Empire of Sin by Gary Krist

actually blew the tuning slide out of his cornet and it would land twenty feet away.”
    This, of course, is a physical impossibility, but it was only one of the legends that eventually grew up aroundthe Bolden persona. Young Buddy did not, for instance, publish a scandal sheet called The Cricket , and he was not a barber. He did, however, spend a lot of time in barbershops, as did many of the early jazzmen, since the shops were common rendezvous points for musicians assembling personnel for upcoming gigs. At Charlie Galloway’s barbershop on South Rampart Street in the late ’90s, Bolden—still in his teens—got many of his earliest jobs. Working by day as a laborer and occasional plasterer, he would play by night in the neighborhood halls and honky-tonks. Andthe Bolden Band was soon attracting plenty of attention—and spawning a raft of imitators.
    Even some of the older musicians took notice. Bandleaders like Galloway, Edward Clem, and Henry Peyton had already been making some innovative music when Bolden came up, but Buddy took the music in new directions. “Buddy was the first to play blues for dancing,” one fellow musician said, summing it up. Bolden was also one of the first New Orleans musicians to performimprovised solos, or “rides.” “With all those notes he’d throw in and out of nowhere,” another musician said, “you never heard anything like it.” But it was the younger musicians in particular who were picking up the new sound. Not just other cornetists, but clarinetists, trombone and bass players, drummers, and guitarists. Musicians like Freddie Keppard, Bunk Johnson, George Baquet, Pops Foster, “Big Eye” Louis Nelson, Willie Cornish, Frankie Dusen, even a young Creole pianist (something of an outsider among the Uptowners) named Jelly Roll Morton … all were soon doing their own innovations, taking old tunes—or making up new ones—and stamping them with their own personalities.
    What exactly were they all playing?Critics would argue for decades about what the new music actually was. They traced its lineage to African, Caribbean, French, and/or Spanish roots, to ragtime, to various religious forms, and to secular traditions like the blues. But in a way, it was utterly new—music created by largely untrained musicians without much experience in any formal tradition: “That’s where jazz came from—from the routine men, ya understand—the men that didn’t know nothin’ about music. They just make up their own ideas.”
    Perhaps guitarist Danny Barker summed it up best: “Who cared if you read music? You were free: free to take liberties, free to express yourself from deep inside. The public was clamoring for it!”
    Many who heard him claimed that Bolden actually wasn’t a very skilled player technically. “He wasn’t really a musician,” trombonist Kid Ory once said of him. “He didn’t study. I mean, he was gifted, playing with effect, but no tone. He just played loud.” But that loud, piercing horn helped him break the music free from the more reined-in style of his predecessors,bringing the soloist—that is, himself—to the fore.
    And people began noticing, especially women. Bolden—an attractive, “light brown-skin boy” with reddish-black hair, a round face, and a “sort of Maori look about him”—was soon a local celebrity in black Uptown, traveling around witha harem of female admirers who would fight one another to hold his hat, his coat, even his handkerchief (but never his cornet, which he allegedly didn’t let out of his sight). And he appreciated the attention. “Oh, he was crazy about womens,” a friend would later say. One of those “womens”—an older neighbor named Hattie Oliver—even bore him a baby son before his twentieth birthday. Buddy took care of both mother and child, at least for a while.
    Eventually, though, the new sound played by Bolden and his emulators became so popular—among working-class audiences both black and white—that