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THE GREAT JAZZ SWINDLE

For nearly three decades, the yellowing musical scores gathered dust in cardboard boxes stacked to the ceiling in a cramped French Quarter apartment.

They contain the last music by the first composer of jazz, Jelly Roll Morton.

On a spring evening more than a year ago, copies of the manuscripts were placed on music stands in New Orleans’ Le Petit Theatre. Fittingly, the long-lost scores were heard for the first time just blocks from the notorious brothels and gutbucket saloons where Morton conceived the original masterworks of jazz at the dawn of the century.

The music–strange, exotic and mystical yet breezy enough to dance to–did not simply shatter long-cherished assumptions about Morton’s art and legacy. It proved more advanced than any jazz music of its time, the late 1930s, when Morton wrote these scores as a destitute musician discarded by the industry he had helped create.

Remarkably, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton never could get this music performed.

At the end of his life, Morton no longer had a band to play his music, a record company to document it or an audience to listen to it. The gaudy showman who owned two luxury cars and more than 100 suits in Roaring ’20s Chicago was reduced to hocking his clothes for food in 1930s New York.

Like his final scores, his final lament–that the music industry robbed him of millions–fell on deaf ears. As a musician of color, a Creole from Louisiana, he was easily dismissed by the white music executives who controlled his income and grew rich off of his art.

But an analysis by the Tribune shows he was right. That, in fact, Jelly Roll Morton was the victim of the first great swindle in American recorded music.

In a historical investigation that alters fundamental understandings of the seminal composer of the Jazz Century, the Tribune has done what Morton couldn’t: pinpoint exactly how Morton was bled dry by an emerging music industry, his business associates and even those closest to him.

Morton’s side of the story is outlined in hundreds of letters discovered in the same New Orleans apartment that yielded the old musical manuscripts. The Tribune has stitched together the complete picture of Morton’s tragic decline through an examination of court and copyright records, personal letters, archival material and financial documents from New York to Los Angeles and Chicago to New Orleans.

Specifically, the Tribune found, Morton’s Chicago music publisher was picking Morton’s pockets at the very moment the musician believed he had hit the jackpot. And the very organization that collected performance royalties for Morton’s popular music denied him his money, as it did other black musicians writing what was considered insignificant “race music.”

Morton, from his freewheeling days in New Orleans and Chicago to his lonely death in Los Angeles, not only ushered in a new American art form — setting the stage for Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and every jazz great thereafter — but also served as a prototype for the exploitation of its greatest creators.

A GRAND ENTRANCE

With a cowboy hat perched precariously on his head and a bandana tied rakishly around his neck, Jelly Roll Morton walked into the Melrose Brothers Music store at 6320 S. Cottage Grove Ave. in the spring of 1923. Even without such regalia, Morton cut a striking figure, his scant 140 pounds sleekly distributed on a 5-foot-9-inch frame, his black eyes set off from golden skin, a mole dotting the side of his neck.

Even his name proclaimed his individuality. Morton’s sobriquet likely derived from a bawdy reference to sexual anatomy, or perhaps from a racy quip he made in a vaudeville show.

Morton was lured to Chicago because he wanted proper credit for his hit “Wolverine Blues,” which the Melrose brothers had published a few months earlier. The success of the tune, with its joyously optimistic spirit, was a sure sign that Chicago was ready for Morton’s brand of New Orleans jazz.

“I am Jelly Roll Morton,” he announced as he entered the Melrose store, and he held the floor thereafter.

“He talked constantly for two hours, and we didn’t get a word in edgewise,” Lester Melrose recalled in Down Beat magazine years later. “All of the monologue concerned how good he was and damned if he didn’t prove it.”

All Morton had to do to back up his boasts that day was sit down at a piano and unspool the music he had been refining for fully two decades.

Playing piano as a teenager in the brothels of New Orleans, Morton learned how to seduce an audience with blues-laced melodies and coyly syncopated rhythms — the building blocks of early jazz.

Unlike many first-generation jazz musicians, Morton learned how to read and write music — an opportunity often accorded to Creoles in class-conscious, turn-of-the-century New Orleans but rarely to dark-skinned blacks. Armed with this precious information, Morton immersed himself in the culture of New Orleans’ Storyville, the red light district where piano players competed ferociously for gigs and the flashiest man always won.

