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  Coming through Slaughter (Paperback) By (author) Michael Ondaatje

  

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  Short Description for Coming through SlaughterBringing 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.
  Full description

  • Publisher: Vintage Books
  • Published: 19 March 1996
  • Format: Paperback 156 pages
  • See: Full bibliographic data
  • Categories: True Stories | Contemporary Fiction
  • ISBN 13: 9780679767855 ISBN 10: 0679767851
  • Sales rank: 313,086

Full description for Coming through Slaughter

• At the turn of the century, the Storyville district of New Orleans had some 2,000 prostitutes, 70 professional gamblers, and 30 piano players. It had only one man who played the cornet like Buddy Bolden. By day he cut hair and purveyed gossip at N. Joseph's Shaving Parlor. At night he played jazz as though unleashing wild animals in a crowded room. At the age of thirty-one, Buddy Bolden went mad. From these sparse facts Michael Ondaatje has created a haunting, lushly atmospheric novel about one of jazz's legendary pioneers and martyrs. Obsessed with death, addicted to whiskey, and self-destructively in love with two women, Buddy Bolden embodies all the dire claims that music places on its acolytes. And as told in Coming Through Slaughter, his story is as beautiful and chilling as a New Orleans funeral procession, where even the mourners dance.