Earl Rudolph "Bud" Powell was born September 27, 1924 and grew up in Harlem, NYC. He died at age 41 on July 31, 1966 after years of alcohol abuse and mental illness that was certainly aggravated, if not created, by institutional practices archaic and likely.
It’s rather fair and accurate to say that Bud was the “Charlie Parker” of the piano. Thelonious Monk may have been called the High Priest of Bebop, but it was Bud who innovated the modern style of piano playing for the Be Bop period and beyond. In his prime, he is every bit as impressive as Art Tatum or Bird. In his final years, not so much. Bud suffered much and was under appreciated in his lifetime.
I can’t help but sometimes think on how we (rightfully!) praise, admire, and cherish the work of Van Gogh and collectively see his mental illness, self-abuse, and death as a source of tragedy and even shame on us for allowing it and yet the work of people like Bud Powell and even Charlie Parker is often judged as inferior because of the self-abuse and mental illness. We’re just about the same amount of time now between the period of Bird and Bud and today as the period of Bird and Bud was from Van Gogh’s, but the artistic celebration today is far from equal to what it was for Van Gogh in 1950.
I have nothing but praise for Van Gogh. I’ve even made the effort to view his pieces in museums in Amsterdam and Paris and currently have both Starry Night and The Café printed on t-shirts. But the attention to the Great Painter is sure different than what it is towards the icons of Jazz. I wonder why that is? Is it simply the art form and how we value certain forms art over others? Or could it be...um...something else?
And Ya…I compared Bud Powell to Charlie Parker and Vincent Van Gogh. Heheh
If you’re finding me for the first time, I try to publish a diary about Jazz and related music every Sunday around 10pm EST. Please do comment or add clips you like that I left out of the diary.
Chasin the Bird—Bird, Miles, Bud, Max Roach and Tommy Potter
Here’s the website dedicated to Bud Powell. There’s also several biographies written about him which I’ve never read. In 1989 and 1990 I took piano lessons with Jim McNeely while at William Paterson College. Jim had me learning and playing many of Bud’s tunes.
To understand what Bud did is in part to understand what Charlie Parker did. Charlie Parker innovated notions of improvising within Jazz harmonic structures. Improvisation had always been a part of jazz, but the trend prior to Bird was to improvise around the melody and within the set harmonic structure. The new trend began before Bird with Lester Young and Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins and Art Tatum and Lionel Hampton and others—there is no real clear moment of change—but Bird pulls all the trends together and focuses them into eighth note and sixteenth note improvised lines. Charlie Parker’s improvisations might have nothing to do with the melody of the song and he could stretch the harmony into unexpected places. (The harmonic explorations of Miles and Coltrane would take jazz to its next phase after the 50s).
Round midnight
Bud did this on the piano alongside Charlie Parker.
All God's Chillun’ Got Rhythm w/Ray Brown & Max Roach. 1949
From The Bud Powell website:
Before Bud was ten he had absorbed everything he had heard by the great stride pianists and was already playing with jazz musicians. They would "steal" the young boy away and keep him up late at night. They were amazed at the young prodigy. His father insisted that he continue his classical piano studies, but by the time Bud was a teenager the lure of the jazz world was overwhelming. By 1939 he was playing professionally in a band led by his older brother Bill.
Bud’s father was a stride piano player. Bud’s younger brother Richie also is an historically important jazz pianist who was a member of the Brown-Roach Quintet and died in the same car accident that killed Clifford Brown. Bud was greatly influenced by Art Tatum.
In the early 1940s there was a “scene” and a “hang out” based at the club known as Minton’s Playhouse. If it was in Paris or London in the 1880s we’ld be calling it a Salon or Gentleman’s Association or something else fancy and praising the intellectual and artistic achievement and exploration in which they engaged; teaching it to disinterested High School Juniors around the nation. But this wasn’t Hemmingway’s friends….this was Monk’s gig.
