A REVIEW OF NICHOLAS CHRISTOPHER’S TIGER RAG

BY RO CUZON

The lost Bolden cylinder is considered by many to be one of the most valuable artifacts in music history; others simply believe it never actually existed.

Charles ‘Buddy’ Bolden was a schizophrenic New Orleans cornetist, who, according to musical lore, first invented the art form called jazz by merging traditional marching band music with church spirituals, blues and ragtime. He famously refused to record his music, except for a single session in the late 1890s or early 1900s, when his band cut one song on an Edison wax cylinder.

Willie Cornish, one of Bolden’s sidemen, revealed this fact in an interview with Jazzmen co-author C.E Smith shortly before his death in 1942, and over the years countless people have searched for this mythical recording—nicknamed the ‘Holy Grail’ or ‘Maltese Falcon’ of Jazz.

The lost Bolden cylinder is a MacGuffin of sorts in my new Adel Destin novel due out next spring from The Rogue Reader. Destin’s New Orleans bar in Under the Dixie Moon and the upcoming Crescent City Stomp is named after the legendary cornetist (more here). The book is the third in the series but actually the first one I wrote, several years ago. So you can imagine my alarm last week when I saw the following headline in a Washington Post book review online:

‘Jazz legend Buddy Bolden and lost recording spin suspense in novel about fractured family.’

Freaked, I read the review for this Tiger Rag by Nicholas Christopher. It was positive, so I read a couple more. All the reviewers liked the book. As for the story, it seemed different enough from mine, but I had to be sure. So I bought the Kindle version and immediately started to read it.

And I loved it.

Tiger Rag opens with Christopher’s vivid reimagining of the Buddy Bolden Band’s only recording session and grabs you with its first paragraph. It then jumps to present-day Florida where Dr. Ruby Cardillo, an anesthesiologist who’s taken to wearing purple and drinking 1988 Latour after her husband dumps her for a 26-year-old, reconnects with her daughter, Devon, a jazz-pianist and recovering addict.

Together, they embark on a road trip up the east coast, in the process uncovering secrets and family connections to the recording, the novel’s narrative moving back and forth in time and place from 1900 New Orleans to Christmas 2010 in Manhattan.

I read the book in a day, in just three sittings. Nicholas’ amazingly detailed descriptions of turn-of-the-20^th-century Louisiana in particular blew me away—like stepping inside a time-machine.

So go ahead and buy Tiger Rag. If anything, it’ll enhance your experience when you read Crescent City Stomp!

Thanks, Mr. Christopher. Well worth my $12.99

 Tiger Rag is available now from Random House. Ro Cuzon is the author of Under the Dixie Moon and Under the Carib Sun, the first two novels in the Adel Destin series. The third, Crescent City Stomp, will be published by The Rogue Reader this year.