Music with Ease > Jazz Quotes > Jelly Roll Morton Quotes

“Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.”
-- Jelly Roll Morton

“Get up from that piano. You hurtin' its feelings.”
-- Jelly Roll Morton

"I have been robbed of three million dollars all told. Everyone today is playing my stuff and I don't even get credit. Kansas City style, Chicago style, New Orleans style hell, they're all Jelly Roll style.”
-- Jelly Roll Morton

"I do not claim any of the creation of the blues, although I have written many of them even before Mr. Handy had any blues published. I heard them when I was knee-high to a duck."
-- Jelly Roll Morton on W. C. Handy

“In 1908 Handy didn't know anything about the blues and he doesn't know anything about jazz and stomps to this day. I myself figured out the peculiar form of mathematics and harmonies that was strange to all the world but me.”
-- Jelly Roll Morton on W. C. Handy

"It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of jazz, and I, myself, happened to be creator in theyear 1902, many years before the Dixieland Band organized."
-- Jelly Roll Morton

"I first met Jelly Roll in Chicago. He was livin' high then. You know, Jelly was a travelin' cat, sharp and good lookin' and always about he wrote this and that and the other thing -- in fact, everything!"
-- Zutty Singleton on Jelly Roll Morton

"I always called him the Dizzy Dean of music, he was so belligerent and braggadocio... But one thing I always noticed about Jelly, he would back everything he said by what he could do."
-- Omer Simeon on Jelly Roll Morton

“My contributions were many: First clown director, with witty sayings and flashily dressed, now called master of ceremonies.”
-- Jelly Roll Morton

"Rejoice at the death and cry at the birth: New Orleans sticks close to the Scriptures."
-- Jelly Roll Morton


Related Resources

Quotable Jazz

Jazz musicians are well known for strong opinions and a major sense of humor.

Quotable Jazz collects the best of these often funny, sometimes outrageous, always enlightening quotes. It's all here -- the vaudevillian ribaldry of Jelly Roll Morton, the warm humor of Louis Armstrong, the insight of Duke Ellington, the acerbic views of Miles Davis. These greats and many more, both well-known and unsung sidemen, hold forth on a variety of topics including women, race, the music business, the art of improvisation, and that eternal question, "what is jazz and where is it going?"

Quotable Jazz is a one-of-a-kind reference that's as essential to your jazz collection as Coltrane's Giant Steps or Miles' Kind of Blue.

Buy a copy from Amazon.com