Though recent scholarship maintains that Morton was born in 1890, that is contradicted by Morton’s letters and other documents, which support the composer’s claim that he was born in 1885. Whatever the birth date, the timing for Morton’s emergence in Storyville in the first decade of the century hardly could have been more opportune, for all kinds of music were blossoming in one of America’s most cosmopolitan cities. French opera, Italian melodies, Western European symphonies, Negro spirituals, black parade music — all that and more were in the air.

More than anyone, Jelly Roll Morton epitomized the new sound of American music. Here were populist tunes that sounded positively raucous compared with the refined European classics of another era. Yet jazz, even in its embryonic forms, also was more technically demanding and complex than anything American music had yet produced–and Morton helped make it so.

New Orleans’ unique amalgam of genres permeated Morton’s art, enabling him to develop a repertoire of startlingly original material.

Whether Morton was evoking the sounds of the jungle in “Animule Dance” or articulating hot rhythms in “Kansas City Stomps,” he beguiled audiences in saloons across the Gulf Coast, along the Mississippi River, up the West Coast, down in Tijuana, Mexico, and up in Vancouver, Canada. Though details of Morton’s early travels had been difficult to determine until now, they are laid plain in Morton’s newly unearthed scrapbook, examined by the Tribune in California.

Morton’s arrival brought a shot of energy into the Melrose store, and the place needed all the help it could get. Walter and Lester Melrose, two of four brothers born in southeastern Illinois, near a speck on the map called Sumner, were not exactly destined for success in big-time music publishing.

Walter Melrose, who focused on the publishing end of the business while Lester minded the store, was Morton’s opposite number in every way. His short, stocky build, conservative dress and soft-spoken manner rendered him nearly undetectable when standing in the same room as the loquacious, dressed-to-the-hilt composer.

Walter loved music but never studied it, recalls his daughter, Mary Melrose, who today lives in Tucson, Ariz. Though Walter noodled at the piano, “he was not very good,” she says, adding that he never was heard to sing a note. Lester Melrose possessed even less musical talent, she adds.

She recalls a family gathering where Lester and Walter sat at the piano, Walter playing and Lester singing, “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain” until everyone begged them to stop.

After serving in the Army in WWI, the duo opened a music shop in rented space at 6311 S. Cottage Grove Ave. By 1923, the year of Morton’s entree into their lives, the Melrose Brothers Music store had moved across the street, where two large display windows invited passersby to peer inside. They saw a showroom crowded with Steger & Sons pianos, Conn band instruments, recordings from Gennett, Columbia and Vocalion, as well as an array of piano rolls, phonographs and sheet music. All this was set in indirect lighting and surrounded by light blue walls.

Walter also was a songwriter, penning and copyrighting words and music for such maudlin and obscure tunes as “Since I Lost You” and “My Old Home of Yesterday.”

The music store never fared well, though it sat at the foot of the elevated train platform south of the University of Chicago and close to the Tivoli Theater, a Balaban & Katz movie palace that also featured stage shows. Like most independent shops, Melrose Brothers Music couldn’t compete with chain stores that bought sheet music in large quantities and sold it cheap. Giant operations such as Woolworth, which in 1923 ran at least three stores within a mile of 63rd and Cottage Grove, had no trouble undercutting small fries like the Melrose brothers.

Everything changed for Walter and Lester Melrose, however, the day that Jelly Roll Morton paraded in.

Though Morton was a walking encyclopedia of jazz tunes, he never sold them as sheet music because –like most of the old-time piano professors — he was terrified of publication. Morton came of age when hot piano players from New Orleans to Chicago made their money dazzling listeners with the originality of their riffs and the novelty of their keyboard tricks. Morton, for instance, could make the piano roar like a lion by rolling his left forearm across the low end of the keyboard, as he did in “Tiger Rag.”

To colorful piano men like Morton, these keyboard stunts — as well as the unusually piquant chords and complicated rhythms that went with them — represented hard-won techniques to be protected, not shared.

