Jelly RollMorton

Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe — known as Jelly Roll Morton — was born in New Orleans in 1890 into the city's Creole community. A pianist of extraordinary gifts, he developed his style in the brothels and sporting houses of Storyville, absorbing ragtime, blues, march music, and the Spanish tinge that distinguished New Orleans music from all others.

Morton began recording in the early 1920s, and his Victor recordings with the Red Hot Peppers (1926–1930) are among the first masterpieces of jazz composition and arrangement. These recordings showed that jazz was not just spontaneous improvisation but could be carefully crafted music of real sophistication.

Morton was a difficult personality — boastful, argumentative, and possessive of his reputation — but his recordings speak for themselves. 'Black Bottom Stomp,' 'Smoke House Blues,' and 'Doctor Jazz' are compositions of real originality that reward close listening even a century later.

His final years were marked by obscurity and bitterness, as swing displaced the New Orleans style. But his lengthy interviews with Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1938 produced an invaluable oral history of early New Orleans music. He died in 1941, his full importance not yet recognized.