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 challenges of documenting a continental nation's worth of sound. Here, we pick up our conversation over the branches, from the cultural battles over electric guitars and outside influences, to the brotherhood between jazz and samba, to a moment when Wynton Marsalis sat in with a group of nervous young Brazilian musicians and called a blues.

Q: How have sentiments evolved around incorporating outside influences into Brazilian music? For example, the initial introduction of electronic instruments, such as electric guitar, caused a polemic within music circles.

Guga:

In Brazil, we’ve always, since the 17th century, had a conflict between the people who have defended the notion of a pure Brazilian culture and the people who have believed that Brazilian culture is made up of many different influences. In 1922 in São Paulo, we had a very important aesthetic movement, our modernist movement, that spread all over Brazil. The modernists wrote a manifesto called the Anthropophagic Manifesto, which argued that Brazilian culture was a cannibal culture that consumes foreign, as it happened literally in early periods of Brazil’s history to some of the colonizers. But metaphorically, it consumes foreign cultures and transforms them into a Brazilian style. This is something that has always happened.

For example, today, we have a very strong Brazilian hip-hop movement, but in the beginning, hip-hop was considered too “Yankee”. Electronic sounds and instruments were also considered “Yankee”, depending on the period and how nationalistic people were.

Brazil had a dictatorship from 1964 until 1985 that was sponsored by the CIA, by American politicians, because the American government was afraid of losing South America to the communist movement, like what happened in Cuba. During this time, many nationalistic musicians were very angry at rock and roll and the electric guitar. If you played the electric guitar, they would say you were imperialized or colonized. There were movements in the streets against the electric guitar, but they didn’t last very long. This anthropophagic cultural cannibalism incorporated the guitar and the electric instruments into a Brazilian musical expression.

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Q: And what are some of the ways that jazz has influenced Brazilian music?

Guga:

Jazz has been in Brazil since the beginning of the 20th century, but it has had a different connotation. I’m not a radical nationalist, but musicians have always considered jazz to be a positive influence on Brazilian music. Yes, it came from a large country that was expanding, and spreading its culture, but jazz had in its roots, an expression of freedom. A possibility of having a personal and a collective expression of freedom.

Its influence made Brazilian musicians more free. They could improvise and they could write arrangements in different styles. Jazz was never criticized as “Yankee” or “imperialist”.

The exposure to jazz first came through movies, first with silent films and then through Hollywood. Later in the 40s and in the early 50s, swing became very popular amongst the Brazilian bourgeoisie. Swing orchestras and singers like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.

The biggest influence of jazz music in Brazil happened during the 50s, when the young upper middle class boys from around 17 to 21 years old, who listened to samba, but also loved Stan Kenton and Chet Baker, made a fusion of cool jazz harmony, the West Coast style, with samba in a synthetic, minimalist aesthetics. This movement was called bossa nova. For us, bossa nova, is a kind of jazz-influenced samba. But I’ve heard people outside of Brazil say that bossa nova is a jazz style with a tropical accent.

After this, jazz became very important, especially to instrumentalists. We created many generations of Brazilian musicians making Brazilian jazz, but admiring Miles Davis and John Coltrane and in the 70s, jazz fusion. It’s not my favorite style, but it was important here.

We always considered Brazilian samba and jazz music as brothers because they both genres are evolutions of the syncopations that were brought to the Americas through the richness of African polyrhythms.

Q: In the epigraph of the book, you cite a quote from Mario de Andrade:

“And laughter struck the air, the shouting, the coco caught on in a flash, those people danced, stamped their feet in dance, joyfully, the chorus swelled in the enthusiasm, the stars twinkled almost sonorous, the warm air almost sensual, woven with deep scents. And it was utterly strange. Everyone sang, […] flirted, laughed, danced, the wonderful night, the abundant climes, […] vibrated an immense joy, a sonorous joy, yet within it there was something intensely sad.”

This speaks to an important aspect of Brazil, which prominently appears in samba, dealing with sad and sorrowful themes accompanied by happy and upbeat music. How would you compare this with a music like the blues, which deals with similar themes of life?

Guga:

I think these are two very, very powerful musics. I think the blues is one of the most amazing experiences that exists in the 20th century. It’s only 12 bars. It’s a very basic structure, but it’s changed the world.

