Bud Powell

Curly Russell and Max Roach complete the trio, and both are exactly right for what Powell needs. Russell walks bass with a firmness and clarity that gives the piano lines a proper floor without constraining them. Roach at this stage was already one of the most musically intelligent drummers in jazz, and his interaction with Powell is not the interaction of a timekeeper and a soloist but of two musicians thinking about rhythm from inside the same frame of reference. The ensemble playing here has a three-way conversation quality that many piano trios never achieve.

The material is a mix of originals and standards, all of them approached with the same relentless invention. When Powell takes a standard, he takes it apart and reconstructs it as a bebop vehicle without losing the melody's emotional core. The songs still sound like themselves, but they've been through something, worked over, examined from every angle, and what comes out the other side is something new built from familiar material. This is exactly what the bebop approach was trying to accomplish, and Powell achieves it as completely as anyone.

The Roost 10-inch LP format gives these trio sides an appropriate concision. Nothing outstays its welcome. Powell's improvisations reach their conclusions and stop, which requires a different kind of discipline from the extended blowing that would become standard later. These are complete thoughts, not explorations, and that quality of formal completeness is part of what makes them so listenable after seventy-plus years.

"Un Poco Loco" opens the album and announces immediately that something different is happening. Powell recorded it three times in the same session, and each take is a separate complete performance rather than a lesser or better version of the same thing. The released take is extraordinary: a piece built on a clave-influenced rhythmic pattern with Powell's right hand riding above it in lines of chromatic density that push against the beat without ever losing it. It's one of the most exciting single performances in jazz piano, and it's the first track.

The album also contains a trio "A Night in Tunisia" from the same May 1951 date, where Roach plays to the tune rather than simply marking time, and the two of them together produce one of the great examples of what a bebop trio could do when both the soloist and the drummer were thinking about the music in the same concentrated way.

The Blue Note sessions that make up this and the other 10-inch LPs from this period constitute one of the most important piano records in jazz history. Alfred Lion understood what he had in Powell and gave him the space and technical support to document it properly. What resulted was the definitive recording of bebop piano at its peak, and "The Amazing Bud Powell" is the most concentrated single statement of that achievement.

May 15, 1953, in Toronto, and the competition that night was the Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott heavyweight fight. The jazz concert at Massey Hall drew a sparse audience despite assembling what might be the single greatest collection of bebop musicians ever placed on one stage at the same time. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Max Roach: the five musicians who had, collectively, invented the music. Members of the Toronto New Jazz Society recorded it, and Mingus released it on his own Debut label, which is why this document exists at all. The group was credited as "The Quintet," which is the plainest possible way to describe the most extraordinary group in jazz.

Parker played the concert on a plastic Grafton saxophone, an undignified instrument for an undignified evening, and played it like it was the finest horn in the world. Gillespie had his trumpet and his reckless accuracy, the high notes arriving with the precision of something thrown rather than blown. And Powell, at the piano, provided the foundation that the two front-line musicians needed: driving, responsive, packed with ideas that didn't compete with the soloists but amplified them.

The recording has imperfections: the bass was overdubbed later by Mingus because the original recording captured it poorly, and the sound quality has the limitations of a portable 1953 machine operated under concert conditions. None of that matters. What matters is that this concert happened, that someone had the presence of mind to record it, and that the recording survived. It is the most important live document in bebop, and Powell's contribution to it is one of the central reasons why.

The second Amazing Bud Powell volume brings a different rhythm section: George Duvivier in the bass chair and Art Taylor on drums, both of them slightly different in character from the Curly Russell and Max Roach team of the earlier recordings. Duvivier has a fuller, rounder tone and a slightly more elastic sense of time, and Taylor's drumming is a shade harder in the ride cymbal than Roach's more nuanced approach. The effect on Powell's playing is subtle but audible: he digs in a bit harder in this company, and the results are consistently thrilling.

The compositions on this volume include some of Powell's most searching originals, pieces that push beyond the standard bebop chord progressions into harmonic territory that hints at what the music would become in the following decade. Powell was not a transitional figure in the sense of being between styles. He was a founder. But listening to the more harmonically venturous moments here, you can hear the seeds of what McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock would develop in the 1960s, planted quietly inside perfectly formed bebop structures.

The two Amazing Bud Powell volumes belong together, and Blue Note had the wisdom to give both of them the same care and recording quality. Duvivier and Taylor brought something that made this second volume its own thing rather than a continuation, and the result is a record that rewards comparison with its predecessor without being diminished by it. Essential Powell, part of the same continuous achievement as everything else in this collection.

The Artistry of Bud Powell is a ten-inch, eight tracks by most listings (jazzdisco counts seven) cut over two days in June 1954 at Fine Sound in New York, and it is Powell's first record for Granz's Norgran label, though he had already cut trio and solo sides for Granz's Mercury and Clef issues in 1949 to 1951. Nearly every track is a ballad or a standard taken at a walk, which makes the title a little misleading if you come to it expecting the fireworks of the early trio sides. What it documents instead is the other half of the vocabulary: the voicings, the touch, the way he could sit inside a Rodgers and Hart tune and make it sound like something he had written that morning.

"It Never Entered My Mind" and "My Funny Valentine" are the heart of side two, and on both Powell plays the melody nearly straight before letting the left hand start to argue with it. "Buttercup," one of two Powell originals here along with "Fantasy in Blue," is a bright, simple line that the trio treats gently. "Fantasy in Blue" is the closest thing to a workout, and even that is more about harmony than speed. George Duvivier and Percy Heath split the bass chair across the two days, the session sheets do not say who is on what, and Art Taylor keeps to brushes almost throughout.

