One of the unexpected benefits of watching a sackful of early Chaplin movies is that, lacking music scores, their distributor seems to have laid a bunch of "Jelly Roll" Morton tunes on top of them—I guess Chaplin and Morton were more or less contemporaries, and the songs seem to fit the spirit of the thing. Not to mention they're great.Now, I have to admit that, coming into this, my knowledge of "Jelly Roll" Morton was largely limited to the Auburn marching band's traditional end-of-the-third-quarter rendition of "Tiger Rag." Of course, there's no YouTube video of Jelly Roll performing "Tiger Rag"—in fact, it's not clear now that he even wrote it—but I did find a video of Louis Armstrong performing "Tiger Rag" on stage in Copenhagen on October 21, 1933.
And click here to listen to an absolutely insane version by the legendary jazz pianist, Art Tatum.
(And you wonder why this blog takes so long.)
