This Black History Month, I’ve had the privilege of profiling four amazing innovators, Danny Baker, Jelly Roll Morton, Lil Hardin Armstrong and Duke Ellington. They have each left their mark on the world of jazz.
Hear their story in the words of the artists themselves in these exclusive features below.
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Danny Baker was a New Orleans raconteur, banjoist and guitarist who worked with Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong and his wife jazz/blues singer Blue Lu Barker. He came of age in NOLA and NYC when jazz was developing into an art form.
Jelly Roll Morton was a New Orleans composer, stride piano master, pool shark, & braggart. He was considered the first true jazz composer, springing out of the red light district in New Orleans & blending ragtime, blues, and Afro-Cuban rhythms helping to establish jazz as a genre.
Piano player, singer and composer. “Hot Miss Lil” came out of the vibrant scene in Chicago in the 1920s where she played with King Oliver’s band, where she met her future husband Louis Armstrong, who she encouraged to strike out on his own as leader, playing on and composing for the biblical Armstrong Hot Five recordings.
The legendary composer and piano player is remembered as an eloquent charismatic band leader and curator of inventive and distinctive orchestrations. Duke was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize “In recognition of his musical genius, which evoked aesthetically the principles of democracy through the medium of jazz and thus made an indelible contribution to art and culture.”