Mintons became a hang out and after hours place where all the musicians in NYC would go to in order to jam to have cutting sessions: Lester Young and Ben Webster head to head tenor battles. It was a jam session. It was here that Dizzy and Bird and Max all began to collectively create the musical style known as BeBop. I’ve heard it said that Dizzy and Bird kept trying to make the tunes harder to play in order to keep weaker musicians off the band stand. And it was here that a young Bud Powell came under the tutelage of Thelonious Monk. Bud also had a reputation at this stage for being somewhat unpredictable. Miles has said that Charlie Parker claimed not to want to hirer Bud because he was too crazy. Regardless, when Bebop was born, Bud Powell was there playing piano.
The first of his recordings are with Cootie Williams from Chicago, Illinois, Tuesday, January 4, 1944: You Talk A little trash
Personnel:
Cootie Williams - Trumpet
Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson - Alto Sax
Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis - Tenor Sax
Earl "Bud" Powell - Piano
Norman Keenan - Bass
Sylvester "Vess" Payne – Drums
From Wikipedia
His tenure with Williams was terminated one night in January 1945, when he got separated from the band after a Philadelphia dance engagement and was apprehended, drunk, by railroad police inside a station. He was beaten by them, and then briefly detained by the city police. Shortly after his release and return to Harlem, he was hospitalized—first in Bellevue, an observation ward, and then in a psychiatric hospital, sixty miles away.
He recorded early with Trombonist J.J. Johnson on June 26, 1946. Powell, Johnson, Cecil Payne on Alto Sax (usually he plays Baritone Sax), Leonard Gaskin on Bass and Max.
Hey Jay Jay
And in 1946 he recorded with Bird.
Donna Lee w/Miles too
From Wikipedia—
…. Powell was inactive for most of 1947. In November, he had an altercation with another customer at a Harlem bar. In the ensuing fight, Powell was hit over his eye with a bottle. When Harlem Hospital found him incoherent and rambunctious, it sent him to Bellevue, which had the record of his previous confinement there and in a psychiatric hospital. It chose to institutionalize him again, though this time at Creedmoor State Hospital, a facility much closer to Manhattan. He was kept there for eleven months.
Powell eventually adjusted to the conditions in the institution, though in psychiatric interviews he expressed feelings of persecution founded in racism. From February to April 1948, he received electroconvulsive therapy, first administered after an outburst deemed to be uncontrollable. It might have been in reaction to learning, after a visit by his girlfriend, that she was pregnant with their child. While the electroconvulsive therapy was said to have made no difference, the MDs gave Powell a second series of treatments in May. He was eventually released, in October 1948—though from these early and subsequent hospitalizations, he was emotionally unstable for the rest of his career.
As much as I love Bud with Bird and most any other horn player, it’s the trio and solo piano settings that really let him shine. This is from 1949 with Ray Brown and Max Roach. Bud’s “Celia”.
And here is “Cherokee”
Bud plays with virtually every major jazz artist of his time. His website says he played on some of the more successful Sarah Vaughn recordings of the 1940s, but I can’t find listings of them. I suspect it’s possible he was uncredited on the recordings, hired as a session man? And some people who played with Bud back then are still with us.
Here’s the tune Sonny means: Bud’s own “Bouncing With Bud” from 1949
Tempus Fugit is one Bud’s classics.
In selecting videos for this diary, I discovered this Xmas broadcast from 1949 of Bud, Miles, Max, Sonny Stitt, Serge Chaloff on baritone, Benny Green Trombone and Curley Russell on bass. I have never heard of Serge Chaloff. The DJ sounds like Symphony Sid. “Move”
Notice in the intro that they introduced Miles as “Little” Miles Davis? Where the heck did that come from?????
It’s this 1949-1953 period that Bud really records his best. In 1950 he records some sessions with Sonny Stitt which also include JJ Johnson. I can’t find any of the cuts with JJ in the youtubes. Here’s side two of the record. Its Max and Curly again too.
In 1951 there are wonderful trio and solo recordings. This is Bud’s “Un Poco Loco” again with Max and Curley.
Solo Piano from 1951, his own “Hallucinations” (aka “Budo”)
It’s also in 1951 that an unfortunate incident occurs. I’ve heard it told two ways. According to what I just read on Wikipedia, police searched Bud’s parked car and discovered narcotics. They suspecting the drugs to be Bud’s and required Monk to testify that this was the case. Monk refused and lost his cabaret card in the process, losing his ability to do gigs in NYC for a while. The other version of the story which I’ve heard much more frequently and have heard directly from Thelonious Jr. is that Monk took the rap for the heroin because Bud was already on probation and would have gone to jail. Either way, Monk loses his cabaret card to protect Bud Powell.
