COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER by Michael OndaatjeNew York, Vintage International: 1996 FIC OND
Buddy Bolden and the 20th century arrived on the New Orleans music scene - not yet defined as jazz - at about the same time. Later musicians like Louis Armstrong and Freddie Keppard recognized Bolden's accomplishment and gave it a name but Bolden, with his cornet and his band, led the way.
Bolden (1877-1931) live a short, intense life, suffered a nervous breakdown at the age of thirty-one, and was confined to the East Louisiana state Hospital at Jackson for the rest of his life. He was a barber by day, not perhaps the safest occupation for a man with an excess of temperament in a hostile world with a razor in hand. By night, Bolden made music in clubs and 'houses', maintaining his energy with the injudicious imbibing of whiskey. His patron Tom Pickett, "King of the District", published a yearly directory of services offered to men and where to find them. Bolden also published a local newspaper called The Cricket, filling it with the stories people told him while under the towel or under the influence.
The hard information about Bolden's life is minimal, but Michael Ondaatje's prose poem of a novel offers a convincing attempt at Bolden's truth. (A native of Sri Lanka and longtime resident of Canada, Ondaatje is best known for his novel The English Patient.) He has Buddy's wife Nora Bass, a former prostitute, think about his haunted aspect, "When they were alone together it was still a crowded room." When Bolden falls in love Jaelin Brewitt, the wife of a friend, and disappears for two years, Ondaatje has her husband Webb, a police officer, follow his intuition to discover Bolden in a bathtub. The real life character, E. J. Belloq, photographer of the underside of New Orleans life, makes an appearance but respectable New Orleans barely exists except as customers seeking out carefully disguised pleasures in an America forever protesting its innocence.
The hard information about Bolden's life is minimal, but Michael Ondaatje's prose poem of a novel offers a convincing attempt at Bolden's truth. (A native of Sri Lanka and longtime resident of Canada, Ondaatje is best known for his novel The English Patient.) He has Buddy's wife Nora Bass, a former prostitute, think about his haunted aspect, "When they were alone together it was still a crowded room." When Bolden falls in love Jaelin Brewitt, the wife of a friend, and disappears for two years, Ondaatje has her husband Webb, a police officer, follow his intuition to discover Bolden in a bathtub. The real life character, E. J. Belloq, photographer of the underside of New Orleans life, makes an appearance but respectable New Orleans barely exists except as customers seeking out carefully disguised pleasures in an America forever protesting its innocence.
ONdaatje reveals that the seed for Coming Through Slaughter planted itself in his mind when he read "Buddy Bolden who became a legend when he went berserk in a parade...". It was April, 1907, while Bolden was playing with Henry Allen's Brass Band in a street parade that he had a fit and was taken to jail. Two months later a judge committed Bolden to the asylum where he lived for another twenty-four years. It is painful to think about those years, locked in a place with no black staff and little communication between blacks and whites. Ondaatje reminds us that the mortality rate at the asylum was ten per cent a year, appalling but similar to what awaited Bolden's friends on the outside. "You removed yourself from the twentieth century game of fame, the rest of your life a desert of facts."
Posts
