Join us on a poignant journey through the life of Charles 'Buddy' Bolden, the enigmatic cornetist who sparked a musical revolution. Step back in time to the pulsating streets of post-Civil War New Orleans where Bolden's improvisational genius and the introduction of the 'big four' rhythm heralded the dawn of jazz. Although no recordings of his live performances exist, his influence resonates with us through the oral tradition and the tributes paid by future jazz legends. Uncover the cultural influences that shaped his craft, and celebrate the raw, powerful, and deeply emotive sound that Bolden brought to the world, forever changing the course of music history.
As we pay homage to Bolden's extraordinary contribution to jazz, we cannot overlook the tragic side of his story, marked by his battle with schizophrenia. This episode casts a sobering light on his mental health struggles and the impact they had on his life and career, culminating in his institutionalization in 1907. Through Bolden's narrative, we underscore the enduring importance of mental health awareness and the necessity of compassion and support for those afflicted. Take away from this episode not only an appreciation for Bolden's musical prowess but also a reminder of the human fragility behind the legend. Remember to hold close the stories that shape us, as we prepare to delve into the life of another jazz great, King Oliver, upon our return.
Join us on a poignant journey through the life of Charles 'Buddy' Bolden, the enigmatic cornetist who sparked a musical revolution. Step back in time to the pulsating streets of post-Civil War New Orleans where Bolden's improvisational genius and the introduction of the 'big four' rhythm heralded the dawn of jazz. Although no recordings of his live performances exist, his influence resonates with us through the oral tradition and the tributes paid by future jazz legends. Uncover the cultural influences that shaped his craft, and celebrate the raw, powerful, and deeply emotive sound that Bolden brought to the world, forever changing the course of music history.
As we pay homage to Bolden's extraordinary contribution to jazz, we cannot overlook the tragic side of his story, marked by his battle with schizophrenia. This episode casts a sobering light on his mental health struggles and the impact they had on his life and career, culminating in his institutionalization in 1907. Through Bolden's narrative, we underscore the enduring importance of mental health awareness and the necessity of compassion and support for those afflicted. Take away from this episode not only an appreciation for Bolden's musical prowess but also a reminder of the human fragility behind the legend. Remember to hold close the stories that shape us, as we prepare to delve into the life of another jazz great, King Oliver, upon our return.
Good evening. Good evening, this is the More Wine and Music podcast. I am your host, harriet Westmore. Sorry I am late, but this is a gonna be a good show tonight. It's gonna be short, but it's gonna be a good show, so let's get started. Alright? So welcome to the More Wine and Music podcast.
Speaker 1:
This is season two, episode number three. Before I get started, a little bit of housekeeping. Please come to the website wwwmorewineandmusiccom, where you can buy some cool merch. There's a coffee mug, their t-shirts, one in white and one in black with the More Wine and Music podcast logo on them and also I have created a what you call a Buy Me a Coffee. Buy Me a Coffee is a special place where you can people can send donations and get special perks. So for five hours a month, you will get a personal shout out to the show, among some other exclusive messages and posts from me. So if you'll be so kind to buy me a coffee and it's buymeacoffeecom backslash, more Wine Music is my actual account and for five dollars a month, you will get a personal shout out and also some other cool perks. Alright, so let's get started.
Speaker 1:
This is episode number three, and this week I'm going to be talking about Buddy Bolden. He is another innovator of the early jazz. He created one of the cool ways of playing in his music. He was a cornet player. So here we are talking about him. Some people think of him as the father of jazz, although there are no live recordings of him actually playing. But he was a great innovator of the jazz genre. He created a certain style, a certain tone of the jazz music that people began to emulate after he was long gone.
Speaker 1:
So Charles Buddy Bolden was born on September 6 of 1877 and that was the same year of the reconstruction era of the Civil War. So he was born right after the period of the reconstruction era, right after the Civil War. And he was born in New Orleans, in a central part of New Orleans called Central City. By all accounts, central City in that part of the neighborhood in New Orleans was considered a culturally diverse area. So he witnessed a lot of different diversity as far as races White, black, spanish. You know, like I was explaining last week about Jolly Roe Morton, he was known as Creole. So that was an interracial mixture of black, white, spanish, french, and those were all the cultures that were in Central City. So he was able to experience a lot of the music that was integrated in that neighborhood that was part of central city.
Speaker 1:
But unfortunately I don't know too much about his parents other than that his he was only one of two siblings, he and his sister. His father tragically died from pneumonia, so I think that was at the age of 10. So that was around 1887. His father had died of pneumonia, so it was just his mom and his sister and buddy. So they moved out of the central city after he lost his dad and moved close towards another section of town called Storyville, which is a historically known black section of New Orleans. And to make ends meet his mother and his sister took in laundry, so they became laundress. So they did other people's clothes. They wash other people's clothes to make ends meet.
