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It Like to Broke My Heart |
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a glittering world of sound and melody would have poured from our bandstands with Jelly Roll as our conductor, wearing his wine-colored jacket, smiling that big personality smile, de�manding only that we follow those black dots?
While Mister Jelly Roll, hemmed into the obscurity of The Jungle Inn, was making such bids for attention, real recogni�tion was coming his way without his being aware of it�not from the big gangsters of music or from the impressionable throngs of the Twenties or from the fancy ladies of New Orleans pleasure houses�but now from a growing army of young people who had discovered for themselves that our na�tional musical idiom was jazz, that New Orleans jazz was the hottest and that Jelly Roll Morton was one of the hottest red peppers on the vine.
Hot jazz fans began drifting into the Jungle Inn to watch in reverence "those two perfect hands/' Frightfully serious and sophisticated jazz critics brought their notebooks and began to write articles for the little jazz magazines. (The *8Gs was the period of the little jazz review.) Jelly Roll now had backing in his disputes with the "hipsters" and "hot jive boys'*; the nickels in the juke box began to fall on his old hits, The Pearls and Wolverine Blues. Jelly's smiles grew less forced; The Jungle Inn could be almost pleasant with these young people to listen. And he'd play for them by the hour, digging up the fine old New Orleans tunes, limbering up his fingers on the intricate polyphony of his own compositions, smiling, with the world again in a jug and the stopper in his hand, saying to these young antiquarians of jazz�"One of the old ones? Well now, this k no doubt one of the oldest; this one has whisk-ers . . .
Although at first Mister Jelly did not appreciate being regarded as a historical figure, feeling that he and his music were both very much alive, he was nothing if not precocious. He had one of those memories that could regurgitate the exact phrases of a street-corner argument twenty years gone; he liked to talk almost as much as to play piano�and he had a |
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