Bud Powell

American jazz pianist and composer

• Born: September 27, 1924
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: July 31, 1966
• Place of death: New York, New York

Powell was a pianist of astonishing dexterity and inventiveness whose distinctive style translated the linear developments of the legendary founders of bebop—saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie—to the piano.

The Life

Earl Rudolph “Bud” Powell was born into a musical family in New York City in 1924. His father and grandfather were musicians, and so were his brothers Richie and William, Jr. Richie had a solid reputation as a jazz musician, and he played in the Clifford Brown-Max Roach band. (He was killed in the same car accident that killed Brown in 1956.) Powell’s father, a stride pianist, supported his son’s interest in music, and he encouraged Powell to study classical piano. Powell showed tremendous promise as a child, absorbing the influences of the popular pianists of the time, especially Earl “Fatha” Hines, Fats Waller, Art Tatum, and Teddy Wilson.

When Powell was fifteen, he quit high school and started playing in New York. When he was seventeen, he went frequently to Minton’s Playhouse, where legend has it that Kenny Clarke, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Christian, Dizzy Gillespie, and later Charlie Parker invented bebop. Several years younger than Parker and Gillespie, Powell occasionally sat in to play, but mostly he listened. Monk befriended the younger pianist and mentored his musical development.

Powell was just nineteen years old when he got his first important gig, playing with trumpeter Cootie Williams. In 1945 Powell’s mental health began to decline, worsened by his alcoholism. According to Williams, when Powell was twenty-one, he was arrested after a performance in Philadelphia. When his mother came to pick him up at the jail, she found that he had been badly beaten and had sustained a severe head injury. He was institutionalized several times in the late 1940’s, and he received electroshock therapy as well as other treatments that left him emotionally and mentally damaged and unstable.

Though struggling personally, Powell made a series of groundbreaking recordings during a six-year period beginning in 1947 that established him as the leading jazz pianist of the time. In 1953, after a period of relative mental stability, his mental health began to deteriorate, making his playing extremely erratic. After another series of stays in mental institutions, he moved to Paris in 1959.

Powell lived in Paris for five years. He was drinking heavily, and his playing was negatively affected. Until he contracted tuberculosis in 1962, he performed extensively in clubs in Paris, and he played concerts and festivals in France and Germany. He made a number of recordings there with both American and European musicians. While living in Paris, he met Francis Paudras, a commercial artist and amateur musician who later wrote a book about Powell that served as the basis for the 1986 film ’Round Midnight. He lived with Paudras briefly while convalescing. In 1964, when he had recuperated sufficiently, he came to the United States for a visit, to play an extended gig at Birdland, but he never returned to Europe. He died in 1966 from alcoholism, tuberculosis, and malnutrition.

The Music

Like many jazz musicians, Powell first worked as a sideman for well-known musicians before leading his own groups. His performances and recordings with Williams in 1943 and 1944 established him as an up-and-coming pianist. In 1946, after he recovered from his first extended period of unstable mental health, Powell recorded extensively with a number of musicians and singers. Then, beginning in 1947, he began recording and performing as the leader of his own groups, mostly trios with bass and drums. The recordings he made during the six-year period beginning when he was twenty-three are considered his finest and most influential work. Aside from several important recordings with Parker and Gillespie in the early 1950’s, Powell worked mostly in his own trios and small groups for the rest of his career.

Early Career. In 1944 Powell recorded several albums with groups led by Williams. While Williams’s group played more in the swing school than the emerging bebop style, Powell’s playing on these early recordings, such as on “Floogie Bop” (a reworking of “Sweet Lorraine”), is notably modern in conception and execution.

