Coming Through Slaughter 
by Michael Ondaatje

Geoff Dyer, in his astonishing “But Beautiful” says that Michael Ondaatje’s “Coming Through Slaughter” is arguably the greatest novel about jazz ever written. Dyer’s book is itself a masterful exposition of the nature and essence of jazz, played through the saxophone of literary fiction and it’s quickly clear that Dyer’s reference to Ondaatje’s novel is itself a reflection of another jazz tradition: acknowledging the influences that shape the present artist’s work.

“Coming Through Slaughter” is not, as some suggest, an accurate biography of Buddy Bolden. For that, the reader must look elsewhere (Donald Marquis’ “In Search of Buddy Bolden”). For Ondaatje, Bolden is a peg on which he hangs a stunning piece of improvisation - and, as Dyer says, what is jazz without improvisation? The little that is known of Charles “Buddy” Bolden - cornet player, unrecorded master of early jazz, decisive and definitive influence of the many greats who followed, insane at 31 - is, in Ondaatje’s hands, more akin to what we now know as a “standard” in jazz. Around this, Ondaatje weaves a series of brilliantly improvised ‘sets’. There are blues, there are the hymns, there is rhythm, there is free jazz, there is melody, soul, mood, wild aggression with notes flung out in pain and hurt and it all creates an atmosphere, an environment. New Orleans whores pimps drugs booze clarinets and cornets jazz and jazzmen ship building and photographers and love and lunacy.

Ondaatje takes small vignettes and, from these, spins off in different directions. In this he captures with an astonishing virtuosity all the breathless, breathtaking unpredictability of truly great jazz, of the kind where, listening to a master at the height of his powers, in full cry, you wait with a tightening in the gut for him to execute that one incredible pass when the notes fly out unerringly and, one try, second try and the third time he goes for it and hits that one elusive high note that’s been dancing on the window sill like an excited robin saying let me in let me in let me come in and play with the other notes.

This is not an ordinary novel. It doesn’t have a linear structure and, to those unfamiliar with the music, it might be irritating. It does not have rigidity or structural certainty. It lacks predictability so that you are not humming ahead of the bar or note in play. It is more like an unformed pool of limpid water on smooth tile, constantly being brushed and kicked and swept into different patterns and shapes and forms, sometimes puddling, sometime breaking in waves, sometimes slow, sometimes wild and uncontrolled and in a frenzied, almost sexual heat, its boundaries constantly shifting and changing. At the heart, however, it remains firm and unyielding, true to its own history: you can’t change the past of jazz or its essential nature even as you keep playing with its form. Ondaatje takes all this and pastes it into a literary form: with anecdotes, snippets of conversations, poems, songs, fading images, shadowy persons who may or may not have been, and may or may not have been as he says they were.

As I said, it may not be to everyone’s taste. If you’re looking for discipline and structural form, expecting that every scene will be complete in itself and thus slowly build the entire picture, you’re going to be disappointed. But if you’re willing to sit back and let it wash over you, knowing that you are before a master portraying an early master, prepared to listen and wait and wait and listen, then at the end, all the seemingly staccato, stuttering fragments suddenly come together like mercury finding itself. An hour later, a day, you will find yourself seeing the whole of it, with brilliant pieces echoing and reverberating endlessly in the mind - and that is the nature and stamp of great jazz.

Ondaatje tells of Buddy Bolden’s descent into his own hell, unwitting or self-created we do not know, but, in the process generating a level of art and beauty unsurpassed in its time and which endured and influenced the music of several later generations. It is a story of despair, madness, loneliness, of the viciousness of life affecting high art, of art struggling to transcend life’s miseries, not always successfully, but ultimately a tale of aching lyricism. It is, thus, itself great jazz.