I remember when Wynton Marsalis came here for our first jam. Surely the young Brazilian musicians were excited, but they were also very nervous to play in the presence of Wynton. They wanted to play tunes like “Giant Steps” and “Dona Lee”. And Wynton said, no, no, no. Then started a blues. With the blues you can start simply and then go into any kind of abstraction. You can go very far away from where you started. Blues has this power.

And then samba. Samba is made of an array of styles. There are maybe 40 or 50 different kinds of samba. The first samba was recorded in 1917 in Rio de Janeiro, which had the first radio stations in the country. Within a few years, music from Rio de Janeiro spread all over the country.

As a music, I think the blues is more clear in its emotional expression. It’s more sad. It’s melancholy. Samba on the surface is happy. It’s a sensual dance. But it was built in a very, very cruel historical context. Brazil was the last country to abolish enslavement. Throughout the history, there was a lot of repression and a lot of blood. Samba though it is a happy and sensual dance, carries a lot of sorrow within it. But both, samba and the blues are very powerful.

Q: What are some of the main differences between jazz, and jazz influenced styles such as bossa nova that might not be obvious to musicians not familiar with Brazilian music?

Guga:

Louis Armstrong once said “If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know”. Rather than being a thing, it’s a way you do the thing. When people speak about jazz here, American jazz, we imagine the triplet. The four against three. That characterizes the tension that makes the jazz swing. This is not common in Brazilian music. The other components of jazz though, like the concept of improvising and the concept of real-time, group communication like call and response, in an organic, live process. Through jazz, we learn here in Brazil, to improvise and open our ears to that experience.

The “blue note” is also a major contribution of jazz into many styles of Brazilian music. But you can still do a lot of Brazilian jazz without blue notes. You can play samba jazz, you can play baião jazz, you can play maracatu jazz. It is defined more by idea of the freedom than it is the style.

Q: If someone wanted to get into Brazilian music, where would you recommend that they begin?

Guga:

It depends on the taste of who is interested. But I think we can make some parallels between American music and Brazilian music. There are historical parallels between American and Brazilian history.

In the late 19th century, after slavery was abolished, and cities began to grow, there was music in Brazil that paralleled ragtime and stride piano. Here, there’s a clear influence of concert music. In the 20th century, this music was spread through new media like radio and records, similar to the development of jazz. This era from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end of the Second World War is considered the golden age of Brazilian music.

To make specific parallels, if you like Satchmo, listen to Pixinguinha. Pixinguinha was a great showroom musician.

If you like Gershwin, that is something between the concert music and the popular music. Here we have Villa-Lobos.

And if you like the sophistication of harmonies of Duke Ellington, we have Tom Jobim.

I think this is a good trio of reference to approach Brazilian music.

Q: What advice do you have for young musicians today?

Guga:

I think things radically changed with artificial intelligence. It’s like when a snake changes its skin, except we don’t know exactly what’s going to come out of it.

It’s good to choose an instrument and practice that instrument, to learn harmony and rhythm, but don’t skip this knowledge simply because an algorithm will do this for you through your prompts. It’s important have an instrumental experience: a voice that sings and an instrument that plays and a body that dances.

In these three things, we remain connected to the first human beings. We like music because our ancestors before us also loved music. You can look at this idea through Darwinist perspective, not just as natural selection of genes but also through behaviors and culture. We don’t make music or listen to music simply because it’s fun. We do so because without music probably we would be extinct.

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 various Brazilian fruit-bearing trees such as jabuticaba, cacau, ambarella, sugar-apple, and starfruit amongst many others. Perhaps this was one of the factors that inspired Guga Stroeter, owner of the house, to name his book A Tree of Brazilian Music.

A friend of Wynton Marsalis, Guga is a vibraphonist by trade, but he is also a producer, music director, former jazz club owner and writer and researcher of Brazilian music. The illustrative poster that accompanies the book is displayed on the wall and is perhaps one of the most impressive trees in the house. It gives a curated look into the growth of Brazilian music from its roots of African, Indigenous and European music spanning across time in all directions toward the modern day. One can see that Brazilian funk artists grow out from the sprawling branch of samba. One can trace the long continuity of concert music in Brazil. It is easy to trace the constant expansion of the many interrelated styles of Brazilian music.

