critical debates of the era reflected this tension: was jazz evolving, or losing its core? What remained were the musicians who stayed committed to the tradition, even as the broader current of talent flowed toward pop and other more lucrative directions.

This led to what Moffett described, a “stalemate in the music”.

Many musicians at the time were less concerned with earlier traditions and more oriented toward the future. The emphasis was on “newness” and “innovation,” whether in the avant-garde or in the novelty of the fusion of jazz with other genres. When Branford and Wynton arrived on the scene, they carried an approach that pushed against this forward-only mindset.

“Wynton decided to move to New York and the kind of linchpin of his philosophy was that we were going to play to the future by studying the past, which is not that revolutionary in the scheme of the world.”

“Playing to the future by studying the past”

This approach of “playing to the future by studying the past” earned the Marsalis brothers notoriety within the circles of criticism in jazz. It colored how people viewed them. Many people were quick to notice the influence they took from Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet. But for them, influences weren’t something to hide. Rather they wore them proudly. Branford recalled that he took a lot of criticism from people for his study of Wayne Shorter, instead of studying the sheer velocity of John Coltrane’s playing.

A piece of criticism that encapsulates the common criticisms levied at Wynton and Branford Marsalis is a 1982 essay by late culture critic Greg Tate entitled, Baby Miles and Baby Wayne.

In this essay, two major themes emerge that have continued to shape discourse around Wynton and Branford Marsalis.

The first is the idea that looking back to tradition is inherently reactionary. Tate characterizes the brothers’ “bop and post-bop revivalism” as “not only regenerative but reactionary.” While he acknowledges that such revivalism was “necessary,” he ultimately concludes that it was “atavistic.” In Tate’s view, the music they sought to restore—though once groundbreaking—was ultimately played out. By extension, the implication was that the Marsalis brothers’ own music was equally played out.

Another common criticism was the use of Branford and his style of playing as a way to tear down Wynton and his playing.

Tate also framed their individual studies of past masters in a negative light. Wynton’s deep engagement with the history of the trumpet was cast as a flaw, while Branford’s study of Wayne Shorter was praised only in a backhanded way. The positive he highlighted in Branford—that he constructs “tough musical syllogisms”—was presented as the natural benefit of studying Shorter, but ultimately used as a foil to criticize Wynton. In contrast, Tate depicted Wynton’s work as a “probing yet an overanxious grapple for identity,” setting up Branford’s supposed focus against his brother’s perceived restlessness.

By studying the history of the trumpet and having that influence come through clearly, Wynton’s approach is cast as unfocused and riddled with anxiety about identity. The inherent assumption is that Branford knew who he was while Wynton didn’t, while both are adhering to an approach to music that is regressive.

The Outspoken Wynton Marsalis and the Meaning of Black Codes

Though the Marsalis brothers were often criticized for their backward-looking approach, it was Wynton’s outspoken nature that drew the most attention, and controversy, to his name. A quick glance at the liner notes of Black Codes (From the Underground), written by the late cultural critic Stanley Crouch, makes clear why Wynton struck such a chord. Crouch explains that the album’s title refers to the “prohibitive 19th-century slave laws that emphasized depriving chattels of anything other than what was necessary to maintain their positions as talking work animals.” He then extends this metaphor of black codes into the sphere of art and jazz:

“In his mind, the pressure of commercialism is another form of Black Codes, one that reduces all willing musicians to highly paid but low-grade plantation entertainers, regardless of race or idiom. The late Roland Kirk called it “volunteer slavery.” Coming from the other side of the field, Marsalis is more interested in the statement than the payment.”

By naming the album Black Codes (From the Underground), Wynton Marsalis aimed a pointed critique at the elders of his generation, most notably Miles Davis, who, as Branford observed, had pursued the more lucrative paths of pop music. The comparison of commercialism to “volunteer slavery” became a throughline in Wynton’s career, one that has continued to evolve over time. More recently, it has surfaced in albums such as From the Plantation to the Penitentiary and The Ever Funky Lowdown, where Marsalis directs his criticism squarely at the commercial appeal of hip-hop and what he sees as its damaging consequences for Black Americans.

This criticism of jazz musicians as “no more than barometers of trends” was a major theme in Wynton Marsalis’ commentary during the early to mid-1980s. For his outspokenness and sharp critiques of his elders, he drew the ire of much of the jazz world. Many felt he had not yet earned the right to criticize, given that he was still in his early twenties. That perception was only heightened by the significant money and attention record labels invested in him, eager to market a charismatic young figure. His dual mastery of jazz and classical music was itself a rarity—and in 1984 he became the first musician ever to win Grammy Awards in both categories in the same year. This unprecedented achievement, combined with the industry’s backing, gave him a platform that even many older masters never enjoyed. As Branford notes:

“Wynton came out guns blazing rhetorically. And the moment you come out in a fairly unapologetic, unconciliatory fashion, playing a minority music, the majority will find ways to get back at you.”