Speaker 1:
He took a special interest in music at a very young age. He was given a clarinet at a very young age and he actually taught himself. He didn't know how to read music, so he taught himself how to play and with everyday practice, practice, practice, practice makes perfect and he practiced and practiced and practiced some more. So he became very good at playing to where he was given the opportunity to play, at neighborhood haunts like the Union Halls, all the juke joints, all the brothels, because he actually they did live in that district, the Redlack district. So at a very young age he played in the brothels, and that's not too uncommon for jazz musicians. That's basically where they played anyway, were in brothels. So I mean that's how they made their mark, because those type of areas were very open to new music and to new styles of music. So therefore that's where he had his opportunity to play.
Speaker 1:
It was at the turn of the century of the 20th century, that Buddy became part of a band and his famous instrument was the cornet. Now he went from learning how to play the clarinet to the cornet, and so this is where he started to hone in on his craft. He was known from his band members to play really loud on the horn. So that's how he came to get noticed, because if his playing was so loud and so people would call him Big Noise because he would make that cornet sound, be loud, I mean very loud. So also what was interesting is the fact that he developed a style which was called improvisation, which means he improvised his music A lot of times. Like I said before, he didn't know how to read music. So he listened to the familiar songs that were already out and he put his own spin, put his own improvisation to the music and made it his own. So he was created.
Speaker 1:
What was known in the jazz scene as far as style of playing was called the big four, and basically what it is is that rather than having a four beat, steady beat like boom, boom, boom, boom, that was a steady beat of the drums. That's the regular straightforward. What Buddy Bolden did? He improvised and called it the big four because with that beat he managed to do a skip beat to it. So boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom that. And with that he was able to allow do some other creativity with that. So with the sound of that, with this horn playing, he was able to add a little bit of pizzazz and jazz to the music, which is what jazz is all about anyway. It's about improvisation.
Speaker 1:
So you would take a regular song, elvis post have been played straight forward. But if you take it in a jazz style you can turn it up, turn the beat up, change the beat and change the tone of the music, add a little bit of more chords to it, add a little more complex, changing of the style and the sound, and you can either pep it up and that's basically what jazz is, and Buddy Bolden was the actual one who started that. And so he made a big impression on other jazz artists because he gave way of taking a song and making it his own. He put his own personality and put his own style to the music and people loved it. I mean, you would go to all these Brockville houses and the red light, just all the clubs and the union halls and stuff, and he would do some improvisation in the music that was playing and they would go wild, they would be on that dance floor dancing and swinging and they loved it. So that was his trademark and again, that was what is basically known for him as a musician.
Speaker 1:
One of the early artists is because he created some call improvisation. He improvised the sound of music. He could take, like I said, take a simple song and change the beat to it up step the beat. Actually, what they said was he, the beat was up step to where the drums and the cymbals would be able to play together. So you hear that that type of music, so that's that type of beat, so it will kick it up and then from that you can add the horns. They come in and do, do, do, do, do, do. Just add on to whatever each band player add on to that. So that was what started the whole thing of jazz.
Speaker 1:
Well, at the age of 30 in 1906, he was very well known in the black section of town which was called Storyville in New Orleans. And I mean he was so well known to where every morning children would go by his house in the morning. Every like in the mornings they would come by his house and listen because that's when he would practice his music. So kids would gather around in the front of his house and just hear him play. That's how popular he was. I mean he even got the little kids attention. Kids like to hear him play. And again, the sound of jazz was just. It brought out everybody. I mean I don't care what side of the tracks you came from, people all over who liked that, the new sound that they've never heard before. They would come to the black section of town, so to speak, just to hear the live music. So he was known at this time. He was known as King Bolton. He wasn't just Buddy Bolton, he was known as King Bolton because he was the king of jazz. He was the king of the party and king of getting that stepping it up a notch, so to speak.
Speaker 1:
As with everything when you play as an artist, playing in these type of venues always goes with the drinking, the womanizing, whatever, always the seedy side. And unfortunately, king Bolton was no exception. He was known as to be a very heavy drinker. He was an alcoholic, basically Because when he played he would he'll drink and party along with the audience. But after a while it became bad enough to where he was starting to miss gigs. So he would be too drunk to perform. He wouldn't show up to a lot of the schedule dates that he and his band had. So that causes a problem.
Speaker 1:
And then after that people started noticing something else about him. You know, with his heavy drinking King Bolden had, he had headaches. He used to have a lot of headaches, you know people would say well, that's just hungover, you know being hungover, all the you know from heavy drinking. But it was more than that, because with the headaches he began to start acting irrational. He would start talking to himself, you know, just talking, just saying stuff that just didn't make sense. And he would also, after a while, started, you know, just starting an argument with his bandmates. He'll be okay, you know, one day, and the next day he'll just go off and, you know, start constantly starting, you know, arguing with them.
