The Complete Morton Project refers not to the completeness of this particular album but to the lofty goal of its participants to learn and record as a duo all 93 of Jelly Roll Morton's compositions, including his rarest.
In 2018, they began posting YouTube videos of their arrangements recorded in an apartment and the delicacy and buoyancy of their performances attracted jazz fans the world over. Both musicians on the screen were however already established and well known in the field. They've even played together in The Dime Notes, and more recently The Vitality Five, highly respected traditional jazz bands with slightly different focuses.
Andrew Oliver is a pianist from Portland Oregon who got his start in classical piano, fell in love with ragtime and early jazz, and studied music at Loyola in New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina. In 2007 he toured Africa with Jazz at Lincoln Center. When he got home he founded the Portland Jazz Composers' Ensemble and toured with groups playing both modern chamber jazz and traditional jazz before relocating to London in 2013 and concentrating his efforts solely on the early styles. He draws on the greats for inspiration which made this project a natural fit. In fact, the light bulb went off when he and Horniblow were rehearsing yet another Morton piece to add to the repertoire of their full band.
David Horniblow is from Reading
