The History of Jazz (49 page)

No player realized this ideal better than Earl “Bud” Powell. Other modern jazz pianists might have boasted a more dexterous keyboard technique (Peterson, Newborn), or a cleaner touch (Marmarosa, Tristano, Cole), or more daring harmonies (Monk, Brubeck), or a more ebullient stage demeanor (Shearing, Garner), but none came closer to representing the spirit of the bebop movement than Powell. And none would be more influential during the post–World War II years. Powell’s reconfiguration of the jazz piano vocabulary would have a deep and lasting impact on later players on the instrument. As such, he is one of those seminal artists whose influence is so pervasive that it is easy to overlook. When one person steals your stuff, it is robbery; when everybody does it over and over again, your belongings sooner or later become common property.

But even when others imitated the mannerisms of Powell’s style—as so many pianists learned to do—they rarely captured the preternatural vibrancy of the original. In the context of a modern jazz culture that celebrated personal commitment to intense and immediate emotional experiences, Powell appeared to have some special relation to the zeitgeist. The irony was that, for Powell, this attitude was no celebration. Perspiration dripping from his brow, his hands slashing at the keyboard, Bud Powell in public performance seemed to be fighting his private demons. And these demons eventually came to dominate him, abbreviating his career, which reached its peak long before Powell’s death in 1966 at age forty-one. His most important works were recorded within a decade-long span, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s. And even these works of a young man in his prime seem to show a musical mind precariously close to teetering off the edge, as their very titles indicate. “Oblivion,” “Un Poco Loco,” “Frantic Fancies,” “Glass Enclosure,” “Wail,” “Dance of the Infidels,” “So Sorry Please,” “Hallucinations”—a casual observer could gather much about Powell simply by glancing at the names of his compositions.

Powell, who was born in New York City on September 27, 1924, was raised in a musical family: his father William played stride piano; his older brother William Jr. learned the trumpet; his younger brother Richie also became a well-known jazz pianist. Bud’s early training on the piano emphasized the European classical tradition, but even before his tenth birthday Powell was drawn to the jazz styles of Fats Waller and Art Tatum. By age fifteen, he had left school to work as a professional musician. Before long, the after-hours clubs of Harlem beckoned. Here Powell encountered the nascent sounds of bebop, and met a friend and mentor in Thelonious Monk. Seven years older than Powell, Monk was serving as house pianist at Minton’s Playhouse. When veteran players tried to dismiss Powell from the bandstand, Monk came to his defense. Some years later, Powell returned the favor, serving as an undaunted advocate of Monk’s music at a time when few others took notice. When Powell embarked on his first major gig with Cootie Williams’s band, he was persuasive in convincing Williams to record Monk’s composition “‘Round Midnight”—the debut recording of this now well-known jazz standard.

It is fascinating to speculate about the nature of the friendship between these two masters of modern jazz keyboard. Each ranks among the most reclusive and enigmatic figures in the history of the music. Both were men of few words, and often even those few words were all but impossible to decipher. Jazz historians would give much to be a fly on the wall at one of their conversations—if indeed they were conversations in the normal sense of the word. In time, both pianists came to be viewed as mentally unbalanced—Powell spent much of his peak period of creativity in institutions of one sort or another, and Monk’s reticence eventually reached a pathological extreme—although these tendencies may have seemed mere eccentricities at the time of their meeting. Powell and Monk no doubt shared similarities in background and interests, but even in the area of most common interest—jazz piano—their styles offered more differences than affinities. Monk’s vertical keyboard style was almost a polar opposite to the horizontal approach favored by Powell. Yet the two retained a strong mutual admiration and willingness to assist each other, rare among jazz contemporaries who play the same instrument.

In 1944, Powell recorded with Williams, both in big band and combo settings. Here his modern jazz leanings, while already apparent, were tempered by Swing Era conventions. During his stint with Williams, Powell was arrested for disorderly conduct while on a road trip to Philadelphia. In custody, Powell was severely beaten, and even when he was released, his health remained precarious. His mother needed to rent a car to bring him home to Harlem. Some have seen this event as triggering the pianist’s chronic psychological instability. Certainly the timing was inauspicious. Ten days after the Philadelphia incident, Powell was placed in a sanatorium for the first time. Other periods of institutionalization followed. In these settings, his medical care ran the gamut from humane to savage, with his various “treatments” including electroshock therapy and beatings.

