Grandpa's Spells

Morton's grandfather — his mother's father — was a Haitian-born businessman in New Orleans who reportedly practiced voodoo on the side. Not the Hollywood version with dolls and curses, but the real syncretic spiritual tradition that blended West African religion with Catholicism and thrived in the Crescent City's Creole community. Morton grew up around it. He carried a mojo hand for luck his entire adult life and genuinely believed certain people could cast spells.

Grandpa's Spells is, in Morton's telling, a musical portrait of his grandfather in the act of conjuring. The opening strain has an incantatory quality — a repeated rhythmic figure that builds in intensity like someone working themselves into a trance. Then the band breaks loose and the whole thing transforms into one of the most joyful recordings of the 1920s. The voodoo becomes a party. Because in New Orleans, even the supernatural has to swing.

The Red Hot Peppers session that produced this track in December 1926 was one of the most productive recording dates in early jazz history. Morton cut four sides in a single day, each one a small masterpiece. He achieved this by doing something no other bandleader in jazz was doing: he rehearsed. Extensively. While King Oliver's band and Louis Armstrong's Hot Five walked into the studio with loose arrangements and relied on spontaneous brilliance, Morton arrived with every accent, every break, every dynamic shift planned and drilled.

There's a moment in Grandpa's Spells where the entire band stops on a dime, Morton plays a two-bar piano fill, and the ensemble crashes back in perfectly synchronized. In 1926, with no multitrack recording, no overdubs, no second chances — that's not luck. That's a man who understood that magic requires preparation. His grandfather would have appreciated the irony.