Originally appearing at: Voices of New Orleans

Buddy Bolden has to be one of the most controversial and least understood characters in the history of American music. He is credited by some as the father of jazz, or at least the first to play the music, but as there is no known recording of him (there is a rumor of one being made and then lost), the only thing aficionados and music historians have to go on is the reminiscences of those who heard Bolden play. He apparently had some kind of severe psychotic episode while performing in a parade in 1907 (which was the last time he was heard publicly) and was shortly thereafter committed to the East Louisiana State Hospital, where he eventually died. Thus those who remembered Bolden and were available for interview decades later were few and far between. Jelly Roll Morton was the only one who actually heard Bolden play live and later recorded his music. “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” was based on Bolden’s song “Funky Butt.” Morton referred to him as "…the most powerful trumpet player I've ever heard, or ever was known."

With no actual recordings of Bolden’s music, there are only the many stories of wild performances where he turned his coronet to the sky and blew loud, “calling his children home,” of him possibly being a barber or just hanging out in a barber shop, of haunting Storyville and loving a prostitute and of the liquor, the gallons and gallons of liquor that fueled his manic life and likely led to his untimely death. There have been a few biographies written about Bolden, most notably In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man Of Jazz by Donald M. Marquis. Canadian author Michael Ondaatje took a different tact when exploring Bolden’s life in fiction, however. His Coming Through Slaughter is elegant, dynamic and lyrically beautiful. It is not plot driven though, not even written from a single point of view; it wanders back and forth from historic fact at whim. It is a gorgeously written piece of work, as much about the crafts of writing and music as it is a story unto itself. Just as Ondaatje created something fresh and new with his World War II novel, The English Patient, he did something utterly unique with a part of New Orleans’ past in Slaughter. He also brought Buddy Bolden to life, in all his complicated, accomplished, successful misery. It’s a truly amazing book.

The way in which Ondaatje wrote Coming Through Slaughter is as significant as its subject. Chapters are split into paragraphs that might follow conventionally written conversations and observations at one point only to diverge into elegant stand-alone ruminations about music or marriage or photography a few pages later. There are fake interviews and real ones, mixed together and indistinguishable. Readers have to give themselves up to Ondaatje’s experiment, free themselves for the literary ride he is set to pilot. The fact that he is writing about someone who was critically involved in the formation of jazz makes this meandering literary adventure somehow appropriate though. Should a novel about Buddy Bolden make perfect sense after all, when so little about Bolden’s life does?

There is a narrative thread buried deep in Slaughter, however, and it follows both the final period of Bolden’s sane life while also recalling past events, from his fictional friendship with noted Storyville photographer EJ Bellocq and his unofficial marriage to Nora, a former prostitute with whom he had a child, to the final parade where he was present in all his musical glory until a moment when he apparently snapped and became violent. He was certainly committed to the asylum at the state hospital as the book asserts, although Ondaatje only alludes to those final moments, leaving the reader to imagine what propelled his family to make their final gut-wrenching decision. An insane asylum at that time in American history was a most unpleasant place to end one’s days, although Bolden lived there for nearly twenty-five more years, dying in 1931. He rarely ever played his coronet again, or even knew those who came to see him.

And so went one of the legends of jazz, someone who saw music clearly enough to blend together gospel and ragtime and blues into a pure sound like nothing else. Whether he was the first to play it — the “Father of Jazz” — or not is really immaterial. He was someone who saw the possibility for sound and pursued it, hunted it, until he created something beautiful and wonderful. He was talented and then he was gone and we are all the poorer for having lost him before his time.

Here is Ondaatje, in the voice of Willy Cornish who played trombone in Bolden’s band and continued as a New Orleans musician after he was gone:

“He had all that talent and wisdom he stole and learnt from people and then smashed it, smashed it like ice coming onto the highway off a truck. What did he see with all that? What good is all that if we can’t learn or know? I think Bellocq corrupted him with that mean silence so Buddy went and Bellocq stayed here shocked by his going and Buddy gone for two years then coming back and gentle with us till he had to go…crazy in front of children and Nora and everyone.

Then jesus that, jesus that hospital and the company there which he slid through like a pin in the blood. With all his friends outside like they were on a grandstand watching him and when they began to realize he would never come out then all the people he hardly knew, all the fools, beginning to talk about him…”

We can never — we will never — know Buddy Bolden. But Michael Ondaatje has found a singular way of searching for him in Coming Through Slaughter; of peeling back the layers of a life in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. He has found parts of Bolden, rumors of jazz, hints of beauty, in a life lost long before it was gone. His book is harsh and tender at the same time, and occasionally even a challenge to read. But in the end, it paints a picture of a man and the time he lived in, and the music he made. The ghost here is all the songs he never found; all the sounds Buddy Bolden took with him when he was sent away forever.

What a waste of greatness — what a tragic waste.