Dupree Bolton

Dupree Bolton
Birth name	Dupree Ira Lewis Bolton
Born	(1929-03-03)March 3, 1929 Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S.
Died	June 5, 1993(1993-06-05) (aged 64) Oakland, California
Genres	jazz
Occupation	Musician
Instrument	Trumpet
Years active	1944–1963

Dupree Bolton (3 March 1929 – 5 June 1993) was a jazz trumpeter from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, known for his recordings with Harold Land and Curtis Amy.

Childhood

Dupree Bolton was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on 3 March 1929 as the eldest of his parents' four children. His father was a part-time professional violinist who also played other stringed instruments. The Bolton family moved to Southern California after the U.S. entered World War II, where his father took a job in the defense industry. Dupree Bolton started playing violin at age 5 at the behest of his father, but he soon moved to the trumpet and progressed quickly on the instrument. As an adult, one of Bolton's two younger brothers, Dodge Bolton, played jazz piano professionally in the Seattle, Washington area.

Early professional experience in big bands

In 1944, Bolton left home at age 14 without his parents approval to join Jay McShann's band. This was during a period when many musicians had been drafted into U.S. military service for World War II, and underaged musicians were sometimes used as replacements for drafted musicians. Bolton was an advanced musician for his age, and was given solo features by McShann. (Bolton's time with McShann did not overlap with Charlie Parker's time in the McShann band.) In 1989, Bolton described how he ran away with McShann's band:

I told my mother I wanted to go on the road with that band and she said 'You're not going anywhere with any band. You're going to stay here and go to school.' So I went downtown to Main Street in Los Angeles and bought myself a suitcase and took it over to the hotel where the McShann musicians were staying. Over the next few weeks I'd sneak out my clothes, a pair of pants at a time, a shirt at a time. When I was done, I ran off with the band.

Off the bandstand, he was soon introduced to drug use by members of the McShann band, who sent him to drugstores with forged prescriptions, and introduced him to the use and trade of narcotics. Bolton's brief stint with Jay McShann ended when McShann was drafted into the army and the band was stranded on the road.

After playing for McShann, Bolton made his way to New York City and played briefly with Buddy Johnson Orchestra, with whom he recorded two songs (“That’s the Stuff you Gotta Watch” and “One of Them Good Ones”, Decca 8671). Bolton used the name “Lewis Dupree” for the recording date, as his parents were actively looking for him and put ads in a newspaper offering a $25 reward for information about their son. In 1975, an LP featuring live recordings of the Johnson band was released (Buddy Johnson At The Savoy Ballroom 1945-1946, Jazz Archives JA-25), and Bolton can be heard as a 16-year-old soloing on a riff tune entitled "Traffic Jam".

Bolton left the Johnson band between December, 1945 and January, 1946 to join the trumpet section of the Benny Carter band. He made some studio recordings as a member of Carter's trumpet section, but he was not a featured soloist.

Initial period of incarceration

In 1947, one day before his 17th birthday, he was arrested for marijuana possession during a search of his hotel room conducted by police officers who conducting an arrest of the bandmate who he shared the room with. Because he was still a minor, he was sentenced to serve a prison term that lasted until his 21st birthday, and which exceeded his roommate's sentence for a greater charge. Upon his release in 1950, he lived in Watts, Los Angeles with his family and played music professionally but sporadically for more than a year. He still struggled with an addiction to heroin, and was arrested again in 1951 and sent to in Soledad state prison, setting up a pattern that was to last for another 30 years of convictions and prison sentences for forgery offenses (both financial forgery and drug prescription forgery) and drug possession. Another arrest during a brief period outside prison in 1956 led to a third sentence, this time at the Terminal Island federal prison. He was released again in 1959.

Bolton was able to make productive use of his time in prison, and in his later years, he claimed that spending time in prison saved him from an early death by drug overdose. In a January, 1989 interview with Ted Gioia, Bolton described his practice routine while serving the 4-year sentence in Soledad state prison that began in 1951:

I got a [prison] job that didn't restrict me and I was able to practice every day. I would play tunes, but my main objective was to get down with the mechanics of the instrument. That meant scales and exercises. I would play them sometimes for 12 to 14 hours a day.

Return to music in 1959

In 1959, Bolton was released and finally able to play live in jazz clubs in the Los Angeles area after being mostly off the scene for 12 years. He quickly gained a reputation as a major talent among local jazz musicians, most of whom had not seen him during his earlier periods of professional musical activity. Saxophonist Harold Land and pianist Elmo Hope, who were looking for musicians for an upcoming record date to be led by Land, heard about Bolton and decided to see him play. Land, who had never heard of Bolton prior to 1959, hired Bolton to play on his LP The Fox. The LP quickly gained a reputation among musicians and critics, and has been reissued many times in the years since its initial release for LP and, later, CD editions in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

After the release of The Fox, the fact that Bolton seemed to appear out of nowhere with a fully mature and technically advanced style created an air of mystery around him for jazz historians and fans that lasted for decades. There were no substantive published interviews, articles or books available to provide information regarding Bolton's life and musical development until the 21st century, when a 2001 piece on Bolton by Richard Williams appeared in Granta 69. The biographical details of Bolton's life were unknown to almost everyone other than those who knew him in prison. Bolton told Gioia in an initially unpublished 1989 interview that on the few occasions in the past when he was asked by journalists or researchers about his life story, he was reluctant to give details: "I didn't want to talk about myself because of my background—-prison, using dope and the rest of it. Whereas now, it helps. It's kind of like coming out of the closet. But not back thirty years ago." (Gioia's research on Bolton was published for the first time online in 2009.)

