Buddy Bolden

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Charles Joseph Buddy Bolden (1877 to 1931) was an American cornettist from New Orleans. His contemporaries and later jazz historians see him as a key figure in the development of the New Orleans style of ragtime, then called jass, which later came to be called jazz. He lost his father when he was six and grew up with his mother and other relatives. As King Bolden, his band was at the height of its fame in the city from about 1900 to 1907.

Music and breakthrough

Bolden played loudly and improvised a great deal. He did not copy other cornettists, but played by ear what he heard and adapted it for his instrument. In this way he mixed ragtime, church music, march music and blues. He arranged the ordinary New Orleans dance band differently: string instruments became the rhythm section, while at the front played clarinets, trombones and his cornet. His band is said to have been the first in which brass players played blues. One of his best-known songs is Funky Butt, later Buddy Bolden's Blues, one of the earliest references to the idea of funk in popular music. The Big Four, a new syncopated bass drum pattern that loosened up march rhythms, is also attributed to him. Joe King Oliver and Freddie Keppard were directly inspired by him.

Influence

In 1907, at the age of thirty, he suffered an acute psychosis and was committed to a psychiatric institution in Jackson, where he remained for the rest of his life. No recordings have survived, but his influence echoes in everything that later came out of New Orleans.

Listening

In School of Rock

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