Before we get into the music, you have to understand the man, because with Morton the two are completely tangled up. He was a braggart, a self-promoter, and a gambler who dressed in diamonds and claimed credit he didn't always deserve. He also happened to be right that he was extraordinary. His piano playing was unlike anyone else's — loose and conversational in the right hand, anchored by a New Orleans bass that kept its own kind of time — and his compositions were genuinely sophisticated in ways that his contemporaries were still working toward.

He grew up in New Orleans in the Creole community, which gave him a particular relationship to African American music and European forms at the same time. You can hear both in his playing. There's ragtime in there, sure, but also blues, Spanish tinge, march rhythms, and something looser and more improvisational that wouldn't fully have a name for another decade. When he recorded with his Red Hot Peppers in the mid-1920s, he was making small-group recordings that treated the band as a composed unit rather than just a bunch of guys taking turns. That was new.

The Red Hot Peppers sessions for Victor in 1926 and 1927 are the core of what he left behind. Jelly Roll Morton and His Red Hot Peppers (1926) is where you start. The arrangements are tight without being stiff, and Morton keeps little surprises coming — a sudden stop, a trombone smear, a tempo shift that shouldn't work but does. He thought about texture and contrast in a way that most jazz musicians of the era simply didn't, or at least didn't commit to tape. These aren't loose jam sessions. They're planned, and the planning shows.

His later years were rough. By the 1930s, swing had taken over and Morton was seen as old-fashioned, which genuinely seemed to wound him. He ended up in Washington D.C. running a small club, mostly forgotten by the industry. Then Alan Lomax tracked him down for the Library of Congress in 1938 and recorded hours of Morton talking, playing, and explaining where jazz came from. Those recordings are extraordinary — part oral history, part performance, part unreliable memoir. Morton plays snippets of everything and explains what he's doing, and even accounting for the self-mythology, there's a real intelligence at work.

If you're coming to Morton fresh, don't overthink it. Put on one of the Red Hot Peppers tracks and just listen to how the band moves together — there's a rolling, almost physical quality to the rhythm that a lot of early jazz doesn't have. Then, when you want more context, find the Lomax sessions and let Morton tell you about himself. He'll exaggerate. He'll irritate you a little. But he'll also make you hear the music differently, which was probably what he wanted all along.