Box set: Jelly Roll Morton

Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax, ROUNDER

These days, the pianist Jelly Roll Morton is acknowledged as the great pioneer of jazz, a form he helped to create by welding together ragtime and blues with a sophisticated sense of structure and a soupçon of what he called "the Spanish tinge", the Latin-flavoured bassline that brought a swaying, slow-drag sashay to the music. He is credited with writing the first stomp ("King Porter Stomp") and the first swing tune ("Georgia Swing"), and his compositions became the bedrock of many a jazz band's playbook.

He wasn't always regarded this highly. Since his developments were all brought to fruition in the Teens and Twenties of the last century, changing musical tastes had rendered him unfashionable until, in the late Thirties, he set the record straight, fulminating against "fakes" such as Earl Hines and WC Handy, whom he considered to have usurped his place in music history. Then, while working in a Washington club, he visited the folklorist Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress, and offered to tell the true story of jazz. "They're stealing my music, and they don't even play it right," he protested with characteristic immodesty.

This eight-CD box is the result, a fascinating documentary record in which Morton reminisces about his New Orleans upbringing and career, demonstrating the development of the various piano styles, and performing pieces such as his own "Jelly Roll Blues" from 1915, the very first jazz tune to be published. The music is rich and detailed, brimming with the spicy flavours of his hometown, and played with a virtuosic command of any style Lomax requests - as befits a character who was not only a pool shark but a piano hustler too, always ready to lure unsuspecting "ticklers" into "cutting contests" that they could never win.

But it's not only the music that makes this box set special, it's the vivid portrait of a time and a place depicted as Morton's sonorous, dignified baritone rolls out his narrative over a backdrop of quietly vamping piano chords - a nine-hour Homeric epic of hustlers, chancers, criminals and late-night ladies in New Orleans's Storyville district, and the musicians who entertained them. It's replete with colourful characters called Sheep Bite, Chicken Dick and Toodlum Parker - names as evocative as any gangsta-rapper's - and violent psychopaths such as Robert Charles, whose cop-killing exploits triggered the riots in which many innocent folk were killed.

One of the first oral histories committed to disc (magnetic tape had not yet been invented), The Complete Library of Congress Recordings has a value way beyond the usual career retrospectives and barrel-scraped outtakes that make up most other box sets.