adam
butler

Jelly Roll Morton and Morton Feldman are probably my two favourite composers of the 20th century. One day I accidentally said to someone “Jelly Roll Morton Feldman”, and we both laughed at the absurdity of the combination. So when STEIM (Institute for Electronic Music in Amsterdam) commissioned me to write a piece, I figured that I already had a great title, and set about composing the work: 4 recordings of Jelly Roll Morton playing his own piano compositions, 2 of them recorded onto shellac, 2 recorded on a pianola (a mechanical wonder that recorded piano key presses, including information not only about note and timing, but also how hard the key was struck, as punched holes in a roll of paper), all slowed down in various ways by a factor of about a hundred. Jelly Roll's notes transformed into Feldman's timescale. 4 3-minute blasts of musical energy transformed into an expanse of sound.

That the end result should be so melancholic (the melancholy is occasionally mitigated by appearances of almost-recognizable jazz clichés -- although, given Morton's seminal status, what we are actually hearing here is the slow motion sound of clichés being invented) makes perfect sense, as Morton's life was almost archetypically tragic. Despite doing the groundwork that allowed the history of jazz to unfurl over the next hundred years, he spent a large part of his time as a hustler and gambler, and eventually died in poverty, having been mercilessly ripped off by his publishers.