Wynton Marsalis Producing Buddy Bolden Film

[EKE BBB]

Ghost of Miles mentioned it in another thread, and I thought it would deserve its own discussion.

From Jazz Review forums:

#493, "Wynton Marsalis Producing Buddy Bolden Film"

New Orleans cornetist Charles “Buddy” Bolden will be portrayed by actor Anthony Mackie (She Hate Me, Million Dollar Baby) in the upcoming film Bolden!.

Wynton Marsalis is executive producing the film and will contribute the original soundtrack.

First-time director Dan Pritzker and veteran cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond also join the crew.

The production is currently filming on location in New Orleans and North Carolina.

Though he never recorded, Bolden has been credited with influencing the sounds of Louie Armstrong and Joe “King” Oliver. By 1905, Bolden had reached his peak as a professional musician in New Orleans, playing in various clubs and parks in and around the city with his band. Over the next two years though, he suffered increasingly from mental degradation and alcoholism. He spent the rest of his life in a mental institution in Jackson from 1907 until his death in 1931.

The biopic currently has no release date other than it is expected sometime in 2008.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_Bolden

Source: Zachary Herrmann

***************************************

(please note this post is from April 24, 2007)

[AllenLowe]

the amazing thing is how much Bolden turns out to have sounded like Marsalis -

[AllenLowe]

best casting - Cher as Jelly Roll Morton - however, I thought John Ashcroft as Lovie Austin was a mistake - though he does have a funky butt -

Edited November 14, 2007 by AllenLowe

[EKE BBB]

the amazing thing is how much Bolden turns out to have sounded like Marsalis -

Forgot to say that he is the only one (apart from me) who knows how Buddy Bolden sounded... and that's because I sent him a copy of my cylinder....

[MoGrubb]

the amazing thing is how much Bolden turns out to have sounded like Marsalis -

Forgot to say that he is the only one (apart from me) who knows how Buddy Bolden sounded... and that's because I sent him a copy of my cylinder....

Oh my, not your cylinder(!?).

[BERIGAN]

Ghost of Miles mentioned it in another thread, and I thought it would deserve its own discussion.

From Jazz Review forums:

#493, "Wynton Marsalis Producing Buddy Bolden Film"

...

Though he never recorded, .....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_Bolden

Source: Zachary Herrmann

***************************************

(please note this post is from April 24, 2007)

oh really?????

[Dan Gould]

Well I'm excited since now we'll find out what gumbo sounds like.

[Christiern]

I have discussed Bolden with a handful of people who actually heard him play. Consensus: a very uneventful player who was limited to basic blues and known for playing louder than anybody else. I guess Wynton can relate to being creatively limited, and loud.

I wonder what he thought he heard Buddy Bolden say...

Who will play Duke Ellington in this production?

Will Dizzy's Coca Cola club be selling the "Bolden Gumbo Cook Book"?

[jazzbo]

Well, if this ever appears, which is suspect, I am sure I would find it a fascinating cinematic fantasy one way or another!

[AllenLowe]

well, there's that whole thing where his band takes a boat trip on the Mississippi with Fate Marable, and the boat breaks down and they get stuck on an island with 2 pretty girls and a skipper and a rich guy and his wife and a professor and a dumb guy - and Bolden sees a plane going overhead but he can't flag it down and than the Harlem Globetrotters show up - I read all this in Don Marquis' book -

Edited November 14, 2007 by AllenLowe

[Free For All]

they get stuck on an island with 2 pretty girls

Bea Arthur and Rue McLanahan- "The Bolden Girls"

[paul secor]

they get stuck on an island with 2 pretty girls

Bea Arthur and Rue McLanahan- "The Bolden Girls"

[EKE BBB]

the amazing thing is how much Bolden turns out to have sounded like Marsalis -

Forgot to say that he is the only one (apart from me) who knows how Buddy Bolden sounded... and that's because I sent him a copy of my cylinder....

Oh my, not your cylinder(!?).

I would NEVER send him MY cylinder...

[EKE BBB]

well, there's that whole thing where his band takes a boat trip on the Mississippi with Fate Marable, and the boat breaks down and they get stuck on an island with 2 pretty girls and a skipper and a rich guy and his wife and a professor and a dumb guy - and Bolden sees a plane going overhead but he can't flag it down and than the Harlem Globetrotters show up - I read all this in Don Marquis' book -

And I'm afraid that, if as Lon says "this ever appears", we'll have a few of that kind of stories, mixed with some Murray-Crouch-Marsalis racial/ideological speech.

[Hot Ptah]

I will watch for the scene in which a musician places his instrument near a source of electric power, and Bolden blasts him with a negative, judgmental, personally insulting lecture about the horrors of electricity combining with music.

[Jazzmoose]

Something tells me that even if the movie arrives, it won't be able to top this thread...

