Jelly Roll Morton - "Ganjam"

To the extent that he's remembered at all, jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton's legacy lies in his oft-quoted (and misunderstood) claim to have invented jazz in 1902 and in his immortal 1926/7 recordings with his Red Hot Peppers (including such masterpieces as "Black Bottom Stomp" and "Grandpa's Spells"). Morton spent most of the years after 1927 nearly broke, struggling to scrape by in various setups around the country. His career experienced a minor resurgance in the last 3 years of his life, beginning with an 8-hour series of recorded interviews for the Library of Congress with musicologist Alan Lomax in 1938 and followed by a final spate of recording sessions that would produce some mostly middling bandwork (with some exceptions, marred by musicians that couldn't match their elite Red Hot Pepper counterparts) and some of the finest solo sides of his career. He nonetheless died broke in 1941, remembered by Down Beat (see above) but already forgotten by most of the record-buying populace, who had moved over to swing at least a decade earlier and subsequently dismissed him as an artifact of what was then mostly referred to as Hot Jazz.

To his dying day, however, Morton continued planning for a resurgance, and unbeknowst to them - and to virtually anyone for decades after - he had, in fact, been absorbing the musical changes to which he appeared to so stubbornly be refusing to adapt. In fact, one of his last compositions, the cryptically-titled "Ganjam," not only is arranged for an adapted big band, but even looks past swing, presaging the swirling haze and carefully-measured dissonance that would characterize some of the finest work of Duke Ellington, and in particular, Morton acolyte Charles Mingus, even more than 20 years later. In their excellent biography Jelly's Blues, Howard Reich and William Gaines describe the piece as unfolding "like the first movement of a symphony - complete with primary and secondary themes, a development section, and a recapitulation." To their thinking, had "Ganjam" - with its "astringent chords, bizarre key changes, and exotic scales of a sort that would not be heard in jazz until at least the early 1950s" - been heard in Morton's lifetime, contemporary musicians would have had to acknowledge him as "the most forward-thinking and accomplished composer in jazz."

"Ganjam" wasn't heard then, though, nor at any point until six years after its discovery in the archives of Morton archivist William Russell following his death in 1992, when it received its inaugural performance in May 1998. With the exception of a handful of subsequent live performances, it would not be heard again for 7 years, after which the piece was finally recorded by trumpeter Randy Sandke for his 2005 album Outside In. The album is actually bookended by two versions of "Ganjam," the first a wonderful arrangement by Sandke, and the closer, "Ganjam" as written down by Morton himself. It's an astounding piece for anyone familiar with his work, containing plenty of Morton hallmarks that help with orientation - for instance, the famous Spanish Tinge or The Roll's beloved breaks - but otherwise bearing little resemblance to anything else in his catalog. (One truly wonders what he could have done had his highly preventable death been postponed even a few years.) Sandke's recording of Morton's arrangement can be heard below, available online in its entirety for the first time; interested parties are encouraged to support the artist by picking up the track (or the entire album) here.