Jelly Roll Morton & His Red Hot Peppers

Jelly Roll Morton famously claimed to have invented jazz in 1902, but his genius actually lay in fusing ragtime syncopation with the deep feeling of the blues. He famously stated that jazz had to have a 'Spanish tinge,' but it was his music fused ragtime, blues, habanera/Latin rhythm, and New Orleans ensemble writing into a new compositional language. Tracks like his seminal 1915 composition 'Jelly Roll Blues' are among the earliest published jazz compositions, forever anchoring early jazz to the blues tradition.