Mister Jelly Roll
Monterey gives Wynton Marsalis its seventeenth Jazz Legends Award tonight, a night before he opens the 69th festival with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Later, a young folklorist who called jazz his worst enemy sits at Jelly Roll Morton's feet in Washington in 1938 and goes running for fifty blank discs.
LioraMonterey hands Wynton Marsalis its Jazz Legends Award tonight, then puts him on the stage tomorrow. Today's record is Jeff Parker playing Coltrane. And later, fifty blank discs. It's Thursday. Let's go.
LioraIt's Thursday, September 24th. This is The Daily Quintet. I'm Liora. Five stories from the world of jazz, in about ten minutes. Here we go.
One. The Lead: Monterey hands Wynton Marsalis its seventeenth Jazz Legends Award tonight at Spanish Bay
LioraTonight Monterey gives Wynton Marsalis its highest honor. Tomorrow night he goes to work.
On September 24th, at the Jazz Legends Gala at Spanish Bay, Marsalis receives the Monterey Jazz Festival's seventeenth Jazz Legends Award, first inaugurated in 2007. The festival lists the company he joins: Dave Brubeck, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Quincy Jones. Monterey's gala page still shows last year, so no start time and no price.
LioraThen the work. The sixty ninth Monterey Jazz Festival opens tomorrow and runs through Sunday. As scheduled, the Jimmy Lyons Stage starts at seven with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Marsalis, special guest Cecile McLorin Salvant. At eight forty five, the Eddie Palmieri Experience, an all star celebration of the man the festival calls the Sun of Latin Music, who died in August of 2025 at 88.
One more thing stands behind the award. DownBeat reported in February that Marsalis will step down as Jazz at Lincoln Center's artistic and managing director. On what comes after, he told DownBeat: "I always have ideas. They're endless."
Two. Listen to This: Jeff Parker's recording of John Coltrane's "Miles' Mode" came out on Nonesuch on
LioraToday's record is one track, and it came out yesterday.
Nonesuch released the guitarist Jeff Parker's recording of John Coltrane's "Miles' Mode" on Wednesday, September 23rd, timed to the centennial. Parker on guitar, Chris Speed on tenor saxophone, Kaveh Rastegar on electric bass, Aaron Steele on drums.
Here is the tip, and Parker wrote it himself. "It's an honor to pay tribute to him on the occasion of his centennial with three of my favorite musicians from the Los Angeles music community." Three of his favorites, from one town. Play it listening for that.
Now the release desk. Blue Note puts out "Memory Bomb" tomorrow, the label debut of the pianist Kiefer, made with Shibo and CARRTOONS. Kiefer calls his style Over The Breaks, jazz improvisation and hip hop beat making. The download is ten ninety nine.
LioraWashington, 1938. A young folklorist who called jazz his worst enemy sits on the floor at Jelly Roll Morton's feet, on a chamber music stage, and by his own account runs upstairs to ask for fifty blank discs. Sekou has the story.
Three. The Bridge: A young folklorist who called jazz his worst enemy sat on the floor at Jelly Roll
LioraOne true story from this music's history, every day. Sekou tells it, I ask the questions. Sekou, where are we?
SekouWashington, D.C., 1938. U Street. Upstairs, over a hamburger joint, a small club with a low ceiling. The man pouring the drinks also greets the customers, plays the piano, and owns part of the place, with a partner named Cordelia Lyle. His name is Jelly Roll Morton. The British broadcaster Alistair Cooke said finding him there "was like meeting the President at a shoe-shine parlor."
On March 26th, Robert Ripley's radio show, Believe It or Not, introduces W. C. Handy as the originator of jazz, stomps and blues. Morton answers with a letter. "By this announcement you have done me a great injustice." And: "I, myself, happened to be creator in the year 1902."
LioraDid he mean it?
SekouWhat he meant is still argued. His friend Roy Carew, who edited that letter, said he simply meant he had created piano jazz.
NPR once told the next part as a discovery. Alan Lomax, a folklorist at the Library of Congress, did drop in at the club, on a tip from Cooke. But by two accounts, one of them Lomax's own, Morton came to the Library himself. Lomax remembered that he wanted to correct the history of jazz. Lomax did not even care for jazz. His words: "jazz was my worst enemy." He meant the jazz on the radio, crowding out the folk music he was collecting.