Branford contends that Wynton broke an unspoken code in jazz that young musicians didn’t speak out of turn. It wasn’t about being right or wrong, but about respect and paying your dues. Branford recalled a moment from his own youth, when he spoke out during a rehearsal and offered unsolicited advice:

“Being the age I was, I should have kept my mouth shut, because 21-year-old kids don’t need to be out here intimidating their elders in a certain kind of way.”

The way society “got back” at Wynton—clearly stated in Baby Miles and Baby Wayne—was by putting him in a box, labeling him, and using his brother’s contrasting style as a battering ram against him. Over the years, Wynton would be tagged with labels like “neoclassicist” or “conservative.” The derisive tone of these terms reveals much about the values of the era. Yet, Branford contends that there is nothing inherently wrong with being a “neoclassicist.” What ultimately matters is the quality of the music.

Reframing Wynton Marsalis

Rather than seeing Wynton Marsalis as a conservative traditionalist trying to restore some mythical golden age of jazz, I believe it is more accurate to view him as a young, gifted musician who stepped out of line and used his platform to speak his mind—criticizing both his elders and the very institution jazz had become.

An apt comparison to Wynton in the figure of Pierre Boulez, who was equally divisive when he arrived on the scene in his early twenties, armed with strong opinions about the direction of classical music. Though not ideologically aligned, the parallels lie in their emergence, reception, and the effect this had on their subsequent work. Boulez began as a young radical, openly challenging his elders and their institutions, but eventually became an institutional figure himself—one whom the next generation would, in turn, criticize. His legacy, like Wynton’s, is often framed more by the controversies of his early career than by his musical and ideological development as a composer.

In a just society, Wynton’s age, and the arrogance of youth, would have been taken into account, and the controversy might have passed as nothing more than a passionate young musician overstepping in how he carried himself before his elders.

This brings us back to the question of context. As Branford emphasized throughout our conversation, context is often missing when people try to understand the particularities of a given time.

“Had there been any context to that discussion, they would have just said what other people said: ‘Y’all got some growing to do. It’ll be all right in the long run.”

Critical Discussions around the Definition of Jazz

At the heart of Wynton’s criticisms of jazz in his era, was the definition of jazz itself. Many of the major figures of jazz had gone on to play in other more lucrative genres. Jazz fusion was being pushed as a new modern version of jazz. And those playing jazz increasingly rejected the past in favor of novelty and innovation. Wynton came into this environment with a philosophy of studying the very music that many of these musicians who were still alive had invented and had long abandoned.

It is easy to take for granted what we understand jazz to be today. This clear understanding of jazz history we have at our disposal thanks to our distance, wasn’t afforded to young people of the late 70s and early 80s who were learning as they went. Institutions to study were scarce and the notion of going to school to study jazz was not as prevalent.

The definition of jazz has always been a moving target that would change depending on the point in time. By the 1980s, jazz’s moving definition had grown to a point where the history that created the music was increasingly becoming less relevant to what jazz was becoming.

When the cultural heritage of a music is being lost, is there a responsibility of the practitioners of the music to help preserve that music? While it is not the personal responsibility of any single musician to “save” the cultural heritage of jazz, it is historically significant that Wynton Marsalis chose to shoulder part of that responsibility.

He wouldn’t be the first Marsalis to take on the mission of preserving a cultural heritage. His father, Ellis, was a central figure in building institutions to safeguard New Orleans’ musical legacy. In that sense, you could say Wynton came by it honestly.

What often underlies the labeling of Wynton as a traditionalist is the modernist attitude that dominated both classical music and the jazz avant-garde: the conviction that breaking with the past was essential to creating a new future. This mindset became institutionalized in the classical avant-garde through figures like Boulez and his contemporaries (to return to that analogy). Embedded in this outlook is an inherent faith in innovation as progress—an ethos that pervaded much of 20th-century thought.

As historian Reinhart Koselleck observes in his writings on modernism:

“In a modernist paradigm, history becomes an object divorced from the present. It is an object to be studied and examined…The more a particular time is experienced as a new temporality as “modern”, the more that demands made of the future increase. Modernity in this sense means a human desire to control—in as much as possible— the future.”

This distinction is crucial. What looked in the 1980s like a struggle between past and future was, in fact, a struggle between two competing visions of the future—both of which we now inhabit in part.

On one hand, we live in the future that Marsalis and others fought for: a world where jazz is recognized as an art form, supported by institutions, and embraced as an indispensable part of America’s cultural heritage.

On the other, we also live in a future where genre boundaries are porous, where countless jazz-adjacent styles and fusions fall under the broad banner of “jazz.” The old question—what is jazz?—still lingers, but today we have more perspective, more tools, and a clearer vantage point than was possible at the time of Black Codes.

Looking back, Black Codes (From the Underground) stands as more than just a landmark recording of the 1980. It crystallizes the tensions that defined the jazz world at the time: youth and tradition, innovation and preservation, controversy and conviction. Wynton Marsalis became both a lightning rod and a standard-bearer, embodying the debates around jazz’s identity while shouldering a responsibility few of his peers wanted. The questions he raised—about heritage, authenticity, and the meaning of jazz itself—still echo today.

