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 "Parisian Thoroughfare," one of Powell's best originals, a piece that conjures the rush of a Paris street with a right-hand figure so vivid and precisely characterized that the title seems like an understatement. Roach plays to the image 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 billed attraction was a boxing match. 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. Mingus recorded it on his own equipment and released it on his own Debut label, which is why this document exists at all. The official title was "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 move to Norgran for this and the following volume 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.

The companion volume to Bud Powell's Moods turns up the temperature, leaning toward the uptempo performances where Powell's right hand performs feats of melodic invention that remain astonishing regardless of how many times you've heard them. "Hallelujah" at full speed is not a demonstration of technique in the show-off sense. It's a demonstration of what complete command of an instrument actually looks like when the instrument is the piano and the approach is bebop: everything the music demands, available on demand, without apparent effort, in service of musical ideas that are actually worth the technical investment.

The Artistry title, like the Moods title, reflects something real. What Powell had was a fully developed artistic vocabulary, a set of musical solutions that were his own and that applied equally to any situation the material presented. Whether the standard was fast or slow, chromatic or diatonic, emotionally bright or dark, he had something specific and personal to say about it. That consistency of artistic response across different musical conditions is what the word "artistry" actually means, and this record earns its name.

As a closing statement for this collection of early Powell recordings, The Artistry lands on the right note, which is to say it leaves you wanting more rather than feeling you've reached an end. The five years covered here represent one of the most concentrated periods of genius in jazz piano history. Powell would continue recording into the 1960s, but what he achieved in the early period on Blue Note and Norgran is the foundation on which everything that followed was built. Start anywhere in this collection and you'll understand why.