In 1947, after his first hiatus from the music scene for medical reasons, he performed and recorded prolifically, appearing with Dexter Gordon and J. J. Johnson, among others. He also cut several records with the players from Minton’s Playhouse: saxophonist Sonny Stitt, drummer Clarke, and trumpeters Kenny Dorham and Fats Navarro. Powell’s first album as a leader, Bud Powell Trio Plays, has many of the tunes that became staples in his repertoire: “Indiana,” “I’ll Remember April,” “I Should Care,” and “Everything Happens to Me.” The Verve and Blue Note Recordings. Between May of 1949 and August of 1953, Powell made his most influential recordings. Mostly with Powell leading a trio, they capture his playing at the height of its inventiveness and energy. Powell recorded four sessions for Verve, of which three are trio recordings. These are arguably the best of his career, including definitive versions of his compositions “Tempus Fugit,” “Celia,” “I’ll Keep Loving You” (performed solo), and “Strictly Confidential.” The other trio recordings include Powell’s idiosyncratic renditions of standards such as “Cherokee,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “Yesterdays,” “April in Paris,” and “Body and Soul.” Throughout these recordings, Powell’s right-hand eighth-note lines are authoritative and solid, whether on the up-tempo “All God’s Chillin’ Got Rhythm” or the medium-tempo “Celia.” The final Verve session, in February of 1951, contains solo piano performances that represent Powell at his most creative and fluent, including a brisk version of “Parisian Thoroughfare.” Although Powell was strongly influenced by Tatum, these recordings show a mature solo piano conception quite different from Tatum’s. While Powell employs many of Tatum’s harmonic devices, particularly in the statements of the main themes, his focus remains the right-hand line. His rendition of “Parisian Thoroughfare” is essentially a solo version of what he might play with a trio. There is no stride piano here: His left hand plays the same stark, rhythmic harmonic shells he used in his trio playing. Not only is the harmony more oblique, but the rhythm is more syncopated. This deconstruction of the role of the left hand in solo playing modernized the conception of solo piano, allowing the same focus on the right-hand line as when the pianist is supported by a rhythm section.

Powell recorded three sessions for Blue Note, the first in August of 1949 and the last in August of 1953. Like the Verve recordings, these sessions capture Powell playing at his best. Most of these tracks are trio recordings, though Powell added Navarro and Rollins to the trio for several of the tracks recorded in 1949. Powell’s right-hand lines are confident and secure. His solo on the extended vamp of “Un Poco Loco” foreshadows the fluid harmonic superimposition McCoy Tyner would pioneer on the piano more than ten years later. Powell records “Parisian Thoroughfare” here with the trio, and a comparison between this and the solo recording from the Verve session in 1951 reveals a strikingly similar approach.

Recordings with Parker and Gillespie. Powell made a number of important recordings with Parker between 1950 and 1953, most often with Gillespie on trumpet. By this time, Powell’s style and reputation were well established. The sessions in May of 1950, March of 1951, and several in May of 1953 are now considered bebop classics. The group’s repertoire included all the bebop classics: “Moose the Mooche,” “Lullaby of Birdland,” “All the Things You Are,” “Woody ’n’ You,” “Salt Peanuts,” “A Night in Tunisia,” and “Anthropology.” The 1953 recordings with Parker and Gillespie, along with the Blue Note recordings made the same year, mark the end of Powell’s watershed years: He would never match the quality and quantity of the recordings and performances made during this period.

European Work and American Coda. Powell moved to Paris in 1959, and until he contracted tuberculosis in 1962, he recorded and performed frequently. His old friend, drummer Clarke, also lived in Paris, and they were frequent collaborators. Powell played with both European and American musicians. He made a number of recordings at clubs and festivals in France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland, with Coleman Hawkins, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Zoot Sims, Cannonball Adderely, and Don Byas.

Many critics consider that, by this time, Powell had passed his prime, and he never played with the virtuosity and flair he displayed before he left the United States. In fact, Powell’s playing on these recordings is extremely erratic. On some tracks, such as the version of “Just One of Those Things” made with Byas in 1961, he played with the same authority and clarity as he had in New York in the early 1950’s. His solo on “Cherokee” from the same session, on the other hand, is tentative and frequently falters (though he never loses the beat or the changes).

