Free The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia Page A

Broadway musical based on Morton’s life and times, Jelly’s Last Jam , conveniently relied on other composers for much of its score—almost as if the Morton persona were sufficient, while the artistry could be safely ignored.
    But, in the final analysis, Morton’s position in jazz history depends on none of these superfluities, neither the boasting nor the bordello sidelines. Morton’s most important legacy lies in his body of compositions, recordings, piano rolls, reminiscences, and lucid commentary on the jazz idiom. It is through these that he earned his place as the most consummate craftsman of the traditional New Orleans style.

THE NEW ORLEANS DIASPORA
    One of the supreme ironies of the history of New Orleans jazz is that so much of it took place in Chicago. By the early 1920s, the center of the jazz world had clearly shifted northward. New Orleans musicians continued to dominate the idiom, but they were now operating far afield from their native soil. Well before the middle of the decade, a large cadre of major New Orleans jazz musicians were making their reputations in other locales—Jelly Roll Morton left New Orleans around 1908; Freddie Keppard departed in 1914 (if not earlier); Sidney Bechet in 1916, Jimmie Noone in 1917, King Oliver in 1918, Kid Ory in 1919, Johnny Dodds around that same time, Baby Dodds in 1921, and Louis Armstrong in 1922. These moves may have begun as brief stints on the road, but in the end proved all but permanent. The vast majority of the New Orleans diaspora never returned to their home state except for brief visits.
    This exodus was anything but a purely musical phenomenon. Between the years 1916 and 1919, a half-million African Americans left the South for more tolerant communities in the North, with almost one million more following in their wake in the 1920s. This vast population shift, which has since come to be known as the Great Migration, encompassed the whole range of black society, from doctors and lawyers to musicians and ministers, from teachers and merchants to artisans and manual laborers. Musicians moved north for the same reasons that motivated other groups: the search for a better life, for greater opportunities to work, to support a family, to enjoy a modicum of personal freedom—options that were much harder for an African American to pursue in the segregated South. As a result, in a host of major cities—Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia—the black population more than tripled between 1910 and 1930.
    Certainly there were outstanding musicians who stayed behind in New Orleans, and some even had a chance to record in their native city. Hear, for example, the distinguished sides made by Sam Morgan’s band in New Orleans during 1927 with their uncanny anticipation of the later four-beats-to-the-bar Kansas City swing style. Yet, for the most part, ambitious players intent on advancing their careers in jazz during the 1920s had little choice but to look beyond their home turf. In retrospect, we can see that only those who departed made major reputations, both for themselves and for the musical riches of their hometown. In this regard, New Orleans was no different than Memphis, Clarksdale, and the other centers of distinctive local and regional performance styles in the South. Nashville has emerged as the only exception, the one city that could build national reputations for its homegrown talent, and serve as a destination rather than a starting point for celebrated music careers. New Orleans, for all its fame as a city built on nightlife and entertainment, never achieved that level of self-sufficiency. Bechet, Oliver, Morton, Armstrong, and others were able to put New Orleans jazz on the musical map of American culture, but only by leaving the Big Easy behind.
    White New Orleans jazz musicians also made the move to Chicago during this period, but in their case the motivation was not to escape racial intolerance, but to tap the larger economic base