By R. Leonard Bartholomew
Wednesday, October 23, 2013.
It was Mark Pappenheim - who was then an editor at the Independent -
who showed me the road to jazz. The youthful commissioning editor knew what he
wanted from me: an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek profile of 1920s piano braggart
Jelly Roll Morton. What I chose not to tell him - for finances' sake - was that
I knew as much about Jelly Roll as I did the secret protocols of the Bilderberg
Group.
So off to the library I skipped,
allowing three days to steep myself into fifty years of American musical
history. In truth, I was not so much interested in Jelly Roll himself -
colourful though he was, being a conman, genius, liar and cheat - but more
about the wretched parturition of a music America now dares to call its
classical form.
It was, indeed, the unvarnished reality of early jazz that fascinated
me. It was the brothels, the riverboats, the blackmails and the back doors
ingress - as well as the penurious Chitlin Circuit, the Cosa Nostra, and
naturally, the costly, youthful expiration of turn of the century Mozarts such
as Beiderbecke and Bolden. Drugs, race, poverty, and puzzling innovation,
were the tattered swaddling clothes of a prodigious birth.
(In memory, holy relics now, as they should be.)
Riveted to a hard bench at London’s Stockwell Library, I passed the
hours tracing the hallowed spine of Satchmo's journey from pistol-totin’, rough’n’tumble New Orleans orphan, to cultural tornado
that would sweep from the south, turning into Chicago only to pick up
speed for a career defining landfall in New York.
Turning the pages forth and back, my eyes burned with the mournfully
austere images of very young men and women - children in our own age - Scott
Joplin, WC Handy, Jelly Roll himself, seated demurely at a piano.
Then as if by some magic, I heard and suddenly loved a noise that was so
esoteric to my ear only a week before. The bitter, bittersweet history
of the margins had wrapped itself around the sound. Even today, a crisp bright
note from an upright spells riverboats to me; a fast trumpet is tragic Clifford
Brown, speeding into the history books; a low drum roll introduces Duke
Ellington at Carnegie Hall.
It was against this landscape of pain and pleasure, adulation and early
deaths, drug addiction and stymied genius that Jelly Roll Morton carved a
deserved reputation for himself. His dazzling piano led him to crown himself
Father of Jazz - which he was not - but certainly a towering figure in the
history of the music.
Fifty years after his death, the fractious, self-hatin', braggadocious,
high-yella Creole from New Orleans opened for me - a dreadlocked West Indian -
a back door to the bawdy house, and I have never left that place. Curiousity
took me to jazz, memory keeps me happily languished in it. And it is memory
that gives life its meaning, I am sure. Memory, like history, is not simply
life's echo chamber; it’s that which allows us to live it out in stereo.
R Leonard
Bartholomew is Director of Seriously Good Publicity. He can be
reached at sgpcomms@gmail.com