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NEXT WEEK IN PART II: I analyze the music itself, its influences, innovations, and how it establishes the core characteristics of Wynton’s compositional voice. Through conversations with Watts, Branford Marsalis, and Mondre Moffett, this section reveals the album as standing at a crossroads between the controlled freedom of Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet and the spiritual intensity of John Coltrane’s quartet, a synthesis of formalism and ferocity that shaped Wynton’s emerging compositional identity.

Editor’s Note

The first two articles in this series of each installment will be free to everyone. The complete series, including the exclusive unabridged interview with Wynton Marsalis, will only be available to paid subscribers.

Assembling a series like this takes months of interviews, research, and writing. If you’d like to journey with me through the entire project and support this type of in-depth music journalism, please consider signing up for a paid subscription.

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I’ve lived much of my life in the shadow of my name, as I’ve written on previously. I was named after two great Wyntons. Wynton Kelly the pianist, and Wynton Marsalis the trumpeter and composer. Becoming a musician and composer with this name has meant carrying both its weight and its expectations. No matter where I go though, my connection to Wynton Marsalis always comes up. When I began my Master’s degree in London, it took less than two weeks for a rumor to spread that I was Wynton’s godson. Even my composition teacher asked if it was true! For better or worse, I am bound to him.

Wynton has been one of my most important mentors, alongside musicians and teachers who shaped my path from an early age. I cut my teeth as a middle schooler transcribing his septet music, and he expanded my artistic world beyond music itself, taking me to museums and giving impromptu lessons in literature and film. Those experiences shaped not only my musical education but also my broader aesthetic outlook.

Alongside that background, I’ve studied jazz and classical piano, composition at the undergraduate and master’s level, and now contemporary history at the doctoral level. This project is where I bring those experiences together offering a perspective not only on Wynton’s music, but on the world around it.

Whatever one’s opinion of Wynton, it is undeniable that he is among the most important and consequential musicians and composers in jazz today. His body of work, and his role in shaping how jazz is viewed and received by a global audience, has no true contemporary parallel.

This series will explore his evolution as a composer through a curated sequence of landmark recordings. From small-group writing to orchestral works, I’ll look at how his music engages with structure, purpose, and the broader cultural and critical contexts in which it lives.

The first entry focuses on Black Codes (From the Underground), released 40 years ago in 1985. Aside from it being his first recording with all original compositions (all by him except for one), it also marks an inflection point. Here, Wynton begins to step out of the image of the “Young Lions” and the post-bop revival of the early 1980s, toward the musician most people recognize today as the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, leader of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and a central figure at the forefront of the preservation and institutionalization of jazz as an art form within the wider American cultural pantheon. In Black Codes lie the seeds of the next forty years of his career.

• Part I explores the cultural and musical context of the early to mid 1980s, a pivotal but often overlooked moment in jazz history. Featuring insights from trumpeter and educator Mondre Moffett, drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts (who played on the album), and saxophonist Branford Marsalis, this opening examines the emergence of the “Young Lions” generation and Wynton’s approach of “playing to the future by studying the past”: an approach that drew both excitement and fierce criticism from figures and cultural critics.

• Part II analyzes the music itself, its influences, innovations, and how it establishes the core characteristics of Wynton’s compositional voice. Through conversations with Watts, Branford Marsalis, and Mondre Moffett, this section reveals the album as standing at a crossroads between the controlled freedom of Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet and the spiritual intensity of John Coltrane’s quartet, a synthesis of formalism and ferocity that shaped Wynton’s emerging compositional identity.

• Part III examines the chemistry of the quintet itself, the contrasting and symbiotic relationship between Wynton and Branford, and the extraordinary rhythm section of teenage prodigy Charnett Moffett, veteran mastermind Kenny Kirkland, and the polyrhythmic Jeff “Tain” Watts. Drawing on recollections from Mondre Moffett, Branford, and Tain, this section reveals how the band embodied a concept sometimes referred to as “burnout”, a balance of personal freedom and collective participation that evolved the innovations of the 1960s into something entirely new.

• Part IV traces the album’s critical reception from its 1985 release through its 2023 induction into the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry. This section explores how perceptions evolved from debates over tradition versus innovation to recognition of the album as a foundational moment in Wynton’s legendary career.

• Part V captures how today’s young jazz musicians view the album and what it means for their own understanding of jazz. Through conversations with trumpeters Keyon Harrold, Dave Adewumi, saxophonists Julian Lee, Birsa Chatterjee, and Marcus Strickland; pianists Emmet Cohen, Isaiah Thompson, and Davis Whitfield; bassist Russell Hall; and drummer Ryan Sands, this section explores how a new generation approaches questions of authenticity, artistic responsibility, and the spiritual dimension of the music.

• Part VI concludes with an unabridged interview with Wynton Marsalis himself.

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This series represents many years of study, reflection, and personal connection, and each article is the result of significant time and care. Because of that work, and to sustain future writing at this level, the full series will be available only to paid subscribers. I hope you’ll consider supporting the project by subscribing — not only to gain access to the complete series, but to help make it possible to continue producing thoughtful, in-depth explorations like this.

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