When the jazz community heard Powell perform at the memorial concert for Parker at Carnegie Hall in 1964, they acknowledged that they had lost an important voice. While he had intended to return to Paris with his friend Paudras after his gig at Birdland (which was marred by extremely erratic performances as well), Powell remained in the United States, living in semiseclusion until his death in 1966.

Musical Legacy

Powell completely changed the nature of jazz piano. Before him, the two-handed piano style so powerfully embodied in the playing of Tatum or so elegantly shaped in the playing of Wilson was the principalmodel. While Tatum’s style remained influential in solo piano, Powell redefined the role of the pianist in a jazz small group. His right-hand lines defined both the rhythm and the harmony, but more obliquely than pianists before him, allowing the drummer greater freedom to shade and shape the rhythmic subdivisions of the pulse. His stark, terse left-hand comping ceded greater linear freedom to the bass player. Bill Evans and Red Garland would later codify the voicing language of modern jazz piano, but Powell’s deconstruction of the role of the pianist in a jazz group was an essential contribution to the development of the modern rhythm section.

Powell’s lines were a ferocious, intimidating display of technical skill and musical invention. The emotional intensity and intellectual weight of these lines more than compensated for the de-emphasis of the left hand. More than just a transferal of Parker or Gillespie’s horn lines to the piano, Powell’s improvisations were intrinsically pianistic while still embodying the bebop vocabulary. The linear fluency Powell pioneered has become a required component of contemporary jazz piano.

Principal Recordings

albums:Bud Powell Trio Plays, 1947; My Devotion, 1947; The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 1, 1949; The Genius of Bud Powell, Vol. 1, 1949; Bud Powell’s Moods, 1950; Bud Powell Piano, 1950; Bud Powell Trio, 1950; The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 2, 1951; Autumn Sessions, 1953; Charles Mingus Trio, 1953 (with the Charles Mingus Trio); In March with Mingus, 1953 (with Charles Mingus); Inner Fires, 1953; The Genius of Bud Powell, Vol. 2, 1954; Jazz Original, 1955; The Lonely One, 1955; Piano Interpretations by Bud Powell, 1955; Blues in the Closet, 1956; Strictly Powell, 1956; Time Was, 1956; The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 3, 1957; The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 4, 1957; Blue Pearl, 1957; Bud Plays Bird, 1957; Bud Powell, 1957; Swingin’ with Bud, 1957; The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 5, 1958; Time Waits: The Amazing Bud Powell, 1958; Bud in Paris, 1959; A Tribute to Cannonball, 1961; Budism, 1962; The Invisible Cage, 1964; The Return of Bud Powell, 1964; Salt Peanuts, 1964; Ups and Downs, 1964.

Bibliography

Collier, James Lincoln. The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History. New York: Dell, 1978. Contains an excellent chapter about the development of modern jazz, including an analysis of the origins of Powell’s style and his influence on the development of modern jazz piano. Also contains extensive biographical information.

Groves, Allen, and Alyn Shipton. The Glass Enclosure: The Life of Bud Powell. New York: Continuum, 2001. Provides extensive biographical information and an excellent discography of Powell’s recordings, both as a leader and a sideman. Exhaustively researched and well-indexed.

Lyons, Len. The Great Jazz Pianists: Speaking of Their Lives and Music. New York: Morrow, 1983. While it does not include an interview with Powell, the introduction presents a cogent and accurate history of jazz, placing Powell’s contribution to the development of jazz piano in perspective. Many of the interviews refer to Powell and his influence.

Paudras, Francis. Dance of Infidels: A Portrait of Bud Powell. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998. This is written by an amateur musician and devoted fan who became Powell’s friend and spent a great deal of time with him. This account of their time together is heavily colored by Paudras’s obvious affection for the pianist. Still, it provides a useful look at Powell’s day-to-day life from a unique perspective.

Smith, Carl. Bouncing with Bud: All the Recordings of Bud Powell. Brunswick, Maine: Biddle, 1997. A chronological overview of Powell’s recordings written by a jazz fan. Contains useful discographical information.