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Jazz, a truely American artform. Writer and researcher Don Marquis succesfully describes all the different cultural influences that converged into what we now call jazz and how Buddy Bolden unknowingly began jazz.
He finds the real story of Buddy Bolden. His book is the result of long research, including archives, search of documentary records in and around Louisiana, interviews and cross-checking accounts of surviving people who had known Bolden first hand, autobiographies and monographs. Compared to a novel, the book could be considered a bit dry, but you get the truth about Bolden, his life, his associates, his music and his eventual insanity. Unlike his fictional counterpart, the real Bolden wasn't a barber. Bolden was a New Orleans trumpeter and bandleader in the 1890s and first decade of the 1900s and played an original loud and driving style of cornet that made New Orleans take notice. Some contemporary and later musicians credit him as having started jazz, although Bolden never heard the music he was helping form called "jazz" during his active life.
Most authoritative work on Bolden, a must read book for all those interested in early jazz.
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