As part of the garden Guga sought to grow when he first moved into the house, there are nine different species of Brazilian bees that are cultivated in little wooden bee hives. With the bees came savvy spiders, harmless to humans, taking advantage of the lack of pesticides and insecticide (given these would be harmful to the bees) to help control the bug population. Each spider has a name, with the most famous being Adelaide — over 3,500,000 views on his Instagram page. Guga joked, “some of my music I have that I’ve made with much love, sometimes only get 12, 14 views on the internet…but she deserves it!”

On the door of Guga’s home studio, there’s a brass plaque for the stage, “Palco Wynton Marsalis” that used to adorn the stage of former club Blen Blen Brasil. The plaque also contains a quote from Marsalis’ 1994 book Sweet Swing Blues on the Road: “When everyone chooses to participate, that’s when the music is beautiful”. This quote illustrates the spirit of the performance space. Built during the pandemic as a recording studio meant to house an audience of 20 to 25 people, this studio quickly transformed into a major hub for music and community.

“Sometimes, we create a music club with our friends. It’s called a Sarau. Sarau is a kind of party where people come to make music from everywhere. We called our group Sarau Brasilis to improve Brazilian singing and songwriting. More than jazz and instrumental music, we are most focused on songs. And this grew. We were 10, 12. Now we are 300, 400.”

All around Guga’s home, he has cultivated a forest of ecosystems, natural and social where even the most unexpected guests, such as Adelaide, or even musicians from all over, can find a place.

Q: How was the process of research for the book you and your friend Elisa Mori organized, A Tree of Brazilian Music?

Guga:

In 1994, I was visiting Europe, and I went to a record store. During this decade, it was very important for us musicians to go to these record stores abroad. In Brazil there were no imports. The law was very protectionist. You could not find imported records anywhere. So, when we traveled, one of our favorite things to do was to buy records.

When I was in Amsterdam, I saw a poster that caught my eye called The Jazz Tree. I bought it for a few dollars and when I went back to Brazil and put it in my house. Whenever people would come over, I realized that many people were looking at this poster and searching it for names they recognized. Even people that didn’t like or didn’t even know jazz. I thought that if people were interested in the jazz tree, searching for musicians, then someone has to do the Brazilian jazz tree.

In 1996, I spoke with a very good Japanese friend called Elisa, who owned a place that rented videotapes. Slowly, we spent the first few years researching, every Monday on her day off. This goes to show how old the project was. It was still in the beginning of the internet, so we didn’t have things like Google, so much of the research was done through reading books.

When we finished it, there wasn’t really much interest in publishing it at the time. There was an internet fever going around. People were constantly telling me to publish it on an internet website rather than as a book. But one person was interested, the man who invited Wynton Marsalis to come to Brazil in 2019, the Director of SESC, Danilo Santos de Miranda.

When it was finally published, the book and the poster, people loved it. Because it’s about Brazilian music, people were able find something they like in it. If not choro, then samba. If not samba, then forró. If not forró then Brazilian rock and roll.

Researching was very good for me as well, in helping to better understand my country and its history. Often we don’t realize that music is one hundred percent attached to historical circumstances. There’s a very beautiful historical flow in the creation of different styles and different artists across time.

What was most important for me to learn is that different people will always like different music. I don’t care to be a judge of what is good and bad. The phenomenon of music is anthropological. When an artist or a style is popular it has to be recognized as something interesting within the development of a nation’s culture.

Q: What are some of the challenges you’ve encountered researching and documenting music across Brazil?

Guga:

Making the decision of who to include in the research and who to leave out is a difficult task. It’s not possible to please everybody. I had to make specific limitations. In publishing it, my intention was to make a tree of Brazilian Music not the tree of Brazilian music. Brazil is a continental sized country, with many different regions and styles from the deep south to the Amazon. I hope that this project can give birth to many others so that someday someone can compile a great archive.

Q: For people who may not be familiar with Brazilian music, can you explain some of, what basic elements lie at the roots of your tree?