By the 1910s and ’20s, however, sheet music was becoming the hot commodity in America. Upwardly mobile families aspired to have a piano in the living room or parlor, and sheet music was an essential accessory, with popular ditties selling millions of copies.

The moment clearly had come for Morton to publish an already deep reservoir of music. Because fellow New Orleans musicians such as cornetists Joe “King” Oliver and Louis Armstrong were taking over Chicago nightlife, Morton would have no trouble finding champions of his music. Morton’s style hardly could have been a better fit for these musicians or the rowdy, colorful joints they played. And with the Great Migration of Southern blacks to Chicago already under way, the composer would not lack for listeners attuned to music evoking the spirit of home.

Though jazz fans and musicians still primarily were black, that was changing rapidly as white America began to discover the music. And an expanding audience meant there would be more money from jazz hits — both for publishers and composers alike.

PERFECTLY AT HOME

Though Morton spent brief stints in Chicago as early as 1910 and ’17, this time he stayed, transforming himself from showman-entertainer to composer-bandleader, from itinerant piano player to codifier of a new art form. The Melrose brothers arranged the business deals that no black composer in 1923 had the connections or resources to consummate.

Once Morton joined Melrose, which in 1923 ran trade-paper advertisements trumpeting him as “staff writer,” the firm wasted no time in publishing the composer’s tunes and arranging for him to record them.

Though the Melrose brothers drew Morton’s ire by retitling “The Wolverines” as “Wolverine Blues” — this stomping piece is anything but blues — they otherwise made nary a misstep in publishing, recording and promoting Morton in the ’20s. In 1923 alone, they brought to the world such instant Morton classics as the ebullient “Grandpa’s Spells,” the rhythmically unpredictable “London Blues” and the melodically beguiling “The Pearls.”

These tunes, and others, sold so briskly that by the close of 1923 Walter Melrose moved the music publishing business downtown to 119 N. Clark St. (on a block later leveled to build the Daley Center), while Lester continued to operate the South Side music store with a new partner. The location for the publishing business was enviable, in the old Hamlin’s Grand Opera House, a magnet for vaudeville agents and music publishers, including Irving Berlin’s Chicago office.

While music legend holds that the duo ran the music publishing empire through the late 1930s, in fact Lester quit the music store and Walter closed it, buying out his brother’s interest in the music-publishing business on April 23, 1925, according to court records. The two parted ways commercially and artistically, with Lester becoming the foremost blues record producer in Chicago within a decade.

In the mid-1920s Morton’s tunes rapidly turned Melrose Brothers publishing into a musical powerhouse. The company was acquiring a growing inventory of blues and Dixieland songs, but Morton’s masterpieces were the firm’s central asset and primary claim to fame: From 1924 to ’26 alone, Melrose brought out Morton’s “King Porter Stomp,” the composer’s single most enduring work; “New Orleans Blues,” which he wrote more than two decades earlier; “Wild Man Blues,” to which they inaccurately gave co-composer credit to Louis Armstrong (perhaps thinking Satchmo’s name would help sell copies); and many more.

In addition to his role as hitmaker for Melrose, Morton played a significant role behind the scenes in Melrose’s growing empire.

“With my general assistance by 1924 (Melrose) was considered a first line publisher,” Morton complained to the U.S. Department of Justice in a 1940 letter. “Melrose knew nothing about music. Through my advice lots of successful things were done,” added Morton, citing Melrose’s acquisition of songs by W.C. Handy and Louis Armstrong.

This expansion propelled the Melrose publishing house in 1926 to prime real estate at 177 N. State St., adjacent to the Chicago Theatre, the heart of Chicago’s Loop entertainment district.

Morton never had it so good. The success of his newly published music and his recordings for Gennett and then Victor — in sessions arranged by Walter Melrose — made Morton a bona fide star, awash in more cash than he ever had seen. With Morton’s sound in great demand, money flowed in from live performances, recording dates and sheet music sales.

The listening public — primarily Southern blacks, packed into substandard apartments in a newly emerging South Side ghetto — danced to this music in nightclubs, relaxed to it at rent parties in neighborhood flats and savored it on the new “race records” marketed specifically to urban blacks.

