Jazz ’ s primal moment , one lost to us forever beyond the event horizon , was the story of a young man with a horn . A troubled young man at that . Buddy Bolden never made it into a recording studio , though time has fuelled the hope that he did and that a cylinder will one day turn up in a New Orleans cellar . Instead , he ended up in the crazy place . All that remained of him was a tantalising legend , a trumpet sound that would carry clear over Lake Pontchartrain on a still summer night . Around the time jazz was getting started Guglielmo Marconi was perfecting his new radio technology , one that would in the coming decades transform human – and musical – communication for ever . It was Marconi ’ s semi-mystical belief that no sound ever dies , but just becomes infinitely quieter over time . On this principle , it was theoretically possible , Marconi believed , to pick up faint echoes of the Sermon on the Mount or the Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross . Rather closer to our subject , the bright blast of Buddy Bolden ’ s horn , though known only through the testimonies of those who knew him , has never quite faded . It remains a primal moment in the story of jazz . His sorry fate also sounded a warning that commitment to this music takes you into some dark places .
We don ’ t know what the first “ jazz ” groups sounded like , or how they were constituted . We tend to reverse-engineer the history and assume that jazz ensembles always consisted of one or more horns , some kind of harmony instrument ( piano , banjo or guitar ), a bass instrument ( brass or stringed ) and , crucially , percussion . But this may be wholly anachronistic . They might well have been little ensembles of string players who , after entertaining their employers , or more egregiously , their owners in big plantation houses , retired to their shacks to play a different , less polite variety of music . Spontaneous percussion , easily supplied by clapping
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