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 a trio with Johnny Dodds and Baby Dodds. Victor's electrical process gave Morton his best sound yet; the piano still sits mostly under the horns.

A 78 has no master tape, just pressings; what you hear depends on which one got transferred and at what speed. For each tune I gathered every transfer available: collector uploads on YouTube, CD remasters from JSP and Classics, and RCA's Birth of the Hot. That's 295 usable transfers across the nineteen tunes, 10 to 21 per tune.

Every transfer went through the same pipeline. Source separation pulls Morton's piano out of the band. A tuning pass measures how far off A440 it runs and corrects it varispeed-style, pitch and tempo together; corrections ran as high as 50 cents, a full quarter tone. A transcription model reads the corrected stem into MIDI.

The 1926 sessions put Johnny St. Cyr's banjo in Morton's left-hand register and attack, so the piano model leaves some in the piano stem. A second pass runs a banjo model over that stem to pull it out, backed by a plucked strings model when empty. Together they find real banjo on 53 transfers, which get a third fader and a banjo tag below; the rest keep their piano stem unchanged. Bud Scott's guitar on the June 1927 dates stays with the band; the two trio sides have no strings to pull.

The band stem gets a similar pass for drums. Andrew Hilaire plays the 1926 dates, Baby Dodds the 1927 ones: mostly woodblocks and cymbals, not a modern kit. Two models run in sequence: a drums model, then a percussion model over what's left. Combined, they give 260 transfers a Drums fader; the rest keeps whatever survives both passes. Smoke House Blues gives up the least, 6 transfers out of 19.

That gives a second way to rank transfers: continuity, how much of the piano stem is audible, the fraction of half-second windows above −50 dB, and note count, how many notes the transcription model heard. 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.

Listen · piano and band

Every transfer, ranked

Continuity is the fraction of half-second windows above −50 dB in a stem (higher means fewer holes), measured for both piano and drums; notes is how many notes the transcription model heard. The waveform shows where the gaps fall in the piano. Click a name to load that transfer in the mixer.

Sort by Piano continuity MIDI notes Drum continuity