Alain Gerber is a noted writer on jazz but also, to the wider French public, a highly acclaimed writer of fiction. He has already combined real musicians with fiction in books concerning such names as Armstrong, Davis and Holiday, where his imagination has taken flight from what is known about their lives and personalities.
I assume that Gerber has read Jelly Roll Morton At Jungle Inn by Samuel Charters – where Morton is imagined speaking to the author – and decided instead to provide a stream-of-consciousness which perhaps draws more on Alan Lomax’s Mister Jelly Roll. Lomax himself is imagined in this book’s first five pages as he sees Morton for the last time in New York and later meets Anita Gonzales beside Morton’s grave in Los Angeles.
We then enter Morton’s mind for what is mostly a lively and complex stream of consciousness, beginning in New York, reflecting on his past and present, and eventually crossing the country on his epic two-car winter journey for a reunion with Anita and a Christmas climax I’ll leave unrevealed.
Potential English readers should be warned that Gerber has a massive vocabulary, some of which is surely slang that may or may not be in a conventional dictionary. This surely enriches Morton’s formidable powers of self-expression in an admirable enterprise which deserves exploration by any of our readers up to the challenge.
Un Noël de Jelly Roll Morton – une histoire de Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe, by Alain Gerber. Frémeaux et Associés, pb, 132pp. ISBN 978-2-84468-995-5
