Derrick “Kabuki” Shezbie remains best known as a former member of the Rebirth Brass Band, blowing the trumpet and enlivening the crowds with the Grammy-winning group. The Ghost of Buddy Bolden stands as Shezbie’s second release as leader. The trumpeter’s debut album, Spodie’s Back, a modern jazz album on Warner Brothers produced by the noted Quincy Jones, dropped way back in 1993.
As the title of the new release indicates, this time out Shezbie looks back to jazz’s birth by performing works that were associated with and/or played in the mid-1890s to 1906 by fellow trumpeter Buddy Bolden, who is widely considered the first man of jazz. The ensemble—including top-notch New Orleans musicians such as clarinetist Louis Ford, trombonist Revert Andrews, guitarist Carl LeBlanc, drummer Jerry Anderson and bassist Chris Severin—doesn’t endeavor to recreate what Bolden might have sounded like (nobody really knows); rather, just capture the legend’s spirit in its own way.
Following Shezbie’s brief explanatory introduction, the band kicks off with “Makin’ Runs,” the composer of which remains unknown though Bolden did perform it. It’s been written that trumpeter Bunk Johnson, who was on the scene during the era, had whistled the then familiar melody that he heard Bolden play. It’s a catchy, toe-tapping number with Shezbie and Ford wonderfully teaming up on the front line. Throughout, the band remains a very democratic unit with each talented player getting a chance to shine both in the ensemble work and solos.
Most of the material will be familiar to New Orleanians—“Didn’t He Ramble,” “Down by the Riverside,” “Bucket’s Got a Hole in It”—as they remain in the repertoire of many traditional jazz bands today. Less well-known is the rousing gospel number “Ride on Jesus” that’s performed in a march-like, syncopated rhythm with Shezbie’s bright trumpet providing the “call” and the band coming in for the “response.”
Produced by historian Charles Tolman, The Ghost of Buddy Bolden succeeds in its mission to celebrate Bolden and his era of jazz music rather than to try to perform a reenactment of either. The band, led by the enthusiastic trumpet of Shezbie and filled with New Orleans musicians, makes it work because the artists have grown up with the improvisational spirit of the city that surely propelled Bolden himself.
