Voicing Silence: The Legend of Buddy Bolden

This article focuses on the legendary Buddy Bolden, a putative godfather of jazz improvisation in the very earliest days of jazz-like music–making in New Orleans. We first seek to position him both within the New Orleans of his time and within the broader tradition of jazz’ development to which he is deemed to have made such a singular contribution. But we soon discover that, despite his legendary status, we have in fact no aural record of Bolden’s actual playing and only fragmentary, often contradictory, accounts of his life. It becomes necessary to “improvise the improvisor” – to, in effect, give voice to Bolden’s silence. We then examine several efforts to imagine Bolden both as player and as person: by Michael Ondaatje, on the printed page, in his highly regarded “novel” Coming Through Slaughter and on disk, aurally, by players like Jerry Granelli and Malachi Thompson. We conclude that Bolden’s rather shadowy person and performance make him especially available, in both song and story, for the kinds of improvisation of person we have pinpointed. Indeed, this may again prove true as those in post-Katrina New Orleans who may wish to rebuild the city in the terms of its own history find they must once more “talk back” to power, to those who now choose merely to further (in Mike Davis’ chilling phrase) the “killing of New Orleans.”