He later worked with blues singer and guitarist Smiley Lewis, playing on Lewis’s 1950 hit, “Tee Nah Nah”.
Washington was a well-established and popular figure in New Orleans during the late 1920s and 1930s, playing ragtime, blues, jazz, and boogie-woogie. Unlike Morton, who studied with Mamie Desdunes (a pianist who also was a well-known voodoo priest), he was self-taught. Like Jelly Roll Morton, Isidore “Tuts” Washington started playing piano when he was a child. Isidore “Tuts” Washington – “New Orleans Piano Professor Medley”
#Jelly roll morton spanish tinge mod
Nearly 60 years after Morton recorded “The Crave”, the Italian composer Ennio Morricone performed it on the soundtrack of The Legend of 1900, directed by the Sicilian filmmaker Giuseppe Tornatore, in which Clarence Williams III (of The Mod Squad fame) portrayed the musician. It’s a tango with Cuban, as well as Argentinian influences.
Morton recorded his composition, “The Crave”, in 1939. Jazz historians like Gunther Schuller have hailed Morton as the first great jazz composer and a genius of improvisation who built his extemporizations on melodies and countermelodies. As a teenager, he became an itinerant musician, traveling through the South, the Southwest, the Midwest, and as far as New York, along the way developing a style that married the blues, ragtime, hymns and spirituals, and the Cuban habanera and Argentinian tango. He took up the instrument when he was ten years old in 1902, at 12, he was entertaining prostitutes and their clients in New Orleans brothels, with ragtime, quadrilles, and the popular songs of the day. He didn’t, but the Creole (of African and French descent) pianist, composer, and bandleader is a dominant figure in the early history of the music, and the progenitor of New Orleans piano playing.
Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe - better known as Jelly Roll Morton - boasted that he created jazz.