[Dixielandjazz] Mike Meddings

Ken Mathieson ken at kenmath.free-online.co.uk
Wed Aug 7 16:22:56 PDT 2013


Hi All,

I've just heard of the untimely death of Mike Meddings, the creator, curator and webmaster of the astonishingly detailed website devoted to all things related to Jelly Roll Morton and his music.

Mike was born in Birmingham, England, in 1939 and became interested in jazz (and Morton in particular) during his schooldays.  Later, he took advantage of his spell working on the ocean liner Queen Mary to hear and get to know many of NYC's jazz stars in the 1960s. His interest in the music of the 1920s led him to build his own piano roll perforator, which in turn led him to arranging and preparing music for piano rolls. These activities became restricted by the onset of very severe arthritis and other health complications which took a turn for the worse in the spring of 2013 and he died on 30th June.

He set up the Morton website in 1999 and started assembling a research team of Morton experts so that, over time, the doctorjazz site became the place to go for information on JRM and his music. His roles as instigator, catalyst, collator and researcher cannot be over-estimated and the site will continue in his memory with updates when new information, links etc come forward from the research team. The site isn't glitzy and looks a bit old-fashioned, but it's full of solid information about just about every aspect of Jelly's life and career, so everyone with an interest in Morton owes Mike a debt of gratitude for setting up the free-access site as a labour of love.

He was also enormously supportive of my efforts to re-interpret Morton's music with my band and gave generously of his large collection of sheet music and recordings so that I could have access to often rare and obscure source material for my arrangements.

RIP Mike, you will be missed.

Ken Mathieson 


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