Speaker 1:
And then he developed paranoia. He was always afraid that some other artists, musician, would upstage him. He always had that fear, or that paranoia, that someone you know that someone is would take his shine away from him. So he always would, you know, argue and worry about that. It became to a bad point, to where he was beginning to be afraid of everything, just, you know, paranoid that people were just trying to overshadow him. And so it basically came to a head in September of 1906, where every year in New Orleans, as always, they have a band, a parade in the city, and King Bolden and his band I mean, they were always the ones that would play in the band Well, this particular September he was. They were in formation to march in the band, getting ready for the band, get ready to march down the street, and he just up and left. He left, he got out of line and just walked away. No explanation, didn't tell anybody nothing. He just had his horn and just left, and that was pretty much it as far as him playing again it, you know, his mom tried to step in and try to help him and because he was always just irrational and paranoid and so he was he didn't play again.
Speaker 1:
After that it got to the point six months later, after that September, six months later in 1907, he was staying back home with his mom and his mom couldn't take care of him. I mean, it was to the point now she had to call the police on him because she was afraid, actually afraid of him, afraid for her safety and afraid that she was gonna harm her and or harm himself or harm someone else. So he actually had to, you know, call the police and the police took him away and he spent, he was put into the state asylum in Louisiana and he spent the rest of his life in asylum. And you look back at this now as a. You know I'm not a licensed mental health therapist or anything, but I do have mental health background, I just don't have license. He was basically, you look at it now, it's obvious that he was paranoid, schizophrenic, but back then, you know, they just, you know, throw you in an asylum and that's where he stayed. He died on November 4th in 1934. So this life was cut short.
Speaker 1:
You don't know what the onset, you don't know what causes mental illness like a paranoid, schizophrenic. It's just something that just you know, comes, comes on. Like I said, the early signs of a paranoid is schizophrenia is when you start thinking irrationally and you, you know, just start talking to yourself because you're actually hearing voices in your you know, in your mind, you're actually communicating with the voices in your mind and so people are on the outside. You know, obviously they can't hear. Hear the voices was going in your head, but you know, you're actually, you know, talking to somebody that's in your head. So that's one of the symptoms of schizophrenia. And I don't know. I mean, obviously I don't think there were any kind of medicine, medication, you know, other than I don't even think, I don't even know if it was shock therapy back then. That was like later on, like in the 40s and 50s, I believe. But unless they did a lobotomy and lobotomy, you know, that's pretty much taking parts of your brain, though I mean they're doing, you know, taking away some of your brain for you, where they think that the illness is on the part of your brain. So that's, that's what lobotomy is.
Speaker 1:
It didn't say that he would be received that or not, but otherwise, I mean, he never played again. He was, you know, too far gone to do that. But it wasn't until after he died that, you know, he, his music, still lived on and there's artists after him that paid homage to. One was Jelly Roll Morton, who I talked about last week. He recorded the song Buddy Bolden Blues, sydney Vache he record. He's another horn player who record the song Buddy Bolden Stomp the Duke. Duke Ellington Later on recorded and made a song in dedicated to Buddy Bolden and call hey Buddy Bolden and went. Marcellus created a whole series of songs dedicated to Buddy Bolden called the best of Buddy Bolden. That was back in 92.
Speaker 1:
So there's only one living picture of him. It's if you would look him up. There's just one one surviving picture of him and, like I said, there's no actual. From what historians are have said that there's no actual live recording. He never they never recorded, get a chance to record any of their songs, so you can't actually hear him play because he never wrote music, because he didn't know how. He didn't know how to read music, so he never wrote. There aren't any sheet music of his songs. Everything that he played he played from here. So you know it's.
Speaker 1:
It's pretty sad that you know musicians like that and, like I said, he's not the only one. You look back at it and I was pretty. You know it's not uncommon for you know they're considered genius is really you have a very talented artists or creativity of artists who, for whatever reason, their minds just go into a psychotic break. Look what happened to anybody everybody know Familiar with Donnie Hathaway. He was a musical genius. He was a musical genius and he stuff suffered from schizophrenia and he ended up, you know, pretty much killing himself.
Speaker 1:
So it's very sad and it is something that you know we have to understand and get help for mental illness, because the mental illness is real. It's not anything that you can just sloth off and you know say It'll go away because it doesn't. It'll get worse if you don't get help for it or get the right meds to stable yourself. You can still live a productive life given the right medication and therapy. So that's just a public service announcement.
Speaker 1:
If you are have issues, depression, anxiety, or you know I'm not saying the onset of that to that point of schizophrenia, or you know a loved one that may have. You know some of the early signs of that, you know I, you know urge to get help, you know. Just, you know, don't think that you're suffering alone because a lot of these artists they suffer alone because a lot of people didn't want to, didn't know how to help or was in too much of. You know family can be too much in denial of their loved one who may be ill, and that's not helping the loved one by being in denial. So we have to, you know, take care of our friends and family and our loved one.
Speaker 1:
All right, so that is it for King Bolden. I will be on vacation start of next week so I won't have a episode until the week after. So in two weeks I will be back and I'll be talking about Joseph Nathan Oliver, who is an also King called King Oliver. So again, hit that like and subscribe, and if you so want to buy me a coffee, hit the buy me a coffee dot com. Backslash more wine music and become a $5 subscriber and you will get extra little perks. I'll give you a personal shout out on the show. So, all right, you guys, take care and I will see you in two weeks. All right, good night.