Jazz Articles

Wynton Marsalis And The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra: Marsalis Plays Bolden: The 'Lost Napkin' Suite

by Jack Bowers
April 1, 2003

After more than seven years of painstaking research and decryption, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra have recorded and released Wynton's epic six-movement suite based on music written by the legendary New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden. Working solely from the tattered remnants of a napkin on which Bolden is said to have scrawled a treble clef and three quarter-notes while dining and making whoopee at a New Orleans brothel shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, ...