Bud Powell Trio - 'Round Midnight
We're gonna close down the September rememberings with a centennial tribute to a guy I have always wanted to put on here.
Today's forgotten hero was born into the Harlem Renaissance and ended up making his own, indelible mark on culture.
But for a savage beating by Philadelphia's "finest" in 1945, he might be considered the pre-eminent piano architect of Bebop.
That assault, combined with the electroconvulsive "shock therapy" savagery that followed, kind of ended him as a driving force in the music.
Dead by the Summer of 1966, today he is more thought of for his mental health struggles than the astonishing music and technique for playing it that he brought to the table.
Before he arrived, pianists in pretty much all styles (but especially for the stride and New Orleans cats that preceded him in the then-exploding Jazz firmament) led, so to speak, with the left hand.
Earl Powell -- we know him as Bud -- changed all that, with a vicious, hyperspeed right-hand attack that was a cross between Joe Louis and the Cecil Taylor types that would follow him.
Plucked from Cootie Williams' band in the early 1940s and dropped on the then-burgeoning Minton's Playhouse scene by his pal Thelonious Monk like a metric ton of grand pianos, he and his right-handed approach immediately made their presence felt.
He became an integral part of the development of Bop until 1948, when he had the ill fortune of wandering, after a gig and drunk, into the hands of the Philly police, as ugly an aggregation in that era as then existed in "law" (read: "coercion-enacted protection of the moneyed elite class") enforcement.
The beating that followed was so severe, it gave him debilitating headaches, and he descended further into alcoholism to quell the agony.
He eventually ended up in the infamous Creedmoor psychiatric hospital -- growing up in Queens, I could see it from my bedroom window -- being further abused with electroshock "therapy" after a second time being institutionalized after a bar fight.
After a 1950s falling out with Parker, he moved to Paris to get away from what he perceived as systematic racist abuse, and began to partially recover and begin recording again.
When he returned to New York in the mid-1960s he relapsed again, and this time he did not recover, passing away from a combination of tuberculosis and neglect in July of 1966.
Wow, that sure was an uplifting story, wasn't it? Here, let's try to forget all that and live through the music, OK? It's the only worthwhile thing shitshow humanity does that is worth talking about anyway.
Bud Powell Trio
Blue Note
Geneva, Switzerland
2.1.1962
01 Ornithology
02 Swedish Pastry
03 Hot House
04 I Remember Clifford
05 Just One of Those Things
06 Anthropology
07 'Round Midnight
08 Jordu
09 I Know That You Know
10 Blues In the Closet
Total time: 1:02:17
Bud Powell - piano
Michel Cortesi - bass
Jacques Cavussin - drums
off-air FM capture of indeterminate origin, sourced from the 2009 bootleg CD "Live In Geneva" on the Gambit label
somewhat retracked & remastered by EN, September 2024
280 MB FLAC/direct link
280 MB FLAC/direct link
Obviously, as someone who didn't get to record after the mid-1960s, there's very few unissued or ROIO-type performances of him, but one listen to this hour of power from Swiss radio is all you'll need to understand why folks are still discussing Bud Powell almost 60 years after he left this realm.
I will go sort through October now, but don't miss out on the Bud Powell centenary swingfest as he turns the big C-Note today, or I'mma show up at your spot with the big, hairy tens unit and give you a shock to your system!!--J.
9.27.1924 - 7.31.1966