Jelly Roll Morton

Gan Jam

Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941) was a great American composer who claimed to have been 'The Inventor of Jazz' - he certainly was one of the first jazz pianists to notate music.
This jazz 'big band' arrangement dates from early 1939 when Morton hoped to make a comeback in the popular music scene of New York, but health problems kept him from performing; so the five arrangements he did of his works for this instrumentation have languished in obscurity until now, with the publication of this work. The instrumentation reflects the band size popular in the 1930s (four saxophones, six brass and four rhythm) and is not typical of the music he performed and published in his heyday in the 1920s.
Also unusual, notes the editor: 'Unique in Morton's output, GanJam takes him beyond his usual melodic and , particularly, harmonic means. The harmonic language here is unlike that in any other Morton work; it is obviously meant to be unsettled tonally for much of the time and even to produce a tentative conclusion.'
With prefaces by Alfred Lemmon, Director of The Williams Research Center of The Historic New Orleans Collection, and James Dapogny, the editor of this work.