[EKE BBB]

From the NYTimes:

In Search of the Man Who May Have Created Jazz

By MICHAEL CIEPLY

Published: April 22, 2007

NO one is really sure what this city’s first “cornet king,” Charles (Buddy) Bolden, sounded like 100 years ago, much less what made him tick. The lore says a single wax recording of Bolden’s namesake ensemble was demolished with the old shed in which it was stored in the early 1960s. What is probably the most reliable rendering of his trademark tune, “Buddy Bolden’s Blues,” came from Jelly Roll Morton, who had heard it performed and put it on a record years after the master’s death. But even the song’s own lyrics warn against trusting too much. “I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say,” runs the remarkably tentative opening line.

Yet this elusive character, who some aficionados say invented jazz before lapsing into ultimately fatal insanity before the age of 30, has been coming into focus in recent weeks as a troupe of seasoned filmmakers and impassioned amateurs struggle to capture Bolden and his world in not one but two, related, movies.

Eccentric in concept, ambitious in scope and not cheap — backers put the cost at more than $10 million — the twin pictures will probably stretch the limit of what independent film can do by the time they are seen on festival or commercial screens next year.

Dan Pritzker — a billionaire’s son best known as founder of and guitarist for the off-center soul-rock band Sonia Dada, and an important investor in the project as well as its director — has never made a movie. Yet that neophyte status has not kept him from attracting an impressive group of actors and behind-the- camera talent, including members of the Marsalis clan, to tell the story of a man Pritzker likens to “a shaman who flipped on the lights.”

The first picture, currently titled “Bolden,” is a musical biography with Anthony Mackie (“We Are Marshall”) in the lead role and Wendell Pierce (“The Wire”) and Jackie Earle Haley (an Oscar nominee this year for “Little Children”) among the supporting cast. The second is an hourlong silent film called “The Great Observer,” in which a young boy named Louis, recalling Bolden’s more celebrated successor Louis Armstrong, dreams of playing the horn while becoming entangled with the denizens of New Orleans’s red-light district, played by a company of ballerinas.

The films, which have no distributor yet, are meant to make their debuts in tandem. If all goes according to Mr. Pritzker’s plan, the second will play over a live performance by Wynton Marsalis, who is executive producer of the movies and has written original music that is meant to evoke the man Armstrong, Morton, Kid Ory, Sidney Bechet and other early jazzmen described as both influence and shadowy myth.

“There’s a fine line between guts and stupidity,” Mr. Pritzker said of his project last month. At the time, he was simmering in the spring heat with 100 mostly local players on a shoot that will end on locations and sets in Wilmington, N.C. The day’s work took the group to the Carrollton cemetery in an Uptown neighborhood, where a row of small frame houses had been painted blue-gray and modestly changed to stand in for the city of Bolden’s late-19th-century youth.

“This is a city that lives its history but doesn’t always know it,” explained Mr. Mackie, 28, who grew up here before leaving to attend arts school in North Carolina and then the Juilliard School. In character as Buddy Bolden, the actor wore a heavy blue band uniform with red piping and spent much of the day sweating through a scene in which notes from his horn jump the expected musical tracks at the end of a funeral, triggering a boisterous exit parade.

In and out of the clouds, the sun has only slightly annoyed the director of photography, Vilmos Zsigmond, a film veteran (“The Black Dahlia,” “The Witches of Eastwick”) who suggested that weathermen should be as competent to predict cloudy and bright as cinematographers are to deal with uncertain light. As things settled on the bright side, Mr. Pritzker mulled a replay of the funeral parade on the video monitor, then set up another take, this time with Mr. Marsalis’s music blaring from a loudspeaker. Arms started swinging. Handkerchiefs waved. Sun umbrellas pumped in time as locals picked up the Bolden spirit.

“If this music doesn’t make you move around, something’s wrong,” said Mr. Pritzker, 47, speaking later over lunch in his cramped trailer. With long, dark, gray-flecked hair, he wore jeans and green clogs and showed obvious discomfort only when the subject turned to the settling of a family dispute over the Pritzker financial empire, himself among the contentious heirs. “We’re all done with that; relationships are all back together,” Mr. Pritzker said of the wrangle, which had been simmering even before his father, Jay, died in 1999. Among other things, its resolution left Dan free (and with enough money) to pursue a notion that had dogged him since 1995, when a radio executive in Boulder, Colo., happened to ask if he had ever heard about Buddy Bolden and the birth of jazz.

“That he impacted my life so deeply and I didn’t know who he was, that was unbelievable to me,” said Mr. Pritzker, a professional musician who considers himself a connoisseur of American music.

He was to find that hard facts about Bolden are in short supply. That he was born to a working-class family in 1877 is firmly established. By the testimony of others who played with or around him, Bolden was among the first to break through accepted musical forms, pushing his group into the raucous improvisational style that would become known as jazz. In the first decade of the 20th century, he ruled the musical roost in New Orleans. By 1907, however, dementia, probably induced or assisted by alcohol, left him unable to function. That year he was committed to an insane asylum in Jackson, La., where he played his cornet only rarely with ensembles made up of patients, and where he remained until his death in 1931.

