To: Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton, LaMotte,
Jazz Heaven
Dear Mr. Morton,
I know you are only relatively safe from events befallen your beloved City
of New Orleans. It must seem like only yesterday since you left us, all of
us, in a blaze of glory, a flash that very few of us noticed at the time,
but which we marvel at now. But you must feel keenly the disaster that has
shaken your city, and our nation.
Mr. Jelly Roll, Jazz Inventor and celebrator of New Orleans, the cultural
mecca of our country, we let you down. We let you down, we let down New
Orleans.
We know that back in time New Orleans was the cradle of civilization for the
West. The great importer of culture through the Caribbean and the Gulf.
Contended for by empires, which fell before your native charms. Even the
dreadful human scourge of the nineteenth century was overshadowed by your
culture, your pride, your exquisite talents of grace, and music and language
and diplomacy.
Where did America begin? In Boston with white Puritans? In New York, with
its bitter and burgeoning economies, revolutionary state, and congestion? In
Chicago, the great hub, the jumping off place by rail and river of pale
faced pioneers and homesteaders?
Perhaps the melting pot of the America we in the West recognize, the
cauldron of the country, was more like New Orleans- the destination point
for every American traveler from Toqueville on through young Lincoln, and
the birthplace of the country as an international power to be reckoned with,
culturally. Its afrocuban community, its look and feel and sound, its French
language and quadrilles, its latin tinge that connects with three
hemispheres, the point uniting the continent from west to east at the
Mississippi, the great national resource of river traffic that made the
nation a Nation.
New Orleans was the key to everything more than once in our nation's
history.
Mr. Jelly, you knew this, you taught this, you offered the doctoral
dissertation, the Doctorate of Jazz, that the Crescent City holds the key to
our culture. Even I who never visited must admit I know its storybook
charms, through you and its history and its jazz. It had a deep effect on
San Francisco, which is still felt today, an influence which is thriving and
absolutely vital.
How much of that culture, what inestimably precious artifacts, were
destroyed through our negligence, along with the human lives lost in the
levee-breaker hurricane?
Mr. Morton, you who played a version of every song from your youth, in
impeccable strident, melancholic lyrical jazz all your own, your New Orleans
became the precious attic of Jazz collections, like at Tulane where the Jazz
Archive is, and Bill Russell's place, where countless collector's items from
our irrevocable, boundlessly original past of jazz were hoarded; and
Preservation Hall, where even dorky white dudes were allowed to worship at
the shrine of African American creativity, that fuels the artistic life of
the country- no, the entire cultural world.
Where did that culture come from? Morton, you grew up in the ragtime era,
and were a founder of jazz in the teens and twenties (no matter what anybody
says), and you, Jelly Roll, taught us, I think, that jazz came from the very
elite atmospheres of those who were spiritually privileged, but economically
unrecognized. It grew up despite laws against it, bias, abuse, ransacking
cultural theft, and artistic competition and cooperation. The jazz of Jelly
Roll was diplomatic, it included everyone, though they be seperated by
taste, or class distinction or education or language. Even laws banning its
practice, its language, its style, foundered in the glaring light of its
creative intensity that swept the world and which the whole world recognized
as "American."
Mr. Morton, you brought us jazz and New Orleans itself as an art form
utterly distinct- your bedevilled pride and joy- and as something
democratic, something for everyone, rich and poor- perhaps especially of the
poor- made so through no choice of their own. Yes democratic, it was a
mirror, participatory, strange, mystical. It is absolutely essential to
American life now.
Though jazz is available at the mall, the real thing was perhaps more
evanescent, and more basic, in its live marching band improvisatory form in
the streets of New Orleans.
How can we let such resources go? In our passion to save the blacktop
parking lot faux town square of our massive shopping mall/ sport utility
vehicle life, we still find ourselves longing for our regional arts, our
prewar heritage minus the bitter hates and feuds, and plus the
understandings and insights. But when it came to tax cuts, consumer spending
and whatever boneheaded short term-ism, we cut the funding that preserves
life in our cities and towns. The levee broke, as we knew it would someday.
One can't speak of the suffering, but only in incomprehensible stuttering
sputtering rage, or anguish, or disbelief. And now our jazz archive may well
be under water, and though it seems small compared to the enormous
suffering, in the long run it may be a key indicator of how we look at our
American family and our American life.
Do you remember when you first fell in love with jazz? I do, and it was the
New Orleans kind, trad jazz, I heard on the radio. I hated jazz. What was
all that blasted noise about? But this one time I heard a live traditional
jazz band, on the radio, and I heard a steady banjo beat, strum strum strum,
and a heavy pat pat of someone's toe, and little trumpet and clarinet
filligrees, and that was it. In one minute I was totally in love. It took,
slow me, years to "get" bebop, and Parker and all, but this trad Jazz, San
Francisco style, I adored.
