[1][2] Bolton spent 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"[6] 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.
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.
After the release of The Fox, there was a curiosity on the part of jazz musicians, historians and fans about the lack of biographical information available on Bolton.
The Fox, while never a big seller, found favor among fans and critics, and was reissued many times in LP and CD editions in the United States, Europe, and Japan.
To jazz listeners that found The Fox, Bolton seemed to have appeared out of nowhere in 1959 with a fully mature and technically advanced style.
Bolton told Gioia in an initially unpublished 1989 interview that on the few occasions in the past when he was asked by journalists or researchers about his life story, he was reluctant to give details:[3] I didn't want to talk about myself because of my background—-prison, using dope and the rest of it.
Shortly after The Fox was recorded, Bolton was again arrested and convicted, and he began serving the sentence in San Quentin State Prison described above.
Bolton was adept at fast tempos, which were favored by bebop pioneers like Navarro, Charlie Parker, and Max Roach.
Ted Gioia wrote of Bolton's performance on the composition "The Fox":[3] 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.
The other performances on the album confirmed that Land's sideman was something special.Bolton could also play with restraint on ballads like Hope's "Mirror Mind Rose", which appeared on The Fox, and "You Don't Know What Love Is", from Katanga!.
's “Native Land”, a style that caught on widely among hard bop musicians in the early 1960s, when Bolton was serving a prison sentence in San Quentin.
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).
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.
Dupree Bolton should be remembered, I felt, for the greatness of his youthful achievements, not the limitations of his later efforts.Bolton died from cardiac arrest in 1993, according to his Alameda County death certificate.