Guga:

There are three basic roots of Brazilian history. The first is the native Brazilians. When the Portuguese arrived here, there were more than 1,200 different languages and many different native cultures. This music from this time has not survived much in our popular music today. This music was very important though during the colonial period. During this time, the Portuguese sent Jesuit missions to Brazil to convert the natives to Catholicism. They soon realized that music was the best way to attract people to them, so they invited natives to play music. This kind of music was basically just singing, stepping, and repeated syllables chanted. There were a few instruments such as shakers and flutes.

The next root is the enslaved people. Brazil was the place with the biggest migration of enslaved people in the Americas. During the 15^th century, the Portuguese developed sugar cane plantations, and many enslaved people were brought to work on them. From the 15^th century up until the end of the slave trade in the 19^th century, Brazil received around 5 million enslaved people. For every single enslaved African brought to the United States, 10 were brought to Brazil.

Early on, they were mostly Bantu speaking people from Mozambique and Angola but later in the 18^th century, many people from the Yoruba tribes in Benin and Togo, and Nigeria were brought.

The third root is the Portuguese. Since the Middle Ages, the Portuguese have had many religious parties and festivals. The songs from these celebrations were mixed with the African and indigenous music to create Brazilian music.

In the late 19th century, the Portuguese royal family moved to Brazil, escaping Napoleon’s invasion of Portugal. Suddenly, Rio de Janeiro became the capital of a Portuguese Empire that had lands across Europe, Africa, India, and China. When the royal family arrived they brought with them, the music of European nobility, such as waltzes, polkas, mazurkas. High society in Brazil began listening and playing this music, which then diffused out to the poor, who also learned these styles and made different fusions with it.

In the 20th century, when the United States became the most powerful country in the world, with its record companies, its movie industry, American music became very influential in the evolution of Brazilian music with jazz, some gospel, rock and roll, and R&B being incorporated.

Q: You’ve encountered a lot of the music that exists in oral traditions or is passed down from master to student. What is the importance of documenting this music? How does documenting this kind of music through notation or recording change how people subsequently experience it?

Notation is very important, but sometimes we forget that it’s just a code, a very recent code. We have anthropological evidence of instruments from 50,000 years ago, and we’ve only had notation a fraction of that time. It’s very important as a method of preserving music from one generation to the next, but we should not forget notation was created for Western music. Many different music styles have different scales that cannot be notated in this system.

There are writers and folk music students and professionals here in Brazil that don’t believe that folk music should be notated though. We have a lot of Arabic-Portuguese influenced music from the Moors, and styles of drumming that are very complex. And if you notate this music, you may forget the aspects of the musical performance that aren’t notated. When you choose to preserve something, and you also are simultaneously killing something not possible to be notated.

Notation isn’t the only form of preservation though. Today a great capacity to preserve music through different means, such as audio and video recording, different systems of notation, and big data archives to keep everything together. So, I’m very optimistic.

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 I was obsessed with Stevie Wonder as a high schooler is an understatement. I would spend nights listening and analyzing the harmonic motion in his music until well past midnight. My first song was a Stevie Wonder pastiche and my first nocturnes were Stevie Wonder tunes in the guise of Chopin. My entire understanding of harmonic motion, how a song moves from chord to chord is filtered through Stevie Wonder. To understand why Stevie’s harmonic world feels so emotionally powerful, we have to look at the main tools he deployed: mode mixture and parsimonious voice leading.

Mode Mixture: The Soul Food of Harmony

A technical explanation of mode mixture would be the borrowing of a chord from the parallel major or minor of a key. A clear example of mode mixture would be this moment in Prince’s song "Dirty Mind”. After an entire section within the world of C major: a G major chord over a repeated C bass note, we suddenly get this surprising series of chords: E flat major, A flat major, F major, B flat major, G major.

With the exception of F major and G major, these chords do not exist within the C major scale. They were borrowed from C minor where these chords exist naturally:

A technical explanation doesn’t quite do justice as to what mode mixture actually is though. Mode mixture is the distinguishing feature of R&B music. It’s the musical seasoning, the saccharine sweetness that makes the genre so pleasing to listen to. R&B songs are saturated with these “surprising” moments. Whereas other genres like rock and pop will save mode mixture for important key moments, R&B uses it as a main feature, like the musical equivalent of soul food.

“Knocks Me Off My Feet” is the first Stevie Wonder song that comes to my mind when I think of mode mixture. The opening phrase alone is packed full sweet and surprising harmonies.

