It's an odd coincidence that on Halloween I should be thinking about a dead man, although not the typical sort of ghost for this holiday.

I've just finished reading Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, a fictional account of the life of music legend Buddy Bolden. I knew very little about Bolden going into the book - that he is credited with possibly creating jazz, that he was never recorded, and that he went mad at the peak of his popularity. First though, a bit about the book itself. If you've read The English Patient then you will know what it is like to be both impressed and maddened by Ondaatje's writing. Slaughter climbs inside Bolden's head, as well as his friends and lovers in passages that are never straightforward. Honestly I had to watch The English Patient to really understand what went on in the book, and there were moments in Slaughter when I wasn't quite sure what the point was - but then again this is a book about an alcoholic musician who was a creative genius that spent the last decades of his life in an insane asylum.

How straightforward could it possibly be?

Bolden was born in 1877 and first became known as a great coronet player around 1898. For a short period of time, before being committed in 1907, he dominated the African American music scene in New Orleans. He managed to combine gospel, blues and ragtime into a new sound, which is recognized as the earliest strains of jazz. A lot of people have tried to crown Bolden as the man who invented jazz but it's really rather impossible to do so and Ondaatje doesn't suggest that in his book. He is more concerned with trying to understand (a bit) who Bolden was and what might have driven him over the edge. By climbing inside the head of a man on a downward spiral he gives an amazing look at genius and despair; at the kind of crazy that jazz perhaps demanded from those who sought it out.

It's not a deal with the devil, but in the end Bolden's story contributes to the idea that great musical leaps demand high payments of body and soul.

Ondaatje includes other well known members of the city including the photographer of prostitutes, EJ Bellocq (although he changes both the date and manner of his death). The biggest character other than Bolden himself though is the music - and the strange city that allowed such musical genius to flourish. Here's a bit on Bolden's religion from musician Dude Botley, in a passage that comes directly from Martin Williams Jazz Masters of New Orleans:

I'm sort of scared because I know the Lord don't like that mixing the Devil's music with His music. But I still listen because the music sounds so strange and I guess I'm hypnotized. When he blows blues I can see Lincoln Park with all the sinners and whores shaking and belly rubbing and the chicks getting way down and slapping themselves on the cheeks of their behind. Then when he blows the hymn I'm in my mother's church with everybody humming. The picture kept changing with the music. It sounded like a battle between the Good Lord and the Devil. Something tells me to listen and see who wins. If Bolden stops on the hymn, the Good Lord wins. If he stops on the blues, the Devil wins.

Luc Sante has a wonderful essay on Bolden, "Buddy Bolden's Blues" in The Rose & the Briar, a collection of essays on music history that I flat out adore. It was reading about Bolden online that I found out about Blues and Jazz historians - another aspect of the field that I wish I had known about back when I started college. (Can you imagine studying music as a career? How cool is that?! It's nearly as awesome as the new tag I've seen for Paul Collins, "literary detective".) Sante tracks the history of Bolden's only known piece of music, "Funky Butt", the lyrics written by his band's trombonist Willy Cornish. Jelly Roll Morton later recorded the song with it's opening line: "I heard Buddy Bolden say..." He was the only one to record the song who actually heard Bolden play and called him "the most powerful trumpet player I've ever heard, or ever was known."

I swear I could read about this stuff for hours.

In the end, the miserable horrible end, Bolden died in the East Louisiana State Hospital. There are many stories about what drove him there, from alcohol poisoning to a life of debauchery. Sante mentions that it might have been meningitis. In the end he hardly ever played his coronet again, leaving only the memories of those who heard him in those all too brief ten years of performing in the clubs of New Orleans.

I have In Search of Buddy Bolden on order from Powells. This is a story that I'm not ready to let go. As we all know, some ghosts just don't want to rest in peace and Buddy Bolden, I'm sure, is still wailing his horn somewhere; still calling for his audience and waiting to be remembered yet again.

[Post Pic - the only known picture of Buddy Bolden, from a group photo of his band; it originally belonged to Willy Cornish.]