Shreveport Stomp

Shreveport, Louisiana, in the early 1900s was not where you went to advance your music career. It was where you went when New Orleans got too hot — and not because of the weather. Morton landed there around 1908, possibly running from a gambling debt, possibly running from a woman's husband, possibly both. He spent several months playing piano in establishments that didn't advertise in the newspaper and left as soon as he'd accumulated enough cash to move on.

But something about Shreveport stuck with him. Fifteen years later, comfortably established in Chicago and recording for Gennett Records, he wrote this stomp as a tribute to a city that most jazz historians treat as a footnote. The piece has a raw, stripped-down quality compared to his more elaborate arrangements — it sounds like a Saturday night in a room with low ceilings and no ventilation, which is almost certainly what inspired it.

The 1924 recording is Morton at the piano with a small group, and you can hear the influence of the barrelhouse style he would have encountered in Shreveport's Bottoms district. The left hand is heavier, more insistent, almost aggressive. This isn't the refined Creole composer showing off his classical training. This is the kid from the District who learned to play in rooms where the piano had to be louder than the arguments.

Morton's genius was that he could inhabit both worlds — the parlor and the juke joint — and make each one sound like the only place worth being. Shreveport Stomp is his juke joint record, and it hits harder for the honesty.