Shortly after The Fox was recorded, he was again arrested and convicted, and was sent to San Quentin State Prison. Towards the end of that sentence, from from March 1961 to October 1962, Bolton and Art Pepper were serving time concurrently in San Quentin and were able to play music together. Bolton's last professional recordings were in 1963, most notably his featured role on the album Katanga! by Curtis Amy. Bolton also recorded two pieces in 1963 for a Pacific Jazz session led by alto sax player Earl Anderza, who Bolton had met in San Quentin. These were released on the 2009 compilation CD Fireball under Bolton's name. An excellent music reader, Bolton was also hired in 1963 for a studio session led by Gerald Wilson and another session backing Lou Rawls as part of a band organized by Curtis Amy.

Music style

Bolton was a technically gifted player in the bebop idiom who was adept at the very fast tempos sometimes used by bebop musicians. Ted Gioia wrote of Bolton's performance on the Elmo Hope composition "The Fox":

The tempo pushes a ridiculous 400 beats per minute, roughly the rhythm of a machine gun shooting off its bullets, rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat. Bolton leaps out of the starting gate like a man shot out of a cannon, and never looks back. He thrives on the near frenzy of the proceedings—indeed, it would be hard to find another trumpet solo that surpasses this one for sheer intensity. The other performances on the album confirmed that Land's sideman was something special.

Bolton could also play with restraint on ballads like Elmo Hope's "Mirror Mind Rose", which appeared on The Fox, and "Laura", a ballad feature he performed on a television broadcast in 1963 as a party of Curtis Amy's band. Writers have noted that Bolton's art continued to evolve in the 1950s and early 1960s, even when he was incarcerated and unable to see live music or buy records. For example, by 1963, Bolton sounded comfortable playing the modal jazz of Katanga!'s “Native Land”, despite the fact that the style had not caught on widely among hard bop musicians until the early 1960s, when Bolton was serving a prison sentence in San Quentin.

Bolton told Gioia that one of his biggest musical inspirations was Fats Navarro, who he was able to see live when he lived in New York City in the mid-1940s. Jazz writers have also compared Bolton's playing to Dizzy Gillespie, and Clifford Brown.

Later life and death

Bolton, who returned to prison in 1963 for forgery and drug related crimes, he spent most of the next 20 years serving prison sentences, all for the same types of non-violent crimes that were related to his inability to overcome his drug addiction. One brief period in 1967 when he was out of prison led to work with Bobby Hutcherson, but no recordings are known to exist of Hutcherson's band with Bolton. During 1980, while serving a prison sentence in Oklahoma, Bolton was recorded with a small prison band made up of semi-professional and amateur musicians, and these recordings were released as one section of the Fireball compilation CD in 2009 (the CD also has performances of Bolton playing live with Curtis Amy in 1962 and 1963). Talking of the 1980 prison recordings, he said "The people on the record were not musicians. They were just people doing time. I did it because it was something to do."

From 1983 until his death from cardiac arrest in 1993, Bolton lived in Oakland, California and kept a low profile, continuing to struggle with substance abuse issues. He sometimes played his trumpet on the street in San Francisco's Chinatown neighborhood for tourists.

Writer and jazz pianist Ted Gioia, who found and interviewed Bolton in January, 1989, recorded Bolton in Menlo Park, Calf. a few days after his interview, but explained in 2009 what became of the tapes:

I accompanied him on piano while he played trumpet. His approach was tentative as he felt his way around the new horn he had borrowed for the occasion. The fire-breathing intensity of his early recordings was apparently gone for good. On fast numbers, only an occasional phrase reminded the listener of the prepossessing trumpeter of the early 1960s. When we played ballads, he revealed a more delicate approach than I recalled from his earlier recordings, relying on filigreed improvised lines that sought for beauty rather than passion. "Yes, man, I can still play. I can still play," Bolton asserted. But the recordings, alas, would not live up to the inevitable comparisons with the work he had done in his youth. I held on to the tapes from this session for some months. But then I did what struck me as the only honorable thing. I destroyed them. Dupree Bolton should be remembered, I felt, for the greatness of his youthful achievements, not the limitations of his later efforts.

Discography

• 1959: The Fox (HiFiJazz, later Contemporary) with Harold Land
• 1963: Katanga! (Pacific Jazz) with Curtis Amy and guitarist Ray Crawford, pianist Jack Wilson, double bassist Victor Gaskin, and drummer Doug Sides
• 2009: Fireball (Uptown Records, recorded 1963 and 1980)