Crash Course Timeline, No. 19: Fats Waller, the "Son of Stride Piano"(?)

The maniacal look is on- and off-brand.

I didn’t dive too deep into stride piano - for instance, I didn’t even touch back to James P. Johnson, one of its originators - but I did take some notes on what typifies its sound. Most simply:

“Proper playing of stride jazz involves a subtle rhythmic tension between the left hand which is close to the established tempo, and the right hand, which is often slightly anticipatory.”

Next, a little more on the technical side:

“The left hand characteristically plays a four-beat pulse with a single bass note, octave, major seventh or major tenth interval on the first and third beats, and a chord on the second and fourth beats. Occasionally this pattern is reversed by placing the chord on the downbeat and bass notes on the upbeat. Unlike performers of the ragtime popularized by Scott Joplin, stride players' left hands span greater distances on the keyboard.”

That last note matters because, like a lot of American popular music, stride piano borrowed defining elements from ragtime - e.g., syncopation - and it started as the original form faded out of popular music. It had its pioneers - someone dubbed James P. Johnson the “Father of Stride” - but one of his pupils would out-strip him. And by some distance.

“Fats was the most relaxed man I ever saw in a studio, and so he made everybody else relaxed. After a balance had been taken, we'd just need one take to make a side, unless it was a kind of difficult number.”
- Gene Sedric, clarinetist and long-time collaborator

“Larger than life with his sheer size and magnetic personality, [Fats] Waller was known to enjoy alcohol and female attention in abundance.”
- A Biography biography

Crash Course Timeline, No. 4: Jelly Roll Morton...Which Was as Dirty as It Sounds

That's really him. "Jelly roll" is a tough search.

Jelly Roll Morton claimed to have invented jazz in 1902, which, according to one record would have made him 12 years old at the time and, according to another, 17. Most people (or Wikipedia, at least) has 1890 for his year of birth, but Morton claimed 1885. He didn’t have a birth certificate, so the world may never know…

…he does, however, popularly get credit for producing the first published jazz composition: the semi-autobiographical “Jelly Roll Blues” way back in 1915. (That version will sound pretty damn ragtime, by the way.) His specific contribution aside, Morton became one of the first great names in jazz. Though he was multi-instrumentalist, he mostly played and composed on the piano. He operated all over the country and wrote and arranged scores of jazz numbers and at a time when many of his contemporaries either refused to or couldn’t, as well as ragtime, “stomps,” and several at least titled as “blues.” By leading one of the first “big bands,” he popularized the idea before the big band/swing era of the 1930s. For all that, Morton didn’t leave much for the historical record - and what he did leave, historians take with a grain of salt (bit of a fabulist) - a detail music critic named Scott Yanow summed up like so:

“Jelly Roll Morton did himself a lot of harm posthumously by exaggerating his worth...Morton's accomplishments as an early innovator are so vast that he did not really need to stretch the truth.”

Whenever it happened, Jelly Roll Morton was born in New Orleans as Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe. Reading between the sources, his family seemed reasonably well-to-do, or at least well-established in New Orleans’ Creole community. Squaring that thought with some details of his upbringing takes some doing. His father, a bricklayer named Edward Joseph Lamothe, left when he was three. Louise Hermance Monette, “a domestic worker,” raised him as a single mother until she married a man named William Mouton shortly after Monette's lover left. According to Wikipedia’s account, “Morton” came from an anglicization of “Mouton.” Other sources say differently…

Blackpast.org offers the most romanticized take on his early life, not least by accepting 1885 as his date of birth. It also names a working, lightly-itinerant trombonist named E.P. LaMenthe as his father, and the figure who “encouraged” Morton’s musical abilities. Another source, 64 Parishes, shrugs off the mechanics of his childhood, but brings in a detail that supports both Morton coming from a family of some standing and a particular influence of music within it: