"JELLY'S LAST JAM:" Sweet Substitute
The superlative revival of Jelly’s Last Jam that recently closed at Encores! (and urgently deserves to reopen soon on Broadway) was something I never thought I’d see again. Having witnessed firsthand the evolution of the original in the early-1990s, practically from its inception, I knew what an enthralling, ennobling, yet exasperating, inescapably troubling experience Jelly’s Last Jam is. Who the hell would ever hazard revisiting all of that onstage pain and contradiction?
Happily, Encores!, as it turned out. Handing the show to Robert O’Hara, a director of scrupulous, yet extravagant, truth-telling gifts, and populating it with a cast of sensational, unflinching artists, Encores! looked Jelly square in the eye and did not blink. The result was a transformative bonfire of a revival.
I had the crazy good fortune years ago to sit in on early workshops and late rehearsals of Jelly’s Last Jam, through my friendship with Rocco Landesman, whose Jujamcyn theater organization helped produce the show, alongside lead producer Margo Lion and others, including the late-Tony Fisher, one of Rocco’s chief financial backers and pals (as well as one of my own). All of us watched those extraordinary sessions seated more or less side-by-side, and we heatedly discussed what we’d seen, after.
The initial workshops were pointed toward a premiere out in L.A. at the Mark Taper Forum in March 1991, starring Obba Babatundé (of Dreamgirls fame) as Jelly Roll Morton, the jazz pioneering antihero of Jelly’s Last Jam. Rehearsals following that premiere, back in NYC, pointed toward Broadway, and those rehearsals, of course, featured Gregory Hines as Jelly, a role he would ultimately win a Tony for.
I walked into those rehearsal rooms already loving the music of Jelly Roll Morton, and knowing more than a little about him, which is partly why I was invited. Rocco and Tony liked to pump me for sidebar enlightenment about Jelly Roll Morton’s terribly complicated history — especially the essential verities upon which Jelly’s Last Jam was constructed:
1. That Ferdinand Joseph La Menthe [a.k.a. La Mothe, a.k.a. Le Mott], after adopting the moniker “Jelly Roll Morton,” launched himself out of his New Orléans family home into the unyielding racist America of the 1900s as an exceedingly gifted piano player and a truly revolutionary composer; trailblazing, really — an amalgamator of a miasma of Black American folk musics that he melded into something we today recognize as “jazz.”
2. That Jelly Roll Morton also was a pool shark, an all around grifter, and not a very nice guy, who forever bragged to anyone who would listen (or not) that he had, in fact, personally “invented jazz.”
3. That, in those craven boasts, he was not altogether lying.
4. That, to his dying day, Jelly Roll Morton, born a Creole, insisted he was not, racially, Black. In this, he was lying to the depths of his soul.
Jelly’s Last Jam blossomed in those rehearsal rooms as a musical of accusation. George C. Wolfe, the then-30-something wunderkind writer and director of Jelly’s Last Jam, structured his narrative as an allegorical-biographical courtroom, with accusation his dramaturgic gavel. Mr. Wolfe’s musical accused Jelly Roll Morton, to his face, of abdicating his responsibility to himself and to his race, while celebrating Morton’s music and audaciously telling his story.
I already admired George Wolfe quite a lot, going in. We all did. I’d followed his young career avidly — from The Colored Museum, his take-no-prisoners skewering of contemporary Black theatrical tropes, to his Haitian resetting of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle — both at the Public Theater in the 1980s. George was an innovative, erudite, theatrical fire-bomber on the subject of race, from all perspectives, black and white; someone who managed to make you sweat with uncomfortable self-realization and heated, bone-deep theatrical joy.
(Fascinating fact: One of the writers Margo Lion hired before settling upon George Wolfe, was the playwright August Wilson, who took a whack at the excruciating job of telling Jelly Roll Morton’s story in a musical, then handed the job back to Ms. Lion.)
Pamela Koslow, Gregory Hines’ then-wife, was present at every juncture of Jelly’s Last Jam as Margo Lion’s co-lead producer. I remember being introduced to her in a rehearsal room well before her husband joined the show officially. Once he did join, post-L.A., Jelly’s Last Jam shifted, from a musical about Jelly Roll Morton to a dance musical about a piano player. Not that Morton’s story was in any way downgraded in centrality. It’s just that his pianistic genius became purely an expression of Gregory Hines’ tap dance genius. This genius was exquisite and unmistakable but, to me, it tended, in Jelly’s Last Jam, to further obscure what was already historically cloudy: exactly what it was that Jelly Roll Morton did, in terms of creating jazz. Every time Gregory Hines stepped out from behind his stage piano to dance, he took one’s breath away. But somehow Jelly Roll Morton was left behind at the keys.
I offered gentle but emphatic notes about this to Rocco and Margo, truth be told. Not much came of them. Gregory Hines, obviously, was money for Jelly’s Last Jam; he sold the tickets. And let me be clear: Gregory Hines was a stellar collaborator, utterly devoted to selflessly illuminating Jelly Roll Morton as the show’s spotlit centerpiece.
