Jelly's Last Jam

I went to this show wanting to like it.  It had been billed at our local theater all through Covid, so it was time to hear a Broadway interpretation of Jelly Roll Morton's music.  You can imagine.  As I recall most Broadway musicals with jazz content miss the mark, mainly because they don't swing.  Swing you say?  What is that?  There is that one that did work.  Can't remember the name, but a song had "greasy" in the lyrics.  Okay, I haven't seen enough of them, but "Sophisticated Ladies" had no story line.  While musical reviews in the "Follies" style have a deep background in Broadway, putting jazz on the stage is risky, at least today.  Back in the Roaring Twenties (Ziegfield!) jazz was in its heyday, so hearing or feeling swing music was the norm.  Trying to add a story or dramatic tension and release is a whole other challenge.  This story and its accompanying libretto are the crux of a Broadway musical.  You must have a story not unlike a Hollywood film.  Jelly's Last Jam had a bit of a story, but not much of one.  Jelly was a narcissist and openly he put down everyone who was not him.  As the self-professed inventor of jazz, we understand this was a core trait of his personality.  He was an egotist.  Understood!  I was prepared for this braggadocio.  I, as both a composer and jazz musician, was more interested in how they would depict Early Jazz from New Orleans on a Broadway stage.  I knew it would be difficult, and I all ready had listened to the soundtrack.  It didn't appeal to me, not because it was uninteresting, but it was difficult and meandering.  The songs in the show didn't sound like music from Jelly Roll Morton.  How did I know?  I have been studying Early Jazz for several years, and I have listened to his music.  I knew he was a Creole, so when Louisiana passed Jim Crow laws, musically educated and talented performers were reduced to the status of freed slaves.  They lost their symphony and opera house jobs and resorted to jazz to make a living.  An interesting aside is that the banjo played in Early Jazz was a four-stringed affair very unlike the five-stringed instrument that became paramount in Bluegrass.  There was no drone string, and mostly it was played with a plectrum or a pick.  It was strummed, and this strumming rhythm was the rhythmic basis for Early Jazz.  It differs from later jazz, because in reality it was swing sixteenth notes rather than swung eighth notes.  Stop!  This is a major defining characteristic of Early Jazz.  It was swung 16th notes, not swung 8th notes.  It also was mostly fast invigorated tempos with boundless energy.  The facile availability of cocaine during this era probably accounted for some of this energy.  The tuning of this four-stringed banjo was the same as the viola, so an ex-violist from a symphony could learn to strum a banjo more easily.  The score for Jelly's Last Jam does include a banjo, but in this performance it rarely was heard and certainly didn't provide the rhythm of real Early Jazz.  When it did play it added authenticity to the music.  Instead the piano was used, and while there were "tunes" that were sung, the score was more "Third Stream" having an underlying orchestral flavor.  There was some recititive, some dramatic interludes, and some Expressionist darkness.  There also was an attempt at the Blues, but like other African-American oriented Broadway shows I have seen at this same theater, the score shied away from "blue notes" in the harmonic realization.  They sung the Blues and used "blue notes," but the accompanying dominant seventh chords were conspicuously absent.  Instead they use traids, and triads while in Country music do suffice, triads in jazz rarely are used.  The whole flavor of jazz uses altered tones or chromatic additions to traditional diatonic harmony.  I'll back up one step.  Early Jazz, because of the limitation of the four string banjo, did rely upon more simplistic harmony.  With only four strings available and one is used for the root of the chord, a seventh chord is your only option unless you were smart enough back then to understand what a poly chord was.  Thus the secondary dominant became important in Tin Pan Alley.  The early songs did use simplistic harmony, but the jazz flavor was attained in other stark way.  Most of this was sound and interpretation on the wind instruments.  Early Jazz, and Louis Armstrong in particular, changed the sound of traditional European instrument and made it their own.  the eloquence, reservation, and manners of chamber music did not suffice to express what black people felt and had to say during this time period.  John Williams aptly says, "There are things between the notes."  Instrumental lines were more akin to vocal laments and exclamations stemming from field hollers, work songs, and church testimonials.  It was powerful, emotional, tumultuous music, and this was its intent.  Consequently when the church met the jook joint is when you felt your most authentic jazz.  It was not all carnal, and not all jazz was spawned from the "Sporting Life."  It, like most art forms, encompassed many tenants.  My entire life never have I related jazz music to sexuality, and that is a mistake.  Maybe I didn't want to.  For me it was like Miles Davis.  There was more serious content for which to contend.  To stereotype early jazz as only carnal is short-sighted, but the roots of its expression did emerge from the sweaty hot dance halls of the French Quarter in New Orleans.  Surprisingly with rules about dancing and prostitution in effect, if you bought a ticket and were dancing upright with a partner, sexual arousal and gratification were allowed.  Men purchased condoms in the men's room and wore them as they danced to receive their ecstatic offerings.  It could be said that dancing, sex, and music were almost the same thing.  If were were not snobby purists, wouldn't a combination of these things create a stronger product than just one?  There was some gratuitous sexual content in this show, but unfortunately because Broadway has become largely LGBT, this dynamic was absent.  They shimmied and shook and feigned sexual arousal, but like most Broadway shows it seemed more like a drag show.  The blurring of gender, while it could be sexual in some ways, mostly just confuses the story and the music.  It is too much with which to contend trying to recast jazz music with a different persona.  It is misunderstood enough, and before we abandon one of America's greatest art forms, we should try to understand it from its own perspective, not Broadway's.