Which reminds me of something you know, Mr. Jelly, as you now know all
things, I guess, that San Francisco and New Orleans, and Chicago, well, we
feud about the origins of jazz. It's a healthy family argument. We had jazz
here too, in the early years ca. 1910 and you ought to know, Jelly because
you were here on the Barbary Coast, I heard, playin up a storm. And white
folks and ragtimers and fakers and losers all jumped in as soon as
practicable, rendering, what we now think of as early music, ancient tunes
of old New Orleans in a continually replenished reviving style.
A replenished revival. That's really what we need right now, spiritually in
this country. Never forgetting the old, and joyfully adding the soul of the
utterly new. Impossible without what has come before. Thank you, African
Americans. Thank you Creole Traditionaries. Thank you Mr. Jelly.
San Francisco followed closely in your footsteps, Jelly Roll Morton, through
your inspiration, honoring your tunes, your arrangements, and your artistic
direction, through the famous revival bands of Lu Watters and Turk Murphy.
These sparked a world wide jazz phenom of its own, on the terms of early New
Orleans "Trad" jazz. Blasted over live airshots on local SF stations int he
1940s and 50s to avid enraptured audiences- Turk Murphy, Bob Scobey, and
line-ups of Earl Fatha Hines as well as New Orleans natives, like Kid Ory,
who previously with L. Armstrong in the King Oliver band in 1923 rocked the
world with popular jazz.
I know this joy through records and radio and books. I have the jazz records
right over there, including a pile of 78 rpm records, and a hundred hours of
radio tapes by our local Jelly Roll Morton afficianados here in the San
Francisco Bay Area. Chris Strachwitz, who played the earliest jazz records
in existence, as well as cajun and zydeco, alternated radio programming on
our listener-supported station with jazz expert and collector/writer Phil
Ellwood, who continually introduced new audiences to authentic regional
music every Sunday morning. And the older the records they played, the more
I loved them.
King Oliver!! Louis Armstrong! C'mon! Gospel quatertets recorded in 1902!
Give to me a break, Lord.
And it's all because of you, New Orleans. Thanks in part to the contribution
of Jelly Roll Morton.
What's in our attic, what may we lose forever, given the chance, the
negligence, the lack of foresight, the lack of cultural insight and
political will? The more we claim to love America, the more we seem to
merely aproximate and fabricate its true joys and freedoms, which include
jazz, as well as our multicultural, rich heritage, and our truly democratic
society. Mr. Jelly Roll Morton may have had this in mind when he sat with
the simple recording device, dictating his musical memoirs of New Orleans,
to the Library of Congress in 1938.
Some of this we may never lose- it is a part of us. But the Jazz Archive
that many have never seen nor heard- that could be its own lost jazz Library
of Alexandria, and it may be gone, it may be gone. And so many lives lost,
young and old, gone in this, one of the worst disasters in US History.
I heard a native say New Orleans is gone. I heard it on the very same radio
I heard the living history of jazz. It is too soon to know what the
rebuilding and recovery will be like. San Franciscans understand this. We
still gaze in silence over our own ruins today, as the Great Earthquake and
Fire nears its centennary.
We can change some of this right now. We can save our Declaration of
Independence, and our Constitution, but we also have to re-evaluate the life
our our Arts. Our Art is the life of our people.
Chevron can fund it, but it can't really preserve or create it. We have to
love it. And now we know our our art and our culture and our infrastructure
are all tied, are inter-related, as New Orleanians taught us. We have a
choice.
Of course, Mr. Jelly Roll Morton, you can't force the art of Jazz, or the
love of new Orleans, or San Francisco, or regional American Arts, on anyone.
You demonstrate the love as a piano genius, and story teller, and hope we
may get it.
I went to a religious revival when I was a teenager- it took place in
Houston Tx, at the Astrodome, right where the refugees are tonight, and Rev
Billy Graham asked everybody to be born again, and on the program to take us
home was the great great Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and I was born again,
at least for the moment, ecstatic! But not for religion- for the power of
that wonderful indescribable music of joy! The religion didn't take,
institutionally speaking, but the jazz experience i still feel right now.
It is that spirit that I long for in this meditation. To ask myself, when oh
when did you fall in love with jazz, and however can we repay New Orleans,
and the citizens of New Orleans, for all that has been given to our cultural
life?
That's why I write to you this night, Mr. Jelly Roll Morton.
I ask you to look down from the pantheon and forgive us. From your vantage
point among the constellations, with as many brilliant stars in the
firmament of jazz, your infinite stories, your endless originality, forgive
us, if it's possible.
james koehneke
sf
9-2-05
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