Pianist and Composer.

The Smithsonian has also reissued the best of Jelly Roll Morton, that prodigious genius who rose from the bordellos of Storyville in New Orleans to the top rank of jazzmen. Jelly Roll Morton was a jazz pianist, composer, band leader, and arranger who ranks with Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and Duke Ellington in that great company who brought jazz out of its ragtime form and combined it with other elements in American music to give us the jazz that burst onto the nation in the Twenties and then on to the world during the Swing Era.

Forgotten during the years when Betray Goodman and the big bands took over the dance halls and radio, Morton nevertheless left his mark in a series of outstanding recordings made in the late Thirties. The Smithsonian collection, on three CDs, takes him from Pianist and Composer in New Orleans, through his greatest days in Chicago: The Red Hot Peppers, to New . York, Washington, and the Rediscovery. That "rediscovery" was mostly among those jazz aficionados who looked back to the New Orleans days. The Smithsonian, however, should issue on CDs that series of sessions at the Library of Congress in which Jelly Roll nipped at a bottle as he talked and sang an oral history of jazz. There have been bowdlerized versions of these sessions, but jazz lovers deserve the full measure.