The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia Read Free Book Online Page A

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    This forced association took place not only in the broader social arena, but also in the musical subculture of New Orleans. The Creole musicians were, for the most part, better trained than the black players from uptown; they were steeped in the classics and skilled at reading music. But suddenly these polished Creole ensembles were forced to compete for work against the less schooled, more boisterous black bands that were pursuing a “hotter” style, one that would serve as the foundation for New Orleans jazz. In time, the hotter sound would emerge as the dominant strain— although assimilating many aspects of the Creole tradition in the process. At the close of the nineteenth century, John Robichaux’s Creole band, with its studied arrangements and skilled musicianship, represented the best of the older style. The newer, more intense approach was exemplified in the music of cornetist Charles “Buddy” Bolden.
    BUDDY BOLDEN, THE ELUSIVE FATHER OF JAZZ
    Buddy Bolden, often cited as the first jazz musician, may well be the most mysterious figure in the annals of New Orleans music. No recordings survive of this seminal figure—despite the rumored existence of a cylinder recording from the turn of the century—and no mention of his music appeared in print until 1933, two years after his death, and some three decades after Bolden contributed to the revolutionary birth of a new style of American music. Hence any assessment of his importance must be drawn from scattered and often contradictory accounts, almost all of them documented, sometimes with mixed motives, long after the fact. For years, only the barest sketch of a biography was available—an account that placed Bolden as a barber and editor of a local scandal sheet, both facts ultimately proven to be untrue. However, detailed research conducted by Donald Marquis, which culminated in his 1978 book In Search of Buddy Bolden, First Man of Jazz , put to rest the many misconceptions and brings us probably as close as we will ever get to Bolden and his music. 12
    In 1877, the year Bolden was born, President Rutherford Hayes removed the last federal soldiers from Louisiana, signaling an end to the Reconstruction era in New Orleans and its surroundings. The apparent return to normalcy was deceptive: Bolden, the son of a domestic servant, was raised in a society that would never match the prosperity and general well-being of prewar New Orleans. In 1881, four years after Bolden’s birth, his sister Lottie, five years of age, died of encephalitis; two years later, Bolden’s father died, at age thirty-two, of pneumonia. These personal tragedies reflected a broader, more disturbing social reality. As the mortality statistics cited earlier make clear, the abbreviated life spans of the Bolden clan were, for the most part, typical of black society in late nineteenth-century New Orleans.
    Bolden would have been exposed to music not only at various social events, but also at church and in school—in fact, two of John Robichaux’s musicians taught at the Fisk School for Boys, which Bolden likely attended. At some point in the mid-1890s, Bolden began playing the cornet, initially taking lessons from a neighbor, and was soon supplementing his income as a plasterer with earnings from performing. At this remove, it is hard to evaluate how much formal training Bolden enjoyed. “[I] don’t think he really knew how to blow his horn right,” Louis Armstrong has suggested, and members of the Robichaux band dismissed Bolden’s group as a bunch of “routineers,” by which they meant fakers. 13 Yet Bolden listed himself as a “music teacher” in the local directory. Certainly one would give much to know what pearls of wisdom he passed on to his private students. In any event, the lessons he gave in public, through the example of his own playing, came to exert an even greater influence over the nascent jazz style of his hometown.
    Unlike many New Orleans horn players, Bolden’s