The miracle is that Powell managed so well for so long in the face of this dual existence as part-time patient, full-time jazz legend. His recordings from the late 1940s—made after his ordeal with electroshock therapy at Creedmoor—include some of the most compelling piano trio music in the history of jazz. His work on fast numbers is especially noteworthy. A session with Max Roach and Ray Brown from February 1949 produced three high-speed masterpieces. On “Tempus Fugit,” Powell exudes an almost diabolical level of energy, while on two standards, “Cherokee” and “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm,” Powell anchors his attack with intricate passing chords working in contrary motion to the melody. The effect is surprising and strikingly original. A session from the following year finds Roach replaced by Buddy Rich. Here Powell floors the gas pedal, apparently trying to take the tempo to its limits—it sounds as though the pianist is engaged in a race with the virtuoso drummer—on a thrilling version of “Tea for Two.” These tracks possessed an odd, almost paradoxical quality, conveying a sense of mastery, yet also sounding as though they are on the brink of spinning out of control. Much of their appeal comes from this daredevil willingness to push to extremes in performance—a calling card of Powell’s finest work.

Powell was equally impressive when playing his own compositions. It is hard to understand why so few of his pieces have been recorded by other musicians. They boast memorable melodies, satisfying harmonic movement, and are generally good vehicles for improvisation. His medium-tempo pieces are especially strong—“The Fruit,” “Celia,” “Bouncing with Bud,” “So Sorry, Please,” “Cleopatra’s Dream,” “Strictly Confidential,” “Hallucinations”—and deserve to be as well known as the more frequently played compositions of Parker, Gillespie, Dameron, and Monk. Perhaps Powell himself was partly to blame. Unlike Monk or Gillespie, who frequently recorded the same compositions over and over, and played them often in performance, Powell often left behind only a single studio recording of his finest pieces.

Powell’s greatest limitation was as a performer of ballads. But this was also a general weakness of his whole generation of jazz pianists. Not until the late 1950s did modern jazz piano refine an original and authentic approach to ballad playing. Powell had a glimpse of this future, as his impressionistic piece “Parisian Thoroughfare” makes clear. But for the most part, he remained under the shadow of Art Tatum when tackling slower tempos. The pieces are weighed down by ornamentation and cocktail-piano virtuosity. Even a heartfelt composition such as Powell’s “I’ll Keep Loving You” finally collapses under the burden of these extraneous devices. Jazz piano would eventually break through this stylistic dead end by paring away ruthlessly at the unnecessary notes and ad lib fills—a process propelled by the contributions of Bill Evans and Ahmad Jamal—but this radical pruning, built on a reassessment of the importance of space and silence, was still some years away at the time of Powell’s best work. Along with most other pianists who came of age between 1940 and 1950, Powell was at his sharpest when the tempo approached or exceeded two hundred beats per minute.

Almost all of Powell’s most important recordings were completed by the time of his thirtieth birthday. His late 1940s and early 1950s sessions for Norman Granz (now reissued on Verve) and Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff’s Blue Note label stand out as paragon achievements, defining statement of bebop piano. In fact, Powell’s reputation as the leading keyboard voice of the bebop movement would be well established if only on the basis of his extraordinary output from the two-year period stretching from May 1949 to May 1951. These twenty-six months encompassed a lifetime of music: strident trio sessions with Max Roach in May 1949, February 1950, and May 1951; the superb August 1949 combo recordings (under the name Bud Powell’s Modernists) for Blue Note, which prefigure the coming hard bop movement; two memorable quartet dates with Sonny Stitt from December 1949 and January 1950; a brief but notable July 1950 trio session with Buddy Rich; and an outstanding solo piano outing from February 1951.

The quality of Powell’s later work has been the subject of much debate, but even its most ardent supporters stop short of comparing it to these early efforts. Clearly the later Powell was capable of occasional stellar performances. The best of these were often in the company of other premier jazz players—with Parker and Gillespie at Massey Hall in 1953; with Coleman Hawkins in 1960; with Dexter Gordon in 1963—or on occasional trio settings where he showed glimpses of greatness, as in his Lausanne recording from 1962. But these were, at best, compelling enough to remind listeners of Powell’s early prowess, and never so good as to make them forget it. At its worst, Powell’s playing in his later days could be execrable. His touch unsure, the tempo wobbly, his improvisations rarely broaching new ground—Powell, on such evenings, could sound like an automaton, futilely going through the motions of a jazz performance without ever feeling it. His early work had been distinguished by a suppleness and gripping tension; his later work often seemed clouded by malaise.

