The Father of Jazz: Jelly Roll Morton

This growing popularity and prevalence of Latin rhythms and music in New Orleans and elsewhere helped to influence the syncopated rhythms of early jazz. Well-known composer and trailblazer of the genre, Jelly Roll Morton learned to play these popular musical styles, especially habaneras, from his Mexican music teacher.[1] These early lessons influenced his later work and when being interviewed by Alan Lomax referred to this Latin influence as the “Spanish Tinge:”

“The difference comes in the right hand — in the syncopation, which gives it an entirely different color that really changes the color from red to blue. Now in one of my earliest tunes, “New Orleans Blues”, you can notice the Spanish tinge. In fact, if you can’t manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz.”[2]

In his own words, he attributed the ultimate success of jazz and demise of ragtime, a popular style of music in the same historical moment of the early 1900s, to the inclusion of Latin syncopation. Another early founder of jazz with ragtime roots, Buddy Bolden, also borrowed heavily from Latin syncopations and his work is rife with them, most notably his habanera based rhythm pattern known as “the big four” (see fig. 1[3]). [4] This

fig. 1 Buddy Bolden’s Big Four

blatant influence demonstrates that it was Latin syncopations that made jazz distinctive from any of the other genres that were popular at the turn of the century, most specifically ragtime. The new rhythms were exciting and bring forward momentum of a different sort than does ragtime making it popular very quickly and soon in spreads all across the country in songs such as W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” and Jelly Roll Morton’s “La Paloma.”

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[1] Fernandez, Raul A. Latin Jazz: The Perfect Combination. San Francisco: Chronicle Books in Association            with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, 2002. 16.

[2] Morton, Jelly Roll, “The Spanish Tinge,” The Library of Congress Recordings, compact disc.

[3] Image Transcribed from: Hentoff, Nat, and Albert J. McCarthy.Jazz: New Perspectives on the History of            Jazz. New York: Da Capo Press, 1975. Print.

[4] Gunter Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development, (New York, Oxford University Press,            1986), 68.