On May 23rd, they begin. The stage of the Coolidge Auditorium, the Library's chamber music hall. Busts of composers in their niches, Beethoven and Brahms among them. Morton at the grand piano. Lomax, 23, on the floor at his feet, with two battery-powered disc recorders behind him and one cheap crystal microphone on a metal stand.
LioraWhat does he play first?
SekouAs Lomax remembered it, he started with a folk song. Did Morton know "Alabama Bound"? He played, Lomax said, "about the most beautiful 'Alabama Bound' that I had ever heard."
Lomax ran all the way upstairs, he said, to his chief, Harold Spivacke, and asked permission to use fifty blank discs. He had set out, he wrote, "to make a few records." In the end, there were fifty-four.
LioraAnd what's on them?
SekouTalk, and music. What won Lomax over was the talk. He said he realized "this man spoke the English language in a more beautiful way than anybody I'd ever heard." New Orleans funerals, parades, Mardi Gras. How jazz works. His rule: "Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm." Time magazine said he talked and played almost every day for a month, and there was one last session in December. The Lomax archive calls it the first recorded oral history in jazz.
In the fall of 1938, between the sessions, a customer stabbed him at the club. On an icy Christmas Eve, he and his wife, Mabel, drove north. He died in Los Angeles in 1941, of heart failure.
The discs stayed at the Library. Harold Spivacke, the chief Lomax ran upstairs to, had to write at least two letters a day explaining they were not available to the public. An edited set came out in 1947. The whole thing, uncut, came out on Rounder Records in 2005. Sixty-seven years after the first session.
LioraHe came to correct the history of jazz. It took sixty-seven years for all of it to come out.
That's The Bridge. Back to today, right after this.
Four. On the Road: Birdland runs its twenty fifth Coltrane Revisited and Dizzy's Club sells out both
LioraTonight, coast to coast.
Tonight's ticket first.
If I had one ticket tonight, it's Birdland in New York, and the run it calls its twenty fifth annual Coltrane Revisited. Seven and nine thirty. Tonight the club's own personnel line reads Troy Roberts, Helen Sung, Lonnie Plaxico, Steve Smith. Forty five seventy six to fifty six oh six.
Now the sweep. Also in New York, Dizzy's Club calls tonight "Expressions of Infinity." Rudresh Mahanthappa and Ron Blake on saxophones, Brandee Younger on harp, Geoffrey Keezer, Noriko Ueda, Ryan Sands. Seven and nine, both sold out. The late session at ten forty five is fifteen dollars.
In New Orleans, Snug Harbor has Yusa and World of Rhythms at seven thirty and nine thirty. Forty one thirty.
LioraIn Chicago, Jazz Showcase opens four nights with the Isaiah Spencer Quartet, at eight and ten. Twenty five dollars.
In Los Angeles, Catalina bills "Walk on By, The Music of Dionne Warwick," by Nina Lares with Todd Hunter. Doors at seven, show at eight thirty, forty one oh five.
Scullers in Boston and MCG Jazz in Pittsburgh list nothing tonight. Kansas City's Green Lady Lounge says it is temporarily closed after an HVAC fire.
Five. One More Note: Census records put Blind Lemon Jefferson's birth on this date in 1893, near Wortham
LioraSeptember 24th, 1893. A farm at Couchman, Texas, near Wortham.
The Texas State Historical Association says census records put Blind Lemon Jefferson's birth on that day. The Handbook prints the catch itself: on his draft registration he wrote October 26th, 1894.
He started in Dallas around 1912, in Deep Ellum and on Central Track. A Paramount scout took him to Chicago in 1925. From 1926 to 1929, a hundred and ten sides, counting alternate takes.
"Matchbox Blues." "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean."
Outro
LioraThat's the Quintet. If today's show earned it, follow The Daily Quintet wherever you listen.
The Daily Quintet is an AI-crafted production, researched and checked by humans. Every listing you heard came from the venue or the festival's own organizer.
That's your Thursday. I'm Liora. See you tomorrow.