According to Forbes Dan Prizker has a net worth of $2.3 BILLION dollars so if he wants to squander x amount plus eleven years turning out a film based on a very real person about whom next to nothing is known then who's to say nay. I've already written about this in Jazz Journal and I repeat here what I said there that everything I know about Buddy Bolden I learned from a great book entitled hear Me Talkin' To Ya in which jazz musicians who were still alive in the mid nineteen fifties reminisced about their lives to form a living oral history of the art form. Pritzker's film - clearly a labour of love - adds precisely nothing to the sparse data I gleaned from the book but that doesn't mean the film should be dismissed. We do know, for example, that Bolden was admitted to the Louisiana Hospital for the mentally ill and died there a few years later and Pritzker seizes on this as a hook to draw us into the film which is, in effect, filtered via the mind of a schizophrenic, triggered by a concert on the radio performed by Boldens' fellow (and equally real musician Louis Armstrong. Armstrong, of course, played the trumpet whilst Bolden played the cornet at the same time - the turn of the century - and in the same place - New Orleans - and is thought in some quarters to be responsible for 'inventing' jazz. Out of this slenderest of threads Prizker weaves his account of the birth of jazz and modern day trumpeter Wynton Marsalis contributes a score faithful to the sound and style of the period. English actor Gary Carr, known mostly via his roles on television, turns in a fine, albeit virtually silent, performance as the eponymous Bolden and the film is well worth seeing.
Review of Bolden
