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Probably the most influential pianist of the bop era, Powell liberated the left hand to comp freely and played right hand phrases as bold as any horn. All modern piano starts with him, really. If peer Thelonious Monk was a conceptual influence on jazz at large, Powell was a direct influence on piano playing itself. Unfortunately, he suffered from mental problems and became more erratic as time went on. He died in 1966, leaving behind a lot more recordings than I’ve selected here. The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume One Aug 1949 & May 1951 / Blue Note RVG Amazing is the correct word. Powell’s daring command of the keyboard still amazes today, let alone realizing when it was done. I can only think of Art Tatum as a possible technical reference, although Tatum’s approach was different. Powell runs the mazes of bop, acknowledging all the corners yet flying above them, too. The first of the two sessions here is a quintet date with Fats Navarro (trumpet), Sonny Rollins (tenor sax, good at this young age), bassist Tommy Potter and drummer Roy Haynes. The original pieces “Bouncing with Bud”, “Wail”, and “Dance of the Infidels” each display Bud’s composing depth, and the first one is especially catchy. Multiple takes allow comparative listening, and since they’re such short sides, that’s not a big chore. Also appearing are Thelonious Monk’s bustling “52nd Street Theme” (never recorded by Monk, although Sonny would wax it again in the ‘60s for RCA Victor) and a trio read of Bird’s “Ornithology”, where if you listen closely, you can hear some of Bud and Monk’s common language. The second session is a trio date with bassist Curley Russell and drummer Max Roach. It includes the smartly embellished standards “Over the Rainbow” and “It Could Happen to You” and two groovy takes on the Gillespie favorite “A Night in Tunisia”. The sunny “Parisian Thoroughfare” is aborted by Bud after a cathartic solo. But all is secondary to the three variants of “Un Poco Loco”, a galvanizing tune. The flat-five chords of the theme, in hammered syncopation, seem to be saying, “You want the new tonality? Here it is!” Lightning-fast melodic fills and bold harmonic shifts set up an intense, Latin-based solo section over a taut riff and Max’s alarm-bell beat. Listening to “Un Poco Loco” is like being connected to an electric current.
It’d be pretty redundant for me to call this an essential disc.
A softer program, for the most part. These are all trio sides (masters plus alternates) with bassist George Duvivier and drummer Art Taylor, who add nice touches but are slightly clouded in the recording. Powell mixes bop linearity with some classical ideas, as in “Sure Thing” and “Glass Enclosure”. A couple of standards drift toward background decor (“Polka Dots and Moonbeams”, a Latin-loping “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”), but the richness of “Autumn in New York” glows romantically and rewards close attention. Elsewhere are the bluesy “Collard Greens” (aka “Blues in the Closet” by Oscar Pettiford), the okay “Reets and I”, and the uptempo frolic “I Want to Be Happy”, in which Bud quotes his own “Wail”. The mini-masterpiece “Glass Enclosure” sieves a baroque past into a personalized, claustrophobic present. Within this fascinating essay are classical allusions, a Monkian fanfare, and an ambiguous section of descending chords.
Amazing Volume 2 captures a satisfying range of Powell’s artistry, although it doesn’t have the dangerous feel of Volume 1. Both of them are very worthwhile if you want to understand the fuss about Bud, and you may also want to check out his early Verves.
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