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26 jazz
think he blew too hard. I will even go so far as to say that he did not blow correctly. In any case, he finally went crazy. You can figure that out for yourself."
Yes5 Buddy Bolden eventually went mad. He trumpeted his brains out. Slavery had officially ended: you could turn off the tap of cruelty in a minute, but it would take an age to finally clear up the mess. But he was a dynamic character: that great jazz pianist 'Jelly Rolf Morton sums up Buddy Bolden as "the blowingest man since Gabriel." And what fitter climate could there be for this new Gabriel's stentorian tones than that of New Orleans?
Street Parades
Let's flash back for a minute to the days that followed the emancipation of slaves in 1865. The negro was officially Tree' all right, but now he had to fend for himself and scrape his own living. Musical instruments, as we previously explained, were luxuries beyond his dreams; so he made music with his voice. He sang at celebrations and parades, he sang at funerals, he sang at the ecstatic negro religious services (some of which have been recreated for us on gramophone records). And in between, he sang all day long just for the hell of it. Of the in-between singing in New Orleans, Louis Armstrong writes: "We began by walking down Rampart Street between Perdido and Gravier. The lead singer and the tenor walked together in front, followed by the baritone and the bass. Singing at random, we wandered |
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