One of the unexpected benefits of watching a sackful of early Chaplin movies is that, lacking music scores, their distributor seems to have laid a bunch of "Jelly Roll" Morton tunes on top of them—I guess Chaplin and Morton were more or less contemporaries, and the songs seem to fit the spirit of the thing. Not to mention they're great.Now, I have to admit that, coming into this, my knowledge of "Jelly Roll" Morton was largely limited to the Auburn marching band's traditional end-of-the-third-quarter rendition of "Tiger Rag." Of course, there's no YouTube video of Jelly Roll performing "Tiger Rag"—in fact, it's not clear now that he even wrote it—but I did find a video of Louis Armstrong performing "Tiger Rag" on stage in Copenhagen on October 21, 1933.
And click here to listen to an absolutely insane version by the legendary jazz pianist, Art Tatum.
(And you wonder why this blog takes so long.)
You can drop .99 [US] and buy through Amazon Jelly Roll Morton's Library of Congress recording of "Tiger Rag."
ReplyDeleteI already owned it because a book [not one of the Myth Mon's books, but a jazz book] told me to own it.
The book was right.
BTW, I have been doing my own half-assed version of the MythMon's quest, reviewing jazz recordings, and I gotta tell ya -- Louis Armstrong's reputation as THE SHIT was and is well-deserved.
PS And that ol' Louis is right -- "The Tiger Rag" may have had rag roots, but it's plainly swing.
Gahd bless it
Word Verification: catrynes
of course it is. . . .
PS I see 1935 looming in the headlights. . . .
ReplyDeleteA really intriguing bit of information regarding the Chaplin films; the dual subject of jazz age music and silent films fascinates me. I have a paperback book titled JAZZ ON RECORD~A CRITICAL GUIDE, published in 1960, that details the work of jazz artists then available on vinyl. The section on Ferdinand ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton has this to say: “The number of musicians in jazz who play in an entirely original style and use new material is very few, and the number of composers in jazz who create really new material is even fewer. One of the few was Ferdinand ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton. Morton is the Chopin of jazz.” I can’t think of a more perceptive observation regarding a man of prodigious talent
ReplyDeleteMy knowledge of "jelly roll" consists of what lies around my waist...
ReplyDelete