Buddy Bolden: Profiles in Jazz

Cornetist Buddy Bolden’s life is shrouded in mystery. He was the George Washington of jazz- first at nearly everything. And as with Washington, many legends and fictional stories have been written about him. While the first president allegedly never told a lie, Bolden supposedly was a barber and edited a scandal sheet called The Cricket, both assertions are dubious at best. Bolden was the first major name in jazz history, and some would say helped found jazz itself. But just as no one today has the slightest idea what Washington sounded like when he spoke, the sound of Buddy Bolden’s cornet has been silent ever since he stopped playing in 1906.As of this writing, the Hollywood film called Bolden has not yet been released. Wynton Marsalis wrote the music for the film but, at best, his contributions will be an educated guess because Bolden never recorded. No one alive today really knows what he sounded like. Nobody has known since his occasional bassist Ed Garland died in 1980. No one was interviewed during Bolden’s career about the cornetist, and there was no real interest in documenting his life or music until the mid-1930s, long after his horn was stilled.A definitive and highly recommended book, In Search Of Buddy Bolden – First Man Of Jazz by Donald Marquis, was written in 1978 and it does its best to set the record straight on jazz’s first martyr. But there are still man