Coming Through Slaughter

I decided to read Michael Ondaajte's jazz age novel, Coming Through Slaughter (1976), as background reading to color in my recent trip to New Orleans. And color it did provide: sex, love triangles, gambling, drinking, whoring, music and a tour of the now lost Storyville red light district. This novel is a fictional depiction of the life of an obscure jazz musician, coronet player Buddy Bolden. It is experimental in form and has a lyrical quality that sets it apart from other novels in that much of the impact of the novel comes from the impressions and atmosphere of the story rather than the plot which is less than linear. It does seem that this early jazz pioneer had a breakdown that landed him in an insane asylum, which tells us that we would really never know what it was that landed him in that institution but ripe for the imagination of a writer like Ondaajte.