Description

Bringing alive the fantastic, vibrant panorama of New Orleans in the first flush of the jazz age, this book tells the story of Buddy Bolden, the first of the truly amazing trumpet players--some claim the inventor of jazz--who had been, regardless, the guru, the leading spirit, and the master of the time and location. In this meditation, Bolden, an unrecorded dad of Spruce, stays within a tantalizingly ungraspable phantom, the main mysteries of his life, his art, and his chaos leftover thought but never really pinned down. Ondaatje's writing reaches times amazingly musical, and as he chases Bolden through moments and files, the novel partakes of the extremely finest kind of contemporary detective novel--one where in actuality the enigma is never solved, but permitted to reveal in its volume. However more 'experimental' in type than either The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion, it's a fitting addition to the renowned Ondaatje oeuvre.