Parsimonious Voice Leading

Parsimonious voice leading is another term that sounds more intimidating than it actually is. If you take the definition of parsimonious from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary “frugal to the point of stinginess”, you can understand parsimonious voice leading to mean that the “voice leading” or movement of voices between chords is minimal and restrained. This is a distinguishing feature of classical music. Bass movement is the most important element within classical harmony. The bass doesn’t function the way it does within popular music, as simply the root of a chord. The bass is a melodic line with fluid motion like any melody. Bass motion by small steps may seemingly limit the chords you can use, but it opens up surprising possibilities within those chords and allows for tension to be built up making larger jumps such as basic V - I resolutions seem like the Earth has just jumped.

“They Won’t Go When I Go” is one of Stevie’s most “parsimonious” songs. Stepwise movement isn’t just reserved for the bass line. All of the voices and instruments employ it. The harmony of this song is reminiscent of the theme from Beethoven’s C minor variations.

Stevie Wonder’s Harmony in Practice

The way Stevie Wonder utilizes these two elements of mode mixture and parsimonious voice leading elevates his music from just popular songs, into the realm of masterworks. I will propose a general harmonic rule or logic that Stevie Wonder’s songs follow and then will examine a couple of my favorite songs of his to demonstrate how he utilizes both of these elements.

Stevie Wonder’s songs tend to follow rather typical and generic base chord progressions as they begin, but there’s usually a point in the song, either near the pre-chorus or chorus where he slows down the harmonic motion and allows for tension to build up to a surprising moment that reframes the song. Think of any song from “My Cherie Amour” to “The Secret Life of Plants” and you will find this general structure.

The first Stevie Wonder song that I truly fell in love with was a bit of an atypical first love for his music. It didn’t come from the album Songs in the Key of Life or Innervisions. Two albums that were on heavy rotation in my household. Rather it was a small song about the slow revelation of heartbreak and betrayal called “Lately” from the album Hotter than July. During my freshman year of high school, I used to sit up late nights at my keyboard trying to figure out the chord progressions from this song. What I was trying to understand wasn’t how to play the song, but why did this song inspire in me such depths of sadness that I had never felt before at that point in life?

“Lately” is a slow march toward an exalted sorrow that starts with humble roots. The song begins in D flat major with one of the most cliché progressions one can use. The 1950s progression that pervaded doo-wop music: I–vi–IV–V.

Stevie’s use of this kind of progression demonstrates his evolution from his writing style as the boy genius, “Little Stevie Wonder” during this era of doo-wop, which was foundational to the sound of Motown as a whole. But being the master of R&B he was by this point he did something clever with this progression. He substitutes the IV chord, which would be G flat, for its relative minor chord, E flat minor. Similar chords with different root.

That small change in flavor, gives the song a feeling of being more in B flat minor than D flat major. This feeling is important. It imbues the verse with a little tinge of melancholy.

The answer phrase, “Yet the thought of losing you has been hanging…” begins on that E flat minor, which still lingers around for more than half the phrase before the phrase resolves back home to D flat major. So far we have been hanging out more around E flat minor and B flat minor than around D flat major.

The real magic of the song begins in the pre-chorus: “Well I’m a man of many wishes/Hope my premonition misses”. Stevie leads into this line by using a D flat dominant 7 chord on the lyric “never know” which has the expectation of resolving to G flat major. This instance of mode mixture, changing to root or “home” chord into a dominant V7 chord, whose job it is to resolve to the root chord of a different key, sets the tone of our expectations that things are about to change.

The expectation:

And we get an immediate surprise. Instead of resolving to G flat as we are expected, Stevie returns back to that E flat minor substitution, once again betraying our expectations.

As the phrase continues we arrive to the moment of truth, in the lyric “Because they always start to cry”. Just as in classical music, Stevie leads upward one step at a time. This upward progression is also a symbolic rising tide of emotion. Stevie’s voice swells as he sings, “Because they always…” drawing out this phrase across the whole progression. But unlike classical music, there are no inversions or clever tricks. It’s just a blocky series of minor 7 chords.

The same chord rising up by step, E flat minor 7, F minor 7, G flat minor 7, “al-ways start…”. Every step, yet the sorrow is still the same.