Still, what struck me about the Encores! revival — which I had not expected — was how much more fundamentally focused upon Jelly Roll Morton this production seemed, because Nicholas Christopher, as Jelly, was (is) a terrific actor and a fine singer, but merely a good tap dancer. He is not Gregory Hines, and so was more believably Jelly Roll Morton. If you know what I mean.
Encores! surrounded Mr. Christopher’s Jelly with a glorious troupe of hoofers, show-stompingly choreographed by Edgar Godineaux and the tap maestra, Dormeshia. They elevated Jelly and, at times, levitated him. Another riveting high point was the ageless Leslie Uggams, as Young Jelly’s “Gran Mimi,” exiling her grandson with a roof-raising vocal blast of disapproval for having abandoned himself to music that, she believed, betrayed his Creole gentility.
There were many more indelible talents in this Encores! revival, just as there were in the original Jelly’s Last Jam. Fascinatingly, the heirs replicated their ancestors’ extraordinary impact without necessarily resembling them.
I will never forget Tonya Pinkins’ original appearance in a Jelly’s Last Jam rehearsal room as Anita — George Wolfe’s fictitious creation as Jelly’s romantic foil. I mean, her first entrance is literally seared into my memory, because Tonya Pinkins was a searing presence in Jelly’s Last Jam, start to finish. Which is why she, too, won a Tony Award, alongside Gregory Hines, though no statuette can reflect the immensity of her humanity and sensuality in that part. Joaquina Kalukango projected a similar humanity as Anita, at Encores!, but it was derived more from her vocal immensity, plush and tender, than the transcendent earthy carnality that Tonya Pinkins possessed and projected. Different route; same destination.
Keith David, in the original, also seemed larger than life itself as “Chimney Man,” another of George Wolfe’s fictitious creations — the interlocutor of Jelly’s Last Jam; a prosecuting attorney-like deity who grills the dead Jelly Roll Morton about his earthly crimes before sweeping him to his deserved destination in the afterlife. Where Keith David was a physical and vocal presence of sheer dominance in Jelly’s Last Jam, all chest and voice, Billy Porter, at Encores!, conversely delivered a vocally keening Chimney Man of raging, biblical vengefulness; an otherworldly Chimney Man wrapped in genderqueer finery; the diametric opposite of Keith David’s hyper-masculine Chimney Man, yet just as grimly reaping.
The closest, step-by-step match to an original Jelly’s Last Jam performer in the Encores! revival was young Alaman Diadhiou conjuring young Savion Glover, the living tap legend who, at 18, stopped the show in 1992 as Young Jelly. The inspiration at Encores! was all Savion, but the intricate steps were all Alaman Diadhiou. Watch for him down the line.
Encores! did offer up one touch of pure symmetry: Three roles — “The Hunnies,” a kind of Greek Chorus Line to the Chimney Man — were performed by the same ladies who were actually “The Hunnies” in 1992: Mamie Duncan Gibbs, Stephanie Pope Lofgren and Allison M. Williams. They made time stand still.
Without Luther Henderson there would be no Jelly’s Last Jam. A monumental jazz arranger (for, among others, Duke Ellington) and a musical theater orchestrator-arranger for the ages, the late-Mr. Henderson was the person who incisively cut and pasted and sometimes recomposed Jelly Roll Morton’s songbook for Jelly’s Last Jam, transforming Morton piano solos and jazz band numbers into show tunes, set to excellent new lyrics by the lyricist Susan Birkenhead. (Though not every tune in Jelly’s Last Jam is a Morton tune. “Michigan Water Blues,” for example, which Tiffany Mann absolutely brought down the house with at Encores!, was written by the pioneering Black pianist, songwriter and music publisher Clarence Williams, and recorded by Jelly Roll Morton in 1940, piano and vocal.) The Encores! Orchestra, led by Jason Michael Webb, kicked out the jams on Luther Henderson’s still-sizzling orchestral score. Call it Jelly’s everlasting jam.
(One more immodest fact: Some years after Jelly’s Last Jam, I interviewed Luther Henderson for an extended New York Times profile on the occasion of a Carnegie Hall concert of his Ellington orchestrations. You can read that piece: HERE.)
Three months past the April 26, 1992 opening night of Jelly’s Last Jam, on the evening of July 27, George Wolfe, Gregory Hines, Keith David and Tonya Pinkins came to my bookstore, Chartwell Booksellers, in midtown Manhattan, to read from our friend Thulani Davis’s new novel, 1959. The reading was designed to raise money for the Bookstore Relief Fund, benefiting Black-owned bookstores destroyed by the recent riots in South-Central L.A. The quartet of Jelly’s Last Jam talents brought Thulani’s book to life, and inspired the crowd that night to give. They embodied a spirit of community, surrendering their night off to give something back. I marveled at this then, and I reflected on it again 32 years later, watching Jelly’s Last Jam come to life once more. Jelly’s Last Jam is really about music born of community; namely jazz, the quintessential communal music —way bigger than one man. It’s messy, it’s complicated and it’s mostly improvised, but that’s how a community makes music, together. Not a bad thing to remember right now.
