Jelly Roll Morton - The Piano Rolls realized by Artis Wodehouse

Posted By : sexything | Date : 04 Dec 2009 04:16:59 | Comments : 4 |

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Born in 1890, Jelly Roll Morton fused a myriad of musical styles abundant in the Crescent City — ragtime, European parlor music, blues and worksongs from the countryside—and then hit the road, spreading the message of early jazz to Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and elsewhere, all before he reached the age of 30. During this period, the “piano king” created performances on piano rolls, regarded as superior to sound recordings of the day because they could accommodate compositions of longer duration.

Piano-roll scholar Artis Wodehouse, producer of the highly acclaimed Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls series, has converted 12 of Jelly Roll Morton’s original piano rolls to computer data and recorded them on a modern-day player piano, the Yamaha Disklavier. The result is an unprecedented opportunity to hear Jelly Roll Morton’s compositions as he might have played them — in state-of-the-art digital sound.

Jelly Roll Morton: The Piano Rolls brings his legendary talent back into the spotlight. Wodehouse converted to computer files both Morton’s musically complete but expressionless piano rolls, as well as the contemporaneous but musically abbreviated old phonograph recordings—rich in Morton’s characteristic performance style but thin and tinny in sound. By setting the rolls side by side with the old phonograph records in computer format, she was able to reintroduce into the piano rolls the performance style lost in the roll-marking process that was Morton’s hallmark. Then the computer data was transfered to 3.5” diskette, inserted into a 9-foot Yamaha Disklavier, and recorded in the Academy of Arts and Letter by veteran producer Max Wilcox.

For the first time, Jelly Roll Morton’s full-length composition — with all their innovative breaks, polyphonies, and harmonic progressions—can be heard as if he were to sit down and play them for us today.

— from Nonesuch website

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Track list:
01. Midnight Mama 3'16"
02. Shreveport Stomps 4'02"
03. Stratford Hunch 4'14"
04. Dead Man Blues 4'49"
05. Grandpa's Spells 3'13"
06. Tin Roof Blues 3'29"
07. London Blues 3'18"
08. King Porter Stomp 2'39"
09. Sweet Man 3'27"
10. Original Jelly Roll Blues 3'43"
11. Mr. Jelly-Lord 4'16"
12. Tom Cat Blues 2'58"