The Living Legend

...In three successive takes, he struggled to break into the clear in his solo, but each time he seemed to sink into the dark element he himself had created...

...The critic Barry Ulanov once complained of Bud's work: "His solos sometimes have a fragmentary quality, like a series of boxes piled precariously on top of one another...

...All through the '40s, Bud was under the influence of Monk...

...He was obviously out to beat Bird at his own game of killing tempos, dazzling virtuosity and startling ideas...

...Despite this sidetracking, Bud managed to make the legendary "KoKo" date with Charlie Parker in '45, ad-libbing some tasty introductions and comping masterfully behind Bird, Miles and Dizzy...

...When sophisticated soloists like Charlie Parker began to call for "fat-boy" chords to feed their invention, only a handful of wiggy whites-among them, George Wallingford, Al Haig, and Dodo Marmarosa-had the training and the ear to accommodate them...

...In a recent issue of the New Yorker, Whitney Balliett decided that all jazz novels written by whites were "unrevealing and unwittingly condescending...

...Confined to one eight-bar chorus per side, Bud would come yeasting up out of the grooves, swinging hard with a loose-jointed, splay-fingered style that soon got a name: People said he played "funky" (the word means, roughly, lowdown, dirty and dark...

...When he did, as in the Jazz Giant album (Verve 8153), he achieved for a brief moment the most satisfactory jazz synthesis since the heyday of Bop...

...Before long Bud was in demand for record dates and downtown gigs...

...cruel, exploitative friends and lovers...

...and squalid hotel rooms littered with empty bottles...

...Bud's early role as a supporting player was cut out for him by history...

...On the air check of "Round About Midnight" (Jazz Cool 101), Bud enters after Parker's grimly despondent statement of the melody...

...Bud now became the mad genius of jazz piano...

...He spent as much time in mental institutions as he did out of them: 11 months in Creedmore with electro-shock...

...Apparently, Monk had not been able to impress on Bud the corollary of the rule: while you think everything, you play only what fits...

...a brief period back at work...

...In the main," he writes, "jazz musicians are home-loving, television-watching, newspaper-reading innocents who dislike night clubs, late hours, buses, and all other discomforts their jobs force on them...

...Bud's down home stuff, like "Collard Greens and Black Eye Peas," was played without a trace of self-consciousness...

...In jazz, suffering and greatness seem inseparable...

...And because Bud's mind was swarming with so many ideas, each clamoring for expression, his work often had a tentative, sketchy outline...

...In 1951 he suddenly threw off his old style and emerged as "The Amazing Bud Powell...

...He has to take the tempo up to swing, and his style is an eclectic jumble of his own manner and those of Thelonius Monk and Errol Garner...

...Comping hard with his left hand while backed up by drums and bass, with his right hand Bud spins a long unbroken line of single notes which cascade up and down the keyboard with effortless fluency...

...Shortly before the onset of his disease, I have been told, he suddenly broke through the sullen stupor in which he has been wrapped in recent years and for several nights played brilliantly at the Blue Note in Paris...

...At that point, he quit De Witt Clinton High and started scuffling in the sleazy bars of Harlem, Coney Island and the Village...

...and, finally, a terrible breakdown leading to a 16month commitment to Pilgrim State with still more electro-shock...

...Yet while the funky style provided a rich soil for musical ideas, its first growth proved too luxuriant...

...Everything in Bud's history vouches for the accuracy of the story...

...The funky style anticipated by a decade the recent emphasis on "soul" and "roots...

...Of all the Boppers, Bud is Bird's musical son and heir more than anyone else...

...Bud was out and those flying thoughts inspired the great playing to be heard on the 1947 Savoy dates with Bird...

...In 10 weeks, though...

...Bud and John Lewis, another classically trained Negro pianist, were exceptions, though even then Lewis was a sucker for impressionistic prettiness...

...from this strange genius he had learned that the basic rule for the jazz performer was to hold his mind as wide open as possible to the spontaneous entrance of ideas...

...Despite the constant interruption of his career by mental illness, Bud's development as an artist, from the evidence provided by dozens of records, seems perfectly regular...

