With so many of his song titles including the word ‘blues’ one would imagine nothing other than some fine, pre-war styled Americana from “Jelly Roll” Morton. That’s just not the case (and I assume you already knew that if you’re engaged in reading this.) It’s an interesting note to make, though, that Morton didn’t see a tremendous distance between the forms. And at the date of his most respected recordings – the latter part of the ‘20s – there really wasn’t a difference between jazz and blues.

Concurrently to Morton’s work was a spate of citified singers using a blues scaffolding to work in what would eventually become vocal jazz. Ma Rainey and company even made use of the arrangements and compositions that Morton worked out – most notably “Black Bottom Stomp.”

But even beyond a few appropriations, what “Jelly Roll” Morton did for the genre and American music in a grand sense makes his latter day invisibility confounding.

Working in brothels during the earliest of the 20^th century’s decades didn’t earn Morton too much familial acceptance or great financial worth. What it did do, though, was to expose a young pianist to a variety of music – and life styles – that would increasingly become a way of life during the ‘20s and ‘30s.

He moved around a lot, though, spending time in California and then moving to Chicago. It’s in this last place that those sides from the ‘20s were cut with the Red Hot Peppers. There’re a number of cobbled together compilations that include an array of the cuts from this era in Morton’s career. There’s probably one out there that claims to be completely complete, but having every take of every song seems like overkill.

The melody used for “Steamboat Stomp” should be familiar to listeners as Morton no doubt borrowed portions of the progression from elsewhere much in the same way that the pianist’s version of the song would be transformed in latter years. It is important to recognize the fact that the banjo that’s included not just here, but on most of the tracks on Birth of the Hot (The Classic Chicago Red Hot Peppers Sessions) and similarly minded collections served a specific purpose.

During the ‘20s guitars had as of yet to be amplified (although a 6-string can be heard introducing and closing out “Grandpa’s Spells”), thus rendering the instrument pretty useless in a large group setting. Instead, the banjo was utilized as a basic melodic instrument – keeping simple time and the like amongst the cacophonous clatter of twinkling keys, tubas, strings and whatever else may have been around at the time.

Morton, obviously, wasn’t the only band leader to do this, but the fact that he had a pretty large peer group was lost on him. In effect, his boasting even ostracized him from the jazzbo community. And after moving from Chicago subsequent to cutting those classic sides, Morton found New York an inhospitable place – a place that seemingly didn’t recognize his genius.

Morton wasn’t forgotten, per se, just relegated to the sidelines. Luckily, though, with the clutch of digital updates, his legacy has been etched in time.