Morton’s popular Victor recordings of tunes such as “Black Bottom Stomp,” “Milenberg Joys,” “Mr. Jelly Lord” and “Sidewalk Blues” gave the record industry the most sublime documents of New Orleans jazz ever made, then or since.

On the road across the Midwest in the ’20s, Morton and His Red Hot Peppers (a changing lineup of half a dozen musicians) averaged a then-staggering $1,500 a night. The band traveled in high style in the Morton tour bus, the leader in his own roomy Lincoln.

The success showed on every inch of Morton. He gilded himself with diamonds literally from head to toe. They glimmered on his fingers, tie-pin, watch, belt buckle, sock supporters and even on a front tooth, the unlikely setting for a half-carat rock.

His music was everywhere in Chicago. You could hear it across the South Side, particularly along The Stroll, the all-night strip of State Street jazz clubs, black theaters and after-hours spots running from 31st to 35th Streets. In clubs such as the Dreamland Ballroom and Joe’s Paradise, the air was thick with smoke, the stages filled with chorus girls and the tiny dance floors packed to capacity.

The South Side practically had a monopoly on jazz and its best musicians. New Orleans’ music scene had imploded since the closing of Storyville in 1917, and New York still was more enamored by society quadrilles than stomps and blues.

Chicago in the ’20s was a wide-open city where visitors to the Pleasures Inn could ogle, in near disbelief, a man in drag who called himself Gloria Swanson and hit notes higher than Mary Garden ever did at the Chicago Opera. Or they could wander to boxer Jack Johnson’s Cabaret D’Champion, where the spittoons were famously made of gold.

In these hedonistic places, Jelly Roll Morton’s music was perfectly at home.

UNDERHANDED DEALINGS

What Morton didn’t realize, amid the sensual attractions of Chicago nightlife in the ’20s, was that the man who was helping him make money also was skimming off the top. Walter Melrose was coolly double- and triple-dipping on money due the composer, records show.

Documents in the Library of Congress reveal that after Melrose properly submitted copyright claims on four of Morton’s biggest tunes — correctly listing Morton as composer and Melrose as publisher — he did something more. Within months of filing the original copyrights on “Milenberg Joys,” “Sidewalk Blues,” “Sweetheart O’ Mine” and “Dixie Knows,” Melrose listed himself as lyricist.

As Morton’s publisher, Melrose had the responsibility of filing copyrights, and he liberally took advantage of it by becoming a collaborator on works of music he had no hand in creating. In this way, he could receive both publisher and composer royalties for sales of sheet music and recordings.

Melrose’s ruse worked brilliantly, yielding Morton extra money from Morton tunes that remained popular in swing-band arrangements long after the public had forgotten Morton’s name. Melrose’s lyrics were not exactly inspired, as in this verse from “Sidewalk Blues”: “My baby’s gone and I got the blues/It sure is awful to be lonesome like me/Worried, weary, up in a tree.”

The practice of attaching lyrics to already completed musical works was not unheard of among 1920s music publishers, who operated in a virtually unregulated business. For instance, music store owners who knew Morton in California, the Spikes brothers, added lyrics to “The Wolverines” before Melrose published it.

But Morton did not approve of Melrose’s additions to his work and said so explicitly in a letter obtained by the Tribune from the U.S. Department of Justice. The letter, dated June 10, 1940, and addressed to Assistant Atty. Gen. Thurmond W. Arnold of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, contains a revelatory phrase buried on page 4: “Walter Melrose, never wrote a hit in his life. Melrose is my publisher, he (Melrose) inserted words to some of my hit tunes without my knowledge or permission & is receiving (royalties).”

This was a particularly egregious act in the case of Morton’s music, because his 1920s scores were conceived and endure as instrumental music. Adding lyrics to Morton’s scores would be akin to adding words to a Brahms Symphony. Morton, in fact, was one of the few jazz bandleaders in America during the 1920s and ’30s who never employed a staff vocalist in live performance or on recordings.

To this day, Melrose’s lyrics to Morton’s tunes remain invisible. Yet Melrose’s strategy enabled him to collect twice on the same Morton composition, a total of 75 percent of royalties — whether or not lyrics are used in any recording or performance.