The G flat minor 7 chord on the lyric “start” is the point where this sorrow is transfigured into something special and it occurs at the same point where the lyrics pivot, on the phrase “…start to cry”. Suddenly this nagging emotion is transforming as tears well up. This G flat minor 7 chord moves to an A flat dominant 7 chord which the V which resolves to the I, back home in D flat major. And this D flat major is the most surprising moment of the song for me.

Even though it is the root of the key, even though we all know it’s coming back to this chord, Stevie makes the obvious and inevitable come across as a revelation.

“Why is this?”

This is what my teenage self wondered all those nights playing through this song at a loss. Remember back to when I noted that the verse had little tinges of melancholy? The mode mixture within that section, substituting the standard G flat major chord, in the doo-wop progression, for an E flat minor chord did a lot of heavy lifting for our expectations. It created an ambiguity between major and minor. Our ear was subconsciously tricked to associate the home key with being in the relative minor, B flat minor. Within the whole verse, every time this E flat minor chord appears our ear is telling us, “this is in B flat minor”. Even as it resolves home to D flat major at the end of the each set of phrases in the verse, our ear is tricked into seeing this resolution as a deception.

When we get to the pre-chorus, “Well I’m a man of many wishes” and that expectation of getting a G flat major chord is betrayed again with an E flat minor chord ambiguity persists between G flat major and E flat minor, we are still expecting there to be an eventual resolution to B flat minor, fulfilling this pull toward minor that our ear so desperately wants to hear. But this is what great composers do. They know what we as listeners will expect and intentionally set us up to be subverted.

As the series of minor seven chords rise in step motion, we are gradually faced with the revelation, that this song is definitively and heartbreakingly in D flat major. To hammer this home we get the most basic resolution in music IV-V-I, with, of course a little mode mixture twist of a minor four, iv-V-I. We have been confronted by this truth that we have been trying to ignore the whole song. At the same time, the narrator, has this same realization that his eyes won’t let him hide the fact that he is heartbroken, trapped in a loveless relationship.

This is the power of Stevie Wonder: A self evident truth, a V-I resolution, is a revelation. There’s no need for overly complex chords. The most simple of progressions can be life changing in the hands of a master.

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Support This Work

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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In Part 1, Aaron Diehl shared how his grandfather’s influence and mentors like Mark Flugge and Marcus Roberts shaped his path from classical training to jazz improvisation. Here, we continue our conversation, turning to his work with Mary Lou Williams’ Zodiac Suite, the composers who have deepened his artistry over time, and his perspective on what youn…

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When I was a child, not long after I first met Marcus Roberts, I heard a rumor about an eighteen-year-old pianist at Juilliard who could play Art Tatum’s rendition of “Tiger Rag”. To me, anyone who could play stride at that level bordered on mythical. That pianist turned out to be Aaron Diehl.

Years later, after we had gotten to know each other, Aaron i…

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Nina Simone is best known as a singer, her voice inseparable from songs like “Feeling Good” and “I Put a Spell on You.” But before she ever sang professionally, she was a pianist, and it’s in her piano playing that the full depth of her musical vision reveals itself.

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Mary Lou Williams was a figure whose impact is felt immensely in jazz history, yet too often overlooked, partly because of her gender, and partly because the nature of her work resists easy categorization. She was the connective tissue between the stride pianists of the 1920s and the bebop innovators of the 1940s, a musician whose evolving harmonic lang…

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My family moved to Jersey City in the summer of 2000 when my father started to work for Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. It wasn’t until the fall of 2001, that it began to feel like home. I was entering third grade and had one of my most influential elementary school teachers, Ms. Feskin. She nurtured creativity in all of her students and encou…

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In a recent post, I reflected on first hearing the pianist Phineas Newborn Jr. on a childhood road trip. That trip culminated in an exhibition of photographs by Frank Stewart at the Smithsonian, who, it turns out, is Newborn’s stepson.

Stewart, one of the foremost photographers of jazz and of black American culture, possesses a unique perspective on the …

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When I was younger, I had a habit of getting sick whenever I traveled with my father. Ever since I got food poisoning on a tour of New England with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, it seemed like it happened every trip, whether it be to Cuba, Louisville, or South Africa. I would later find out that the reason for this was acid reflux, which is some…

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