There were, of course, all too many reasons for this distressing decline. Powell’s unstable mental health was increasingly matched by a deteriorating physical condition. Even small doses of alcohol could have a devastating effect, and friends learned to keep him away from the bottle at all costs. The death of his brother Richie in a 1956 auto accident, as well as the passing of Parker and many other of his contemporaries, may also have weighed heavily on Powell. In his early thirties, a period that finds most jazz players in peak playing form, Powell struggled with health problems and hospital stays. “Nobody gave him much longer to live,” his companion Altevia Edwards (better known as Buttercup) later told an interviewer, “not even me.”
¹³

But Powell survived and decided on an ambitious move across the Atlantic. In the spring of 1959, Powell arrived in Paris with Buttercup and her son John. This temporary visit stretched out to five years. The recordings from this period show that Powell was still capable, at times, of playing coherent and moving improvisations, but even Powell’s better performances lacked the fire and ice of his earlier keyboard excursions. Despite this inconsistency, work was plentiful and audiences treated the pianist with respect bordering on adulation. In this new setting, Powell was blessed with a supportive phalanx of friends, fans, and acquaintances, who conspired (with mixed results) to shepherd his health and keep him away from alcohol. Francis Paudras, a commercial artist and jazz aficionado, eventually stepped forward as an unofficial guardian, overseer, and financial adviser, as well as vigilant defender of Powell against his critics. “People think Bud is crazy or lost or silent,” he told one interviewer, “but he really is in a state of grace.”
¹⁴
This unusual and troubled relationship provided much of the inspiration for the 1986 film
‘Round Midnight
.

When Powell returned to the United States for a visit in August 1964, Paudras accompanied him. In New York, however, the pianist could not be controlled as easily as in France, and on at least two occasions he disappeared for days at a time. When Paudras decided to return to France, Powell stayed behind. Even the artist’s most devoted fans could take little solace in his pianism during this final stage of his career. An engagement at Birdland received mixed reviews, but Powell’s heavy-handed performance at a Charlie Parker memorial concert left few doubts about his diminished capacities at the keyboard. He performed little after this, and his health continued to deteriorate. On July 31, 1966, less than two years after his New York homecoming, Powell died, ostensibly due to the combined effects of tuberculosis, alcoholism, and malnutrition. He was forty-one years old.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, almost every major or minor keyboardist working in the modern jazz idiom showed, to a greater or lesser extent, the marks of Powell’s influence: Lennie Tristano, John Lewis, George Wallington, Dodo Marmarosa, Al Haig, Walter Bishop, Kenny Drew, Joe Albany, and Hampton Hawes, to name just a few. In Detroit, Powell’s linear style served as a springboard for a whole school of pianism. This so-called “Detroit style” actually spanned a wide range of sounds, stretching from the refined keyboard mannerisms of Hank Jones and Tommy Flanagan to the harder-driving piano work of Barry Harris, but all of them could trace their lineage back to Powell. By the mid-1950s, other jazz keyboard approaches had emerged, but even the pianists whose work stood out as the most original—Bill Evans, Horace Silver, Ahmad Jamal, Oscar Peterson, Cecil Taylor— still owed an enormous debt to this pioneer of modern jazz.

The career of Powell’s mentor and friend Thelonious Monk presents virtually a mirror image of this tale of dissipating creativity and declining fame. When Powell was at the peak of his powers, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Monk was an all-but-forgotten figure in the jazz world. Around the same time that Powell’s most fertile period ended in May 1951, Monk embarked on his own renaissance. In July of that year, Monk returned to the studios to record for Blue Note after a three-year hiatus. This session kicked off a fifteen-year period in which Monk recorded prolifically, setting down classic tracks for Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside, and Columbia. By the 1960s, the reversal of roles was all but complete. At the point when Powell’s career was in its final tailspin, Monk was recording for the most powerful label in the music industry, lauded by jazz fans, and even the subject of a 1964 cover story in
Time
magazine.