Parisian Thoroughfare is probably Bud’s most well-known composition. I think this is from the 1951 solo sessions, but it could be from ‘49.
Bud does a few sessions for Blue Note in 51.
Over the rainbow
You go to my head
At the end of 1951 Bud is arrested and institutionalized again for Marijuana possession. He is also treated for schizophrenia. He is held until 1953 when he is release to the guardianship of the owner of the Birdland nightclub, Oscar Goodstein. The playing in 1953 is still quality.
Little Willie Leaps In, April 5, 1953. w/Mingus and Roy Haynes
Lullaby of Birdland w/Oscar Pettiford and Haynes
And the well-known reunion concert now known as Jazz at Massey Hall
Bird, Dizzy, Mingus, Max
Perdido
Things start to go downhill from here. Wikipedia reminds me that Bud was taking Largactil for his schizophrenia and it was affecting his playing. He was also incarcerated in 1954. In 1956, his brother Richie killed alongside Clifford Brown in a car accident. Im not sure if or how often he was institutionalized between 53 and 59. He does make some records, but they aren’t as strong as the past ones.
All The Things You Are w/ Percey Heath and Kenny Clarke. 1955
Moose the Mooch, October 14, 1957 w/George Duvivier and Art Taylor
In 1959, Bud moves to Paris along with is girlfriend Altevia "Buttercup" Edwards. It seems as if Buttercup was bad news for Bud and would control his finances and overdoes him with Largactill. But he continued to perform and record. I’ve been able to find some live footage of this time
Here he is with Mingus’ group at the 1st Festival Jazz d'Antibes Juan-les-Pins France July 13, 1960. Dolphy, Ted Curson, Booker Ervin and Dannie Richmond: "Ill Remember April"
It is not bad playing. A Bud Powell at 80% is still better than most other pianists. But it’s not the giant of before. Cannonball produced two records of Bud. The audience is dubbed in. Bud, Don Byas, Pierre MIchelot on Bass and Kenny Clarke on drums. “I Remember Clifford”
I don’t know the date of this video, but I’m fairly certain it’s from 60 or 61.
This footage of Bud doing “Anthropology” is definitely from 1962
It’s also in 1962 the Bud is called in as a last minute replacement for Kenny Drew on a Dexter Gordon recording session. Apparently Bud couldn’t learn any new tunes at this point and they had to record standards Bud already knew.
In 1962 Bud befriended French artist Francis Paudras and moved into his home. Perhaps you’ve heard of the film “Round Midnight”? Perhaps you know that Dexter Gordon stared in that film? The film is largely based on Bud’s life in Paris and his relationship with Paudras. In 1963 Bud develops tuberculosis.
There are a few later recordings and they are weak. In 1964 Bud and Paudras come to NYC and Bud has a triumphant engagement at Birdland. Paudras returns to Paris without Bud. Bud had two concerts in 1965. One apparently was a disaster at Carnegie Hall and another was a tribute to Charlie Parker involving many performers. His behavior became very erratic.
From Bud’s webpage
In 1964 Bud made a triumphant return to Birdland but his success was short-lived as he quickly descended back into alcoholism. In 1966 he died in obsurity and neglect at the age of 41. His family refused to claim the body but his friend Max Roach took the necessary legal steps to arrange for a New Orleans style funeral procession in which Bud's coffin was accompanied by a Jazzmobile on which Barry Harris and Lee Morgan played Bud's compositions. There were an estimated 5000 people along the Harlem streets paying tribute to the tragic life of one of the greatest figures in the history of jazz.
Bud Powell was released from this Earth on July 31, 1966.
The Last Time I Saw Paris
Oblivion
Parisian Thoroughfare
Thanks for listening and reading everyone. I have the next few weeks planned out with some great music in mind. If music is food, the Bud and BeBop is the nutritional fresh vegetables and free range meat eaten to satisfy your body and soul. Next week its rich and gooey fattening and self-indulgence time. There’s a movie coming soon that needs some pre-discussin’!
Please support your local musicians and all local live music. Rock on with your bad selves.