1890 - 1920 Buddy Bolden's Band plays
Standing, left to right: Jimmy Johnson, Buddy Bolden, Willie Cornish, William Warner. Sitting, left to right: Jefferson Mumford and Frank Lewis. Buddy Bolden, considered the "father of jazz," was born in New Orleans in 1877 and died in 1931. The peak of his career was from 1890 to 1920. He played music at Milneburg and other lakeshore resorts. First of the great New Orleans jazz figures was Buddy Bolden, a barber who blew his horn to glory. Deeper, deeper, Buddy Bolden plunged into his music...He dominated...New Orleans, playing at saloons, lakefront parties... Buddy made up one song after another His playing had one feature that later jazz authorities recognized as indispensable- "the trance,' and ability to sink himself in the music until nothing mattered but himself and the cornet, in fervent communion. As the 1900s approached...a small, bulkily built boy listened nightly to the silver magic of Buddy's notes. Nobody paid any attention to him then. He was young Louis Armstrong. The New Orleans sound had begun around 1900 with brass ensembles which, like ragtime, took the marching military bands as their models. In addition to cornets, trombones, and an occasional tuba these groups included clarinets, banjos or guitars, and fiddles. The bass and the piano were excluded because of their size, although the piano was a popular solo instrument in the dives, honky-tonks, and 'sporting houses." Buddy Bolden's band with Bunk Johnson was playing In honky-tonks as early as 1895, and the Olympia Brass Band existed on and off from 1900 to 1915 led by coronetist Freddie Keppard, with Joe Oliver playing second cornet and Alphonse Picou, Sidney Bechet, and Lorenzo Tio on clarinets. Oscar "Papa" Celestin formed the Original Tuxedo Orchestra in 1910. Keppard later led the Original Creole Band, while Joe 0liver worked for trombonist Kid Ory in his Brownskin Band. When Oliver left for Chicago, as Keppard had done, Louis Armstrong replaced him on coronet, There were probably a hundred of these seminal groups, and their players seemed infinitely interchangeable. All of them understood the basic premise of the music: collective improvisation. Source: New Oleans Online-Music http://www.neworleansonline.com/music/bolden.shtml Around the turn of the century, when the great Buddy Bolden was the king of New Orleans jazz, the legendary musician played his cornet all over town: Rampart and Perdido streets, Uptown, the lakefront and across the river. Source: Gambit Weekly-Blake Pontchartrain http://www.gambit-no.com/1998/0901/blak.html Buddy Bolden's music was never recorded.