I used to think that Cultural Appropriation Did Not Exist….
but now I do think it exists, and it has as much to do with class as with race . Case in point: that awful and disgusting musical, Jelly Roll’s Last Jam, full of disinformation and racial stereotypes and downright lies about Jelly, yet produced by people who cannot be accused of being white, and who seemed to have exercised an idea of class privilege, as though there middle-class status entitles them to seize the cultural day by lying about Jelly Roll Morton. He was not a racist, not a self-hating black man, and he had some claim, really, to having invented jazz; I don’t think he actually did because of various theories I have about how jazz came into being, but he WAS the founder of the modern idea of New Orleans and even swing (all a part of a different subject which I may get to some day).
Those who wrote and produced this vile play (Jelly’s Last Jam) know nothing about his life, his music, or anything else jazz related. The show has some nice tapping, but it is supposedly a moral fable about race and class, but it sinks itself by way of the fact that it had a false idea for theme supposedly based on Jelly’s life, and then built an entire show out of that false idea. The result is fakery of the worst kind.
So….give me a little time, I will deal with all of this in greater detail, soon, I promise. But listen to the Morton piece (Black Bottom Stomp) that I am posting with this, realize it was recorded in 1926, and then understand what a great man and great composer he was and how undeserving he is of this kind of shallow, idiotic Broadway slander.
More soon…..
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