‘Dreams of Jelly Roll’ Work in progress on a series of pictures |
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Jelly Roll Morton was first and foremost a great musician and composer. A good starting point for the new listener is his 1926 masterpieces recorded with the Red Hot Peppers, with whom he remained until 1930. Then maybe listen to the earlier solo recordings and piano rolls, before turning to his late solo sessions, the tracks made with Sidney Bechet, and finally his Hot Six and Hot Seven recordings. Jelly Roll was ‘the true connecting link between ragtime and jazz’ (Schuller G 1968) or as Morton put it ‘... I myself figured out the peculiar form of mathematics and harmonics that was strange to all the world but me’ (Reich H & Gaines W, 2003).
Pictures about a musician, as presented here, might seem paradoxical as the images remain forever silent. And yet music has been a recurring theme in the history of western narrative painting. As well as the symbolic and allegorical meanings to be found in musical pictures, within each viewer resonates a world of imagined sounds, evoking the musicality of silence.
The relationship between narrative, music and history interested Morton who, accompanying himself on piano and later guitar, left us a strange and dreamlike account of his life in over eight hours of recorded interviews made in 1938 by Alan Lomax, Folk Music Curator at The Library of Congress. Morton’s detractors have accused him of self-aggrandisement and braggartry in these recordings and yet his testimony remains ‘the first significant attempt at constructing a history of the music’, and Morton himself emerges as the first theorist and intellectual of jazz (Schuller G 1968).
Despite valuable scholarly research and subsequent attempts to impose chronology and establish the facts of Morton’s life (Lomax A 1950, Wright L 1980, Pastras P 2001, Gushee L 2001, Reich H & Gaines W 2003, Shafer 2008), the most comprehensive account we have, other than Morton’s own, is the huge rambling scrapbook compiled over forty years by William Russell, which was finally published in 1999. It is full of vivid, often contradictory stories by Morton’s contemporaries, photographs, official documents, letters and musical scores.
The painstaking work of historians in discovering evidential fragments of Morton’s life is presumably a finite project, ending when the furthest recesses of the archives have been trawled and when chance is through with its offerings. But new generations will continue to make new interpretations of this material for as long as Morton’s music has cultural value and continues to move us. Culture has to be constantly renegotiated and renewed if it is to remain vital. If art has a role to play in this process regarding Morton, it will not be as illustration, but by a leap of the imagination - something Jelly Roll himself was adept at.
Another element in the biographical equation is surely the presence of the biographer. Inevitably the subject will be seen through the prism of their life and experience. A dialogue ensues between the subject and commentator as between the music and the listener. This dialogue can take many forms, even spilling over into the vicissitudes of the unconscious. The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion made a distinction between ‘knowing about and knowing’, beleaving that alonside established facts other forms of knowledge are necessarily engaged with in our attempt to 'know' (Bion W. 1962).
From this author's perspective, Morton’s personality and worldview can best be described, in the Bakhtinian sense, as carnivalesque. Whether in Mardi Gras or Vaudeville, the Wild West Show or Minstrelsy, whether through Catholicism or Voodoo, the dividing line between rational life and the teaming unconscious seemed porous for Morton. Rather than interpreting his exaggerations and fabrications as signs of an immoral and unstable personality, as many critics have, the aim here is to take a creative and imaginative approach, informed by psychoanalysis, to the possible meanings hidden behind his daydreams and tall stories.
In this respect Phil Pastras has made some interesting observations about Morton’s uncertain sexual orientation, and the disturbing effect on a young mind of witnessing nightly the floorshows in New Orleans brothels, where he earnt his living as a pianist (Pastras P 2001). Laurie Wright (Liner notes Piano Solos Retrieval RTR 79002) commented that ‘Morton would have been a wonderful subject for psychoanalysis’ whilst Morton’s contemporary, Volly De Faut, believed ‘Jelly suffered inwardly from an inferiority complex’ (Russell W, 1999). Gunther Schuller argued that Jelly Roll was ‘led by his musical and personal frustrations to embellish the truth’ (Schuller G 1968). If we agree that great artists draw upon all aspects of themselves in the making of art, including their dark and troubled sides, then none of this should surprise us. Inner turbulence does not preclude a work from having high moral value; on the contrary it might be a prerequisite.
The approach taken here prompts questions about the compatibility of the disciplines of Psychoanalysis and History. Histories of psychoanalysis are common enough, but in their approach shed little light on the workings of the unconscious. Psychoanalytic case histories, on the other hand, seem altogether more promising. Freud’s accounts of his patients offer durable models, as do the insights to be found in Franz Kafka’s fictions. When Kafka wrote America he drew on travel books and family accounts of his namesake and nephew, Franz, who had emigrated to the New World. The book is an imaginative tour-de-force, full of slippages and inaccuracies that only add to its hallucinatory quality.
Like Kafka, the maker of these pictures has not been to America. The settings are instead constructed using the virtual world technology of Second Life, which itself has a discorporate and dreamlike quality. The strategy of using new technology to frame an historical subject opens up a necessary dialogue between past and present, fact and fiction, reality and virtuality, the conscious and unconscious worlds. Similarly the inclusion of documentary alongside anachronistic and prochronistic elements, emphasises the speculative nature of this enquiry.
The final series will be entitled Dreams of Jelly Roll and will consist of between ten and twelve pictures. We hope that the viewer may occasionally return to see progress over the coming year or so. Please click on the images below to enlarge.
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Women of the Family |
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Morton in Moscow |
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Buck House |
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Sources Website; Books on Jelly Roll Morton; Books with significant chapters on JRM; Books on related subjects; Jelly Roll Morton on CD; Jelly Roll Morton in Film Acknowledgements Contact | |||
