Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2006 - (Page 14) Jelly Roll Morton’s own small-band performances, recorded beginning in 1926 under the name Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers, constitute the only other body of work in New Orleans Jazz that fully equals Oliver’s. While the Creole Jazz Band gave maximum freedom to each member (within carefully defined boundaries), Morton liked his musicians to play exactly what he wrote. Recordings such as “Black Bottom Stomp,” “Dead Man Blues” (with its evocation of a New Orleans funeral), “Kansas City Stomps,” “Sidewalk Blues,” and “Grandpa’s Spells” are carefully etched miniatures, three-minute masterpieces. But there are so many more, too, just from the 1920s alone — the recordings of Oscar “Papa” Celestin’s Tuxedo Orchestra, and the Halfway House Orchestra, the New Orleans Owls, Sam Morgan’s Jazz Band (especially “Down by the Riverside” and “Short-Dress Gal”), the Jones & Collins Astoria Hot Eight doing “Damp Weather,” “To-Wa-Bac-A-Wa” by Louis Dumaine’s Jazzola Eight, Johnny Miller’s New Orleans Frolickers, Monk Hazel’s Bienville Roof Orchestra, A. J. Piron’s Society Orchestra Each is in a sense a fragment of the whole picture, yet at the same time each of those three-minute recordings summons the entirety of that world, each one is a whole world in itself, a miniature society of contrasting musical personalities all pulling against each other and yet pulling together at the same time. What kind of place could have produced such a vision of the world, such elation and such lyricism mixed together, such individuality in the service of a communal effect? And those are just the ones actually recorded in New Orleans; there were countless other musicians who, like Oliver and Morton (who performed and recorded in Chicago and Indiana) made up a kind of unprecedented musical diaspora. The 1926-28 recordings by Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven pointed the way to a style oriented more toward virtuoso Willie and Percy Humphrey, at center, perform with the Crescent City Joymakers at Preservation Hall in 1989. soloing on recordings like “Potato Head Blues” and “Wild Man Blues” and “Cornet Chop Suey” and “West End Blues,” one of the perfect jazz records, with its opening cadenza of such power and imagination and balance. Not to mention Johnny Dodds’s “Perdido Street Blues,” and “Cake Walking Babies from Home” by Clarence Williams’ Blue Five, with the amazing jousting match between Louis Armstrong and soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, and countless others. I EXTRAORDINARY MUSICAL CULTURE f New Orleans music were just jazz and no more it would still loom larger than any other art produced by Americans in the 20th century. Even if one leaves aside the fact of so many great musicians, singers and entertainers from the Crescent City — Mahalia Jackson, Louis Prima, the Boswell Sisters — as an accident, the extraordinary musical culture of the late 40s and 50s and beyond that produced rhythm-and-blues and rock- 14 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2006
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