Alan Lomax records Jelly Roll Morton at the Library of Congress

node

Over an extended series of sessions, Lomax records the New Orleans pianist and composer Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton playing and talking about the music of his youth. It is in these recordings that Morton sets out the "Spanish tinge" — the habanera and tresillo patterns he held to be indispensable to jazz — which is a practitioner's testimony that the Caribbean rhythmic strand was present in New Orleans music from the beginning rather than an imported later flavour.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.