Lacking the factual base for conventional biography on the order of “Ray,” about Ray Charles, or “Walk the Line,” about Johnny Cash, Mr. Pritzker and his collaborators — including the writers Derick and Steven Martini (who have written for the television series “South Beach”) — have chosen to develop the myth. Their telling imagines Bolden, in the last year of his life, hearing a radio broadcast in which Armstrong, who became the public face of New Orleans jazz, paid tribute to the music’s supposed birth with Bolden.

That vision, in fact, may be only slightly exaggerated. “If you look at oral histories from the musicians, they all basically talk about Bolden when they talk about where jazz came from,” said Bruce Raeburn, curator of the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University. According to Mr. Raeburn, those who heard Bolden agreed, first, that he was loud, and, second, that his music opened the door to improvisation. “His combination of charisma and playing style is what put it over,” he said.

(Donald M. Marquis, whose “In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz” was first published in 1978, remained cautious enough about claims that Bolden invented jazz to include in a 2005 edition an epilogue noting that his text made no such assertion, and that the book’s title had not been his preferred choice.)

More surprising than Mr. Pritzker’s quest is its contagious quality. The New Orleans-born Mr. Marsalis became involved after a query from Mr. Pritzker’s producer, Jonathan Cornick, a production veteran whose credits range from studio films like “Super Mario Brothers” to independent features like David Mamet’s “State and Main.” Both Ellis Marsalis, the family patriarch, and Delfeayo, Wynton’s brother, have also contributed to the film.

The Marsalis presence may eventually bestow event status on the relatively small films if, as Mr. Pritzker envisions, they play at a major festival or at Lincoln Center, with Wynton Marsalis, artistic director of the center’s jazz program, leading a live musical performance in time with the silent picture. Mr. Marsalis said that such a performance was possible but that he had no firm plan at this point.

Mr. Pritzker said that idea was inspired about seven years ago by a similar show, during which a symphony in Chicago performed behind Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights.” The experience, he said, was “jaw-dropping.” Mr. Pierce, who plays an important role as a music and events promoter in the movie, has a more than professional connection to the project, as a longtime friend of the Marsalis family and an alumnus of the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, which has been the spawning ground for local performers, including Mr. Mackie.

“We live culture,” said Mr. Pierce, one of several Louisiana natives who talked of the attempt to recapture Bolden with near missionary fervor. Speaking by phone from Baltimore, where he is in production on the HBO series “The Wire,” he said he found it exhilarating to plumb his hometown’s musical heritage “at a time when we’re kind of questioning American aesthetic values.”

Extending that enthusiasm to a film audience that has never really warmed to jazz biography (movies like Clint Eastwood’s “Bird” haven’t performed that well at the box office) will be tough. Yet Wynton Marsalis is hopeful. “The world is always ready for everything,” he said. “All you have to do is play music with passion and feeling, and people will connect.”

For Mr. Pritzker, perhaps the greater risk lies in going public with a figure many aficionados may have preferred as a more private image. Mr. Marsalis, for instance, has expressed reservations, the director said, about his tendency to lift the street player Bolden to the realm of the mythic, ballerinas and all.

“I don’t want to demystify him,” Mr. Pritzker said. “I think it’s where it should be.”

Correction: May 27, 2007:

An article on April 22 about twin film projects on the cornetist Charles (Buddy) Bolden included incomplete information about the writers from Dan Pritzker, the director of “Bolden,” one of the productions. In addition to Mr. Pritzker and Derick and Steven Martini, David Rothschild collaborated on the screenplay.

[7/4]

I will watch for the scene in which a musician places his instrument near a source of electric power, and Bolden blasts him with a negative, judgmental, personally insulting lecture about the horrors of electricity combining with music.

[Christiern]

Why would anyone make a movie about a one-cylinder player?

[AllenLowe]

Jackie Earle Haley?

yikes - I'm seeing dead people already - that kid can't act -

[John L]

I have discussed Bolden with a handful of people who actually heard him play. Consensus: a very uneventful player who was limited to basic blues and known for playing louder than anybody else. I guess Wynton can relate to being creatively limited, and loud.

That sounds like something that Peter Bocage probably told you.

Playing good basic blues in a jazz context at the turn of the century doesn't sound uneventful to me. According to Sidney Bechet and others, few if any orchestras in New Orleans were oriented toward blues music at all at the time of Bolden. At any rate, Bolden left his mark on the memories of many.

Edited November 16, 2007 by John L

[JSngry]

[Christiern]

I have discussed Bolden with a handful of people who actually heard him play. Consensus: a very uneventful player who was limited to basic blues and known for playing louder than anybody else. I guess Wynton can relate to being creatively limited, and loud.

That sounds like something that Peter Bocage probably told you.

Yes, Bocage was one of my informants--you have a good memory, because I'm sure that was not a guess.

[Larry Kart]

How lovely that Wynton would turn up bonded to a Pritzker offspring. The gumbo thickens.

[mikeweil]

So Wynton finally decided to make a film about his previous incarnation ...