 This video is brought to you by CuriosityStream. If you sign up to CuriosityStream with the link in the description, you'll also get access to Nebula, where you can watch my track-by-track analysis of Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. Jazz has a rich mythological tradition. It's full of tales of good and evil, struggle and triumph, of comedy and tragedy, and it's got a deep pantheon of gods and heroes, men and women who have tapped into something so beautiful, so pure with their music, that they transcended mortality itself. Of course, because the story of jazz is the story of the modern age, we usually know the truth behind these legends, but there's one figure in jazz who has slipped almost entirely into myth. He was a man who lived at the turn of the century and blew horn lines so loud and so hot that they changed the course of history. He was the first true virtuoso of jazz music and a man whose tragic life story would be echoed by the greats who followed in his footsteps. And he's a mystery that jazz has been trying to unravel for generations. His name was Charles Buddy Bolden, but to many he was known better as King Bolden and to some he is known simply as the man who invented jazz. Let's take a closer look. As far as we know, there's only one existing photo of the man who played jazz before it was called jazz. It's a grainy piece taken by an unknown photographer at the turn of the century. In it Buddy Bolden cradles his cornet surrounded by the musicians who helped him shape history. And while we know what Bolden looked like, we don't really know what he sounded like. Growing up as a working class black man in New Orleans, Bolden learned to play music by ear, so we don't have any sheets of his songs. Furthermore, Bolden's career took place at the dawn of recording technology and it was over a decade before the original Dixieland Jazz Band cut what people consider to be the first jazz record. Bolden's trombonist Willie Cornish claimed that Bolden and his band did record one phonograph cylinder. But if that recording did indeed exist once, it has since been lost to time. So the best way we can get a sense of what Buddy Bolden might have sounded like is to look at the world he lived in. Buddy Bolden, like the music that he would come to define, was born in New Orleans in the late 1800s. At that time, the city was a melting pot of diverse musical ideas. The transatlantic slave trade had brought African rhythms to the new world where they coalesced into a number of different musical movements. Along the Mississippi, field haulers turned into the blues and in the Caribbean they mixed with traditional Spanish dances to become the habanera. Meanwhile, gospel songs became an essential part of black communities and the first generation of freed slaves had turned minstrelcy into ragtime music. All of these musics met and conversed in the streets of New Orleans where a young Buddy Bolden heard and began to learn them. But instead of singing in church or playing ragtime on piano, Bolden adapted the music he heard to his cornet. Since he had no formal training, he played by ear, making up his horn lines as he went. And Buddy Bolden played it all loud. Frankie Doosan, who played the trombone in Bolden's band, claimed that Bolden blew the loudest horn in the world. And Albert Glenny, who played bass with Bolden from time to time, remembered that Buddy's cornet was as loud as Louis Armstrong playing through a microphone a generation later. This volume, along with Bolden's penchant for improvisation, helped him stand out in the music scene. And there was one more innovation that Bolden brought, and it might be the most important of them all. A rhythm known as the Big Four. The Big Four was a modification on the most popular kind of beat at the time, the March. It took this march and jammed an African rhythm known today as a ham bone into the end. The result was a syncopated beat that created space in the music and let improvisers go wild. Within this framework, Bolden played traditional songs and his own original works. The most famous of these was a raunchy piece called Funky Butt, written by Willie Cornish. That song got its name from the smell of the sweaty halls where people packed in to dance to Bolden's music. And Funky Butt gives us our best shot at knowing what Buddy Bolden might have sounded like. At some point, the song took on a new name, Buddy Bolden Blues, and it was recorded by Jelly Roll Morton, another one of Jazz's early greats. As for Bolden's horn, a best guess at what it might have sounded like comes from a 1943 recording made by Bunk Johnson. When Johnson wasn't a member of Bolden's band, he probably played alongside the king a number of times and did his best to emulate those sounds on that recording. By the time the century turned, Buddy Bolden had been crowned the king of New Orleans music, though it was still years away from being named Jazz. But Buddy Bolden's reign as king of New Orleans was short. In 1907, when he was just 30 years old, Bolden suffered a psychotic episode. Soon after, he was committed into a mental institution, with what we now know to be Schizophrenia. Saved for a brief discharge at the end of World War I, Buddy Bolden spent the rest of his life in that mental institution. Then, on November 4th, 1934, Buddy Bolden died. But while Bolden was ailing in a mental institution, the music he helped invent came to find its name, and then it spread across America and around the world. Bolden's story is as compelling as it is tragic, but it doesn't end with his death. And what interests me most about Bolden isn't really his life, or even the mystery of his sound. What I find most interesting about Buddy Bolden is the way that he has been mythologized in the century and more since he stopped playing music. Myths are at the very foundation of culture, and the culture of Jazz is no exception to that. The story of Buddy Bolden serves as a kind of creation myth for the genre of Jazz, and by extension for nearly all of popular music. As with most great stories, the myth of King Bolden began as oral tradition, stories passed down by those who saw him play. One such person was Louis Armstrong. Though Armstrong was just six years old when Bolden was committed, he claimed that one of his earliest memories was dancing to Bolden's music as a young child. And of course, alongside the oral tradition, Bolden has been remembered musically by some of the greats in Jazz history. Sidney Vache paid tribute to his contemporary in Buddy Bolden's stomp, and then there's Duke Ellington's Hey Buddy Bolden. Born with a silver trumpet in his mouth. Wynton Marsalis broke out his best impression of Buddy Bolden for 1992's The Legend of Buddy Bolden. Two takes on Buddy Bolden, his life and his sound, that fascinate me most. Michael Ondace's novel Coming Through Slaughter and the 2019 film Bolden. There have been other works about Bolden, but few others take such an open liberty with