The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 1

Powell, Bud

album cover

The DNA of Bebop on Piano

Bud Powell (1924–1966) brought bebop to the piano. The New York native assimilated the glib, eddying lines created by the genre's pioneers, saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and from them fashioned a parallel pianistic vocabulary of slippery phrases that took others years to apprehend. His playing, in his best years, is a highly caffeinated, cram-packed essay on bebop's possibilities.

Alas, Powell's best years were few. This disc, his third as a leader, gathers recordings he made starting in 1949, when he was twenty-four years old. By then he'd suffered a racially motivated beating that gave him recurring headaches, and had spent time in mental institutions; still, according to the musicians who gathered at his Harlem apartment during this period, he was relatively stable and writing lots of music. The album opens with a quintet identified as "Bud Powell's Modernists," featuring trumpeter Fats Navarro and saxophonist Sonny Rollins playing Powell's aptly named "Bouncing with Bud" and the bebop standby "52nd Street Theme." It also includes recordings made in May 1951, after Powell was released from Creedmore Sanitarium, where he'd received shock treatment. Drummer Roy Haynes, who appears on the early tracks, recalls in the liner notes that Powell's experiences had cost him something: "That's when you started thinking of Bud as having two periods, before and after. Before, he was much sharper."

Still, all of The Amazing, Vol. 1 (and parts of Vol. 3, which includes a torrid fantasia in the style of Bach keyboard music, "Bud on Bach") is essential listening. There are three versions of Powell's crowning compositional achievement, "Un poco loco," two in a trio setting that inspires some of his most robust, intellectually vibrant improvisation. Among several breathtaking ballads, there's an ambling version of "You Go to My Head" that starts at cocktail hour and winds up well past midnight. The takes with the fiery and very young Navarro and Rollins show Powell's gift for goading accompaniment: Even when other piano players caught up to his galloping run-on bebop sentences, nobody could touch his exquisite sense of timing.

Genre: Jazz
Released: 1951, Blue Note (Reissued 2001)
Key Tracks: "Un poco loco," "Dance of the Infidels," "Bouncing with Bud," "Ornithology," "You Go to My Head."
Catalog Choice: Bud! The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 3
Next Stop: Red Garland: A Garland of Red
After That: Hank Jones: The Trio
Book Pages: 607–608