Buddy’s Blues

A Review of Coming Through Slaughter by Raina Lauren Fields

Ondaatje, Michael. Coming Through Slaughter.

Improvisation is one of jazz’ hallmarks, blending sources of music, chord progression, popular riffs and melodies, and on-the-spot, newly created melodies. Quite appropriately, Michael Ondaatje’s work of fiction, Coming Through Slaughter, explores the life of trumpeter Buddy Bolden through a combination of sources, including the rumors, legends, interviews, and conversations of oral history, as well as, lyrics and song lists, official reports, dialogue, and bits of imagined stream of consciousness. With these sources and accounts at play, the narrative can be confusing – Ondaatje uses multiple voices, often without clearly attributing those points of view. It’s not easy for the reader to distinguish between the true accounts and those that are invented.

Little is known about the actual life of Buddy Bolden, which perhaps makes him most intriguing to jazz aficionados and readers alike. The historical record is slim: one picture of him, taken with his band, no recordings, and the sole accounts of him playing are second-hand from musicians who even credit Bolden as one of jazz’s main predecessors: creating a new genre of music through the mixing of previous styles:

Thought I knew his blues before, and the hymns at funerals, but what he is playing now is real
strange and I listen careful for he’s playing something that sounds like both. I cannot make out the
tune and then I catch on. He’s mixing them up…that is the first time I ever heard hymns and blues
cooked up together.

There are more enigmatic things about Bolden. He simply appears in New Orleans, with a trumpet and no past. In Ondaatje's account, Bolden shows up at a parade, elicits a few melodic trumpet blasts every few blocks – an action that intrigues fans to legends for years. Ultimately a psychotic episode led Bolden to a mental institution where he spent the remainder of his life, a fact that further adds to this mystery. A musician at jazz’s very beginnings, Bolden suffers from the same hedonistic “jazz disease” that plagues future jazz musicians such as Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. A wild life, full of abuse: womanizing, drinking and drugging, fighting and arguing.

Ondaatje clearly seeks to recreate the jazz elements that occur throughout the novel include riffs. In this novel, they occur through certain repeated phrases, including the very poetic, “Passing wet chicory that lies in the field like the sky.” At the end of the book, we are introduced to the phrase for the last time, as we find that Bolden is one the way to East Louisiana State Mental Hospital, where he spends the rest of his life. Here, the riff, a once generative dance, reflects Bolden’s decent into madness. Language is one of Ondaatje’s strongest points. Through the fiction writer, Ondaatje is a poet at heart. Even at his crudest movements, where violence and sex are presented and intersect, his language is highly imagistic and revealing.

The last section of the book is held together by threads of history: interview, reports, imagined occurrences, and a surprising two-page, first person account: Bolden’s mind at work, or Michael Ondaatje’s?