That life becomes a hot odyssey of jazz in scenes vibrating with music, dance, humor and sensuality. The New Orleans-born Jelly is cast out by his Creole family, hightoned mixed-bloods who scorn Jelly’s lowdown music. A Paul Bunyanish braggart who boasts, “I invented jazz,” Jelly is a dandy, a pool hustler, a womanizer who bounces around the country sowing the seeds of the new music. He flares into stardom as composer and pianist, a stardom that flames out in the 1930s as the country is “swingin’ to a whole new sound” - the big-band sound of Ellington and Basie.
As a kind of Brechtian, expressionist docu-musical, “Jelly’s Last Jam” has brilliance in Wolfe’s kaleidoscopic staging, Hope Clarke’s vibrant choreography and a vital cast. But Wolfe’s treatment of race adds a dubious note. He depicts a Jelly who despises blacks, tossing “nigger” insults around and insisting, “There’s no coon stock in this Creole.” Such sledgehammer flattening of the complexities of race in Morton’s life suggests that Wolfe may be exorcising his own racial demons. But his stage mastery triumphs over his didacticism, generating exultant energy in the music, which adapts Morton numbers like “The Chicago Stomp…… Lovin’ Is a Lowdown Blues” and “Dr. Jazz,” and in the dancing, especially that of Hines and Savion Glover as Young Jelly. Not just a great dancer, Hines acts through his dancing-his dazzling tapping becomes a polyrhythmic telegraph transmitting jazz to the world.
