New Orleans Blues — for String Orchestra Full Score

Ferdinand Joseph LeMonthe (c. 1890-1941), better known by his pen name “Jelly Roll” Morton, was a New Orleans-born ragtime pianist, composer, and band leader. One of the first musicians to play the New Orleans music that would come to be known as “jazz,” he was also one of the first artists to notate his jazz compositions on paper. He would claim, years later, that he had “invented” jazz, something historians dispute. His popular works include Dead Mans Blues, King Porter Stomp, Alabama Bound, and the Tiger Rag. His 1920s recordings by his hand-picked band The Red Hot Peppers are considered classics in the early jazz idiom. Morton's The New Orleans Blues appears to have been composed between 1900-1910, when the composer was touring the United States.