Bringing to life the fabulous, colorful panorama of New Orleans in the
first flush of the jazz era, this book tells the story of Buddy Bolden,
the first of the great trumpet players--some say the originator of
jazz--who was, in any case, the genius, the guiding spirit, and the king
of that time and place.
In this fictionalized meditation, Bolden, an unrecorded father of Jazz,
remains throughout a tantalizingly ungraspable phantom, the central
mysteries of his life, his art, and his madness remaining felt but never
quite pinned down. Ondaatje's prose is at times startlingly lyrical, and
as he chases Bolden through documents and scenes, the novel partakes of
the very best sort of modern detective novel--one where the enigma is
never resolved, but allowed to manifest in its fullness. Though more
'experimental' in form than either The English Patient or In the Skin
of a Lion, it is a fitting addition to the renowned Ondaatje oeuvre.