Dupree Bolton

Because he was still a minor, he was sentenced to serve a term that lasted until his 21st birthday.

Dupree Bolton (3 March 1929 – 5 June 1993) was a jazz trumpeter from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

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.

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.

The band also included pianist Jimmy Bunn, who had recorded for Dial Records on sessions led by Charlie Parker in the mid-1940s.

In 1941, Bolton's family moved to Southern California so that Bolton's father could work in the defense industry, which was expanding because of World War II.

Bolton was not the only child in the family to pursue music professionally.

As an adult, one of Bolton's two younger brothers, Dodge Bolton, played jazz piano professionally in the Seattle, Washington area and elsewhere.

In 1944, Bolton left home at age 14 against his parents wishes 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 hired to complete band rosters.

Bolton was an advanced musician for his age, and was given solo features by McShann.

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.

In 1947, one day before his 17th birthday, Bolton was arrested for marijuana possession during a search of his hotel room conducted by police officers who were investigating Bolton and a bandmate with whom he shared the room.

Bolton was sent to Federal Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky, which was operating as a combination of drug treatment center and prison, with some patients living at the institution voluntarily, and others, like Bolton, confined involuntarily because of federal drug convictions.

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.

Heroin had contributed to the death of Bolton's musical hero Fats Navarro, and to the early deaths of hard bop musicians including the pianist Carl Perkins, Sonny Clark, and Ernie Henry in the 1950s and 1960s.

He still struggled with heroin addiction, and was arrested again in 1951 and sent to Soledad state prison.

This was the beginning of a pattern in Bolton's life that was to last for another 30 years, where Bolton was repeatedly convicted and sentenced to prison 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 is known primarily for his appearance as a backing musician on two hard bop jazz albums, the first led by Harold Land in 1959, and the second led by Curtis Amy in 1963.

Bolton spend most of his adult life incarcerated for non-violent crimes related to his drug addiction, and he was considered a mysterious figure by jazz musicians and writers during his lifetime because of the lack of available information about him.

He played with relatively few jazz musicians during his musical prime, mainly in the Los Angeles area and inside U.S. prisons including San Quentin and Soledad.

In 1959, Bolton was released and was able to briefly resume his music career in Los Angeles.

However, this period was cut short after he was again arrested, convicted, and sent to San Quentin State Prison.

While in San Quentin, during the period from March 1961 to October 1962, Bolton and Art Pepper were serving time concurrently, and were able to play music together in a prison band.

According to alto saxophonist Frank Morgan, who went to San Quentin in 1962 to serve a sentence related to drug charges, Morgan and drummer Frank Butler also played jazz bands inside San Quentin that included Bolton and Pepper.

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 joined McShann two years after saxophonist Charlie Parker had left the band, and the two musicians did not play together with McShann.) 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 using and selling narcotics.

Bolton's brief stint with Jay McShann ended when McShann was taken into custody by the army as a draftee.

The band members, including Bolton, were stranded away from home with no source of income.

Bolton went to New York City after the McShann band broke up.

In New York, he was hired to play with the 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 his January 1989 interview with Ted Gioia, Bolton said that he felt that prison likely kept him from an early death related to heroin addiction.

Biographical information on Bolton began to emerge following his death, most notably in the work of jazz historian Ted Gioia, who was able to find and interview Bolton four years before Bolton's death in 1993.

Morgan told JazzTimes journalist Larry Appelbaum in 2005 that "Art and I played more when we were in San Quentin together than when we were on the outside. We had a great band there with Frank Butler, Dupree Bolton, Nathaniel Meeks, and some guys who learned how to play while they were in prison."