And Morton was not the only composer Melrose hustled in this way.

The publisher similarly added lyrics to the music of Earl Hines (“Midnight in New Orleans” and “Lazy Mornin”‘), Charlie Davis (“Copenhagen”), the New Orleans Rhythm Kings (“Tin Roof Blues,” later reworked as the 1954 Jo Stafford hit “Make Love to Me”) and Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman and Frank Trumbauer (“High Society”), according to an examination of copyright records.

NEW YORK BECKONS

By 1927, toward the end of Morton’s residence in Chicago, his life began to change. He was smitten by a stage dancer, Mabel Bertrand, whom he met at the Plantation Cafe, on East 35th Street, on The Stroll. Like Morton, she grew up in New Orleans, a physician’s daughter who as a teenager worked her way across Europe in a song-and-dance duo. Within a year of their meeting, the two were living together.

Their courtship flowered as the music industry was maturing and its corporate presence in New York was expanding. Increasingly, Chicago’s big musicians were heading to Manhattan, where Duke Ellington was making a name for himself at the Cotton Club, and where Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Sidney Bechet and others would head before the decade was over.

The city belatedly was beginning to catch on to the new music, and it was only natural that Morton would head to the next hot spot.

But this time, Morton did something he never had done before: He brought a woman, Bertrand, with him. Though Morton developed a notorious reputation for seducing women in every city he visited, he always left them behind. In Los Angeles, for years he romanced a woman named Anita Gonzalez, an old New Orleans flame, but they split up before he came to Chicago.

With Bertrand at his side in 1928, Morton was ready to take Manhattan. Unfortunately, from the instant Morton arrived in New York he saw the value of his name plummet faster than the stock market would a year later. Ellington, Calloway, Fletcher Henderson and other young jazz bandleaders — whom Morton rightly regarded as beneficiaries of his ideas and innovations — had the town sewn up. The only job Morton could get in Manhattan was leading the house band at the Rose Danceland, at 125th Street and 7th Avenue, where women dirty-danced with paying customers, 10 cents a turn.

In 1930, RCA bought Victor Records and promptly canceled its contract with Morton. Rejection notices began piling up in his mailbox in the following years.

“Dear Mr. Martan,” began one note from an Omaha booking agency, insulting him from the outset by mangling his name. And Gennett, the minuscule label in Richmond, Ind., that was the first to record Morton, in 1923, wasted few words: “We doubt . . . if your plan would be of interest to us.”

Incredibly, Morton saved each of these letters, meticulously taping them into his personal scrapbook.

He fell so low on funds that in 1935 he fled Manhattan to become a fight promoter in Washington, D.C. His undistinguished roster of would-be pugilists got him nowhere, and soon he was playing piano in a saloon that changed its name every few months, from Blue Moon Cafe to Jungle Inn to Music Inn.

He worked three years in this squalid room, where one night a patron stabbed him in a brawl. Morton, depressed by his surroundings and his sinking stature, believed he had hit bottom. He was wrong.

ABOUT THIS SERIES

Howard Reich is the Tribune’s jazz critic, and William Gaines is a Tribune investigative reporter.

Reich covered the world premiere of Jelly Roll Morton’s lost scores in New Orleans in 1998 and subsequently examined a cache of Morton letters, records, sheet music and other documents housed in the Historic New Orleans Collection.

The historical collection revealed a previously unknown chapter in Morton’s life and served as a starting point for the Tribune’s investigation.

To assess the validity of Morton’s accusations against his publishers, record companies and music licensing organizations, the two reporters located copyright records to show ownership of musical compositions and to trace royalties due.

They also conducted interviews and examined public documents in Arizona, California, Illinois, New York City and Washington D.C., including congressional files, civil lawsuits and probate records, corporate filings and material from the U.S. Department of Justice. In California, they located Morton’s scrapbook.

———-

– Coming Monday

Back in New York, Jelly Roll Morton pursues a doomed campaign for the money he believes is owed him.

– Coming Tuesday

After Morton’s death, friends and strangers battle for the composer’s millions, and a fan uncovers his brilliant last music.