Two years later Norgran folded all of these tracks into the twelve-inch Bud Powell's Moods, which is the review that follows, so this is the record most people now hear as a part of that one. It is worth knowing on its own terms anyway. As a ten-inch it is a single, quiet mood held for twenty-odd minutes, and if the Blue Note volumes are the argument for Powell as the greatest bebop pianist, this is the argument that he was also one of the best ballad players of his generation.

The move to Norgran, which began with the ten-inch Artistry of Bud Powell and expands here into a full twelve-inch, represents a slight change of context without a change in the essential approach. Norman Granz had a different aesthetic from Alfred Lion, and the Norgran sessions have a slightly warmer recording sound than the Blue Note dates, a bit more reverb, a bit more space around the instruments. Whether this suits the music better or worse is a matter of taste. What it does is present a somewhat different Powell than the Blue Note records, slightly more relaxed in surface texture if not in musical intensity.

The title is doing real work here: this is the ballad-forward side of Powell, the one that gets less attention than the burners but that arguably shows the full range of his gifts more clearly. On the slower material, every harmonic choice is exposed in a way that the velocities of the uptempo recordings can partly obscure. You hear him thinking, following the implications of each chord, finding the note within the scale that carries the most emotional freight and landing on it with a certainty that sounds effortless and is anything but.

Duvivier and Taylor work well in the Norgran context. Taylor in particular seems to have understood that this date called for a lighter hand than the Blue Note sessions, and his brushwork on the slower pieces gives the recordings a texture that supports the more emotionally interior quality of the material. Bud Powell's Moods is not a desert island record in the way the Blue Note sessions are, but it is a significant and often beautiful addition to the discography.

Bud! is the record where Powell came back to Blue Note after four years away, and the first thing you hear is that the label knew exactly how to record him. Rudy Van Gelder's Hackensack piano sound gives the left hand weight and the right hand air, and Paul Chambers and Art Taylor, the rhythm section that was carrying half of the label's catalog that year, play with the kind of restraint that lets a pianist breathe. Side one is five Powell originals, four for trio and "Bud on Bach" for solo piano, and side two brings in a young Curtis Fuller, twenty-four by his usual birth date, though some sources make him twenty-two, on trombone for two standards and a Charlie Parker tune. It was all done in a single afternoon in August 1957, most of it in one or two takes.

The tempos are slower than on the early Blue Note dates, and it would be easy to read that as diminishment. Listen closer and it sounds more like a different set of priorities. "Some Soul" and "Blue Pearl" are blues-rooted pieces that give the chords room to ring, and "Frantic Fancies," despite the title, is a line built on the same crooked logic as his best fifties writing, with a bridge that resolves somewhere you did not expect. Powell had spent the middle of the decade in and out of hospitals, and his brother Richie had died in the car crash with Clifford Brown the summer before. What is on this record is not a man at full sprint. It is a man who still hears everything, choosing his spots.

Fuller's side is looser and more fun, and it is worth having for "Moose the Mooche" alone, where the trombone states Parker's line with a big, round tone and Powell answers with a solo that keeps quoting the melody back at him. "Don't Blame Me" is the longest track at seven and a half minutes, a ballad that Fuller plays with real patience and that Powell decorates rather than dominates. If the trio side is the reason to buy the record, the quartet side is the reason you keep flipping it over.

As a Blue Note object it is a classic of the 1500 series: Reid Miles cover, Francis Wolff photograph, Leonard Feather notes, Plastylite pressing. Four stars rather than five because the early volumes set a standard nothing later could quite reach, but that is a comparison with Powell at twenty-six, not with anyone else. Taken on its own terms, Bud! is a beautiful record, and the Blue Note run it reopened would carry through Time Waits the following spring and on to The Scene Changes.

Nine Powell originals, one trio, one afternoon at the end of December 1958, and then he was gone. Three months after this session Powell moved to Paris, and The Scene Changes turned out to be the last studio record he made in America until his return in 1964. The title reads in hindsight like a statement, though Blue Note could not have known it. What they had was a pianist who had been writing steadily through his two previous volumes for the label and arrived at Hackensack with a full album of new tunes and Paul Chambers and Art Taylor, the rhythm section that had served him so well on Bud! the year before.

"Cleopatra's Dream" opens the record and is the reason most people own it. It is a minor-key line over a rolling left hand, catchy enough to hum and strange enough to stay interesting, and Powell's solo on it is a model of late-period Bud: fewer notes than 1951, every one of them placed. "Duid Deed" and "Down with It" keep the mood, mid-tempo and blues-inflected, and "Danceland" and "Borderick" are short, bright pieces that feel like sketches he wanted on record before he left. Chambers walks with that fat, singing tone and Taylor keeps the ride cymbal light. This is a trio that had recorded together enough to leave space on purpose.

Side two is where the album earns its fifth star. "Comin' Up" is nearly eight minutes, the longest performance of his Blue Note years, a relaxed groove that gives Chambers a proper solo and lets Powell build his chorus by chorus instead of arriving fully formed. "Gettin' There" follows the same unhurried path, and the closing title track is a quiet, almost wistful piece that ends the album, and the American chapter, without any drama at all. Nothing here sounds like a farewell. It sounds like a working musician with a new set of tunes.

Reid Miles gave it one of his best covers, the tilted photograph of Powell with young John, the boy he would take to Paris with him, and the original BLP 4009 is a Plastylite pressing with the RVG stamp in the dead wax. Together with Bud! and Time Waits it makes a three-record run that people who stop at the 1951 sessions never hear, and it is the one of the three I reach for most. If the early Blue Notes are Powell inventing a language, this is Powell speaking it plainly.