The Red Hot Peppers
Between September 1926 and June 1927, Jelly Roll Morton recorded six dates for Victor in Chicago: nineteen tunes, most with the Red Hot Peppers, the last two in a trio with Johnny Dodds and Baby Dodds. Victor's electrical process gave Morton better sound than anything he had recorded before, and the piano still spends most of its time under the horns.
A 78 has no master tape. What survives is pressings, and what you hear depends on which pressing got transferred and at what speed. So for each tune I collected every transfer I could find: collector uploads on YouTube, CD remasters from JSP and Classics, and RCA's Birth of the Hot. That came to 295 usable transfers across the nineteen tunes, between 10 and 21 per tune.
Every transfer then went through the same pipeline. Source separation pulls Morton's piano out of the band. A tuning pass measures how far off A440 the transfer runs and corrects it varispeed-style, pitch and tempo together, the way you would fix a turntable running fast; corrections here ran as high as 50 cents, a full quarter tone. A transcription model then reads the corrected piano stem and writes out MIDI.
The 1926 sessions put Johnny St. Cyr's banjo in the same register and attack as Morton's left hand, and the piano model leaves some of it in the piano stem. A second pass runs a banjo model over that stem to pull the banjo back out, with a plucked strings model as backup where the banjo model comes up empty. Between them they find real banjo on 53 transfers, which get a third fader and a banjo tag in the list below. On the rest both models come up empty, and those keep their piano stem as it was. Bud Scott's guitar on the June 1927 dates stays with the band, and the two trio sides have no strings to pull.
The band stem gets a similar pass for drums. Andrew Hilaire plays the 1926 dates and Baby Dodds the 1927 ones, mostly woodblocks and cymbals rather than a modern kit. Two models run in sequence here, a drums model and then a percussion model over what the first one left, because they catch different things. Their combined output becomes a Drums fader on 260 transfers, and the rest of the band keeps whatever survives both passes. Smoke House Blues gives up the least, 6 transfers out of 19.
That last step gives a second way to rank the transfers. The continuity score below measures how much of the piano stem is audible: the fraction of half-second windows above −50 dB. The note count is how many notes the transcription model heard in that transfer. A muddy transfer hides notes from the model.
Pick a tune and solo the piano. Clicking a transfer's name loads it into the mixer; the arrow downloads its piano stem.
Every transfer, ranked
Continuity is the fraction of half-second windows above −50 dB in a stem (higher means fewer holes), measured for the piano and again for the drums; notes is how many notes the transcription model heard. The waveform shows where the gaps fall in the piano. Trust your ears: play and pick. Click a name to load that transfer in the mixer.