“But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn’t understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot—see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes.”
Bolden's friends often comment about how mysterious his artistic process is. They all acknowledge his genius, but they often miss the order to his chaos. Bolden desperately wanted to defy expectations and accomplish something never heard before, but he was trapped by expectations and unappreciated by his contemporaries.
“Always listening, listening to the wet fluid speech with no order, unfinished stories, badly told jokes that he sober as a spider perfected in silence.”
Bolden is an obsessive person. Desiring to be liked, he spends his alone time thinking up these sorry jokes. They're not good because they come from a place of suffering instead of mirth, their intention clear. He's just a lonely guy.
“Once they were sitting at the kitchen table opposite each other. To his right and to her left was a window. Furious at something he drew his right hand across his body and lashed out. Half way there at full speed he realized it was a window he would be hitting and breaked. For a fraction of a second hid open palm touched the glass, beginning simultaneously to draw back. The window scarred and crumpled slowly two floors down. His hand miraculously uncut. It had acted exactly like a whip violating the target and still free, retreating from the outline of a star."
After living with paranoia for years, Bolden has become somewhat of a master of himself. Although he is prone to dramatic fits of violence, he remains always in control. It's not until he chooses to step back a little that he starts releasing his mastery over his emotions and becoming completely unstable.
“It was a music that had so little wisdom you wanted to clean nearly every note he passed, passed it seemed along the way as if travelling in a car, passed before he even approached it and saw it properly. There was no control except the mood of his power … and it is for this reason it is good you never heard him play on recordings. If you never heard him play some place where the weather for instance could change the next series of notes—then you should never have heard him at all. He was never recorded.”
In this excerpt an eye-witness attempts to describe the beauty of Bolden's music. It is not the kind of thing which you can recreate second-hand. Apparently Bolden's true genius is found in the nuances of the experience of listening to him. Every little detail of the experience, of him, matters in understanding the music. This is why he didn't restrain himself to any given script but willingly improvised.