fact. Ondace's book includes a number of apocryphal stories, including that Bolden worked as a barber and ran a small press called The Cricket. Meanwhile Bolden inserts familiar musical struggles into the titular character's life, notably those that represent the constant tug of war between creativity and commerciality. But neither of these works purport to be rooted in truth. Instead, these stories use Buddy Bolden the same way that we've always used the heroes of myth, as a means of explaining that which is inexplicable. And Jazz is inexplicable. Sure, you can look at the history of the musics that coalesced into Jazz and see where it came from, but there's something else about Jazz. Something raw and something uniquely human. Something that captured the world in a way no music ever had, and changed popular culture forever. Both stories try to explore this aspect of Jazz, not just through the content, but through the way they tell Buddy Bolden's life. Ondace's story is strange and disjointed. His prose is experimental, often feeling closer to poetry. It seems to be a narrative built on creating spontaneous moments of beauty, like the improvisation that is one of the cornerstones of Jazz music. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's at its best when Ondace is writing about Bolden's music in question. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order. What was outside it? He tore apart the plot. See, his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing, he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes. Listening to him was like talking to Coleman. You were both changing direction with every sentence, sometimes in the middle, using each other as a springboard through the dark. You were moving so fast it was unimportant to finish and clear everything. He would be describing something in 27 ways. There was pain and gentleness, everything jammed into each number. Another Jazz cornerstone, Syncopation, is imitated in Ondace's prose as well. His book doesn't have the steady rhythm of story to tie you down. Instead, it leaves gaps and jumps ahead, like the syncopated rhythms that Buddy Bolden's band played. You could say the same about the Bolden movie. That film frames the entire story through the eyes of Buddy Bolden locked in a mental institution. The music of Louis Armstrong comes through the radio and gives Bolden a surreal passage into his memories. We flip back and forth from the sweaty, vibrant dance halls to the harsh realities of lower class New Orleans. At one point Buddy Bolden parachutes into a bandstand with a segregated audience. His music draws everyone away from the traditional pop and has people of different colors dancing and singing together with joy. It's an easy metaphor for how Jazz dropped into the music world and blew it wide open. In addition to surreal, Jazz-inspired passages like this, Bolden works new story beats into the life of the titular character. The biggest of these revolves around a fictionalized manager named Bartley who pressures Buddy into recording and selling his music. This is a conflict that has pervaded throughout Jazz history. Jazz is built around improvisation which means there's a spontaneity baked into its very DNA. When it comes to recording Jazz, there's something about the electricity of watching performers work off each other that's lost. But at the same time there's no way Jazz would have flourished like it did without recording. And of course any discussion of Jazz is also intrinsically tied to race. The recording of Jazz music disseminated it to a wider audience and much of that audience was white. Generations of black musicians would thrive and become icons while playing to segregated audiences. We see this in Bolden through the performance of Lewis Armstrong who plays to a rich white audience while the black community is forced to sit outside and listen from afar. The racial dynamics of Jazz are also explored through the character of Judge Perry, a rich white judge who ends up condemning Bolden to the asylum. The creation of these characters allows Bolden to explore how race ties into Jazz in a way that you just couldn't if you needed to focus on the truths we know about Buddy Bolden's life. Similarly, the soundtrack doesn't seek to find Bolden's true sound but instead to create a facsimile that can appeal to more modern audiences. Masterfully developed and performed by Wynton Marsalis, the soundtrack helps us understand not who Buddy Bolden is but what Buddy Bolden means. Because really there was no true Buddy Bolden, not in the way that we imagine him anyways. The fact of the matter is that no single person invented Jazz. I'm sure Buddy Bolden was an innovator of the music but there were dozens of unnamed musicians who created Jazz in the dance halls in the brothels of New Orleans. But Bolden's life is representative of all these musicians and so many Jazz musicians to come. Bolden's life was one of class struggle and race struggle, one defined by a constant battle with mental illness. Bolden's myth is one that foreshadowed the Jazz greats to come after him. Whether it's Charlie Parker or Big Spider Beck, John Coltrane or Billie Holiday, the story of Jazz is the story of great musicians overcoming adversity only to face more. It's the story of race and sex in America. It's the story of the complicated relationship between art and money. And it's the story about the dangers of chasing fame and glory. The true story of Buddy Bolden is something we'll never know. Maybe someday we'll find the famed Lost Cylinder or dig up some archival information and learn more about the man they called King. But in the grand scheme of things, will that really change much? I'd like to hear Buddy Bolden play just as much as the next guy but at the same time, I've heard Buddy Bolden play. I've heard Buddy Bolden play through the fingers of Jelly Roll Morton. I've heard him play through the lips of Louis Armstrong and I've heard him brought to life by the mind of Wynton Marcellus. I've heard Buddy Bolden play in the vast ripples of music that spread ever outwards from New Orleans and spread even further to this day. I don't need to hear Buddy Bolden's music because I've heard his story a thousand times because the story of Buddy Bolden is the story of Jazz. I'm eternally fascinated by Jazz. It's such a unique musical movement and there are countless stories to be found within its history. If you want to hear more of these stories, you should check out the Jazz Loft according to W. Eugene Smith on CuriosityStream. That documentary uses archival photos and tape collected by Smith himself to tell the story of a legendary loft in Manhattan where some of Jazz's all-time greats came to play throughout the 50s and 60s. But if Jazz isn't your thing, don't worry. By signing up to CuriosityStream you can also get access to Nebula where you can watch my Dark Side of the Moon project in all of its glory. 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