...One great difference between the jazz life today and 20 years ago is that now people care...

...The art remained but the soul shriveled...

...Fresh evidence of this old truth was recently provided by the sad news of Bud Powell's wretched life in Paris...

...Bud Powell tried to follow Charlie Parker wherever he led...

...In the long introduction...

...The operative phrase here is "in the main...

...ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman The Living Legend Ever since the mid-'50s, when the racially inspired movement to "bring dignity to jazz" got under way, many critics have labored to dissociate jazz from the traditional jazz life...

...17 months of freedom...

...For the fact is, neither the jazz novelist, nor the jazz listener, nor for that matter the jazz critic, is much concerned with jazz musicians in the main...

...Ulanov was right...

...A month later he was committed to Pilgrim State in manic condition: "His thoughts were flying away with him," one psychiatrist remarked...

...Though still a kid, he got in with the Boppers up at Mintons and soon became the protege of Thelonius Monk, who taught him the "advanced" chords and pushed him on the stand, much the way Charlie Parker encouraged Miles Davis...

...Not content with debunking the Hollywood and men's magazine version of the musician's life, these writers have tried to convince us that dope has nothing to do with the music, that the anti-social behavior of many jazz musicians is simply an accident of their race or class, and that the fierce, selfdestructive drives of great jazzmen like Charlie Parker are merely regrettable instances of psychic infirmity fortuitously associated with artistic ability...

...I have sometimes thuoght that this culmination of Bud's art was also a dead end, for the loss of his rhythmic looseness and funky flavor subtly reduced the interest and suggestiveness of his work, even though it increased its surface brilliance and impact...

...Bud's manifesto was called "Un Poco Loco" (Blue Note 1503), a number built on an orgiastic 9/8 rhythm whacked out by Max Roach on a cow bell with stunning Latin syncopations...

...He has Parker's power, anger and defiance, and is infected with the same racial virus that embittered Bird's life...

...In 1944, Dizzy Gillespie wanted to use him for the first Bop engagement on the Street, at the Onyx Club...

...Both of them knew this, and until Bird's death in 1955 their paths kept crossing, often with disastrous results...

...Bud Powell's long series of mental breakdowns began in 1945, with a scene in Philadelphia's Broad Street Police Station...

...For almost 20 years he has lived a nightmare existence of paranoid fantasies alongside realities not much less terrifying...

...The formula for all the up-tempo tunes in this collection is simple: It is, in fact, a translation into keyboard idiom of the solo-plus-accompaniment style of many Bop horn players...

...Bud generated an atmosphere of gagging expectancy and then leaped off the deep end into the turbid whirlpool of a rolling bass...

...mental institutions with assemblyline electro-shock...

...From 1947 to 1953, Bud Powell was caught in a crippling cycle of psychotic episodes...

...Now one of our leading critics has taken the final step in this whitewash campaign by implying that the lurid features of the jazz scene are principally the creation of hopped-up hipster novelists...

...It is the exceptional men, the men of genius who really engage our thoughts and feelings, and these men have lived and created in a world of pain...

...Brought in drunk, he got salty with the desk sergeant and was busted...

...Born Earl Rudolph Powell in 1924, one of six children of a Harlem janitor who played piano in his spare time, Bud received the usual City education, plus music lessons, until his 15th year...

...Unlike the deliberate racial stance adopted by the Hard Boppers of the late '50s, however...

...But his flow of ideas is impressive and, significantly, he does not change the subject...

...Years ago Bud Powell would have died alone in Paris, and some nitwit in the Village would have scrawled on a wall-"Bud Lives...

...From 1953 on, Bud began to decline in much the same way that Bird did...

...It was not until several years later that he finally learned how to combine his hypnotic rhythmic base with a brilliant top line of solo figuration...

...In those days, most Negro pianists were self-taught naifs who could swing and play melody but were harmonically crude...

...angry, jealous musicians...

...Today Bud is stretched out in a Paris hospital with tuberculosis, the result of colossal self-neglect...

...The circus billing was appropriate...

...His has been a world of brutal cops...

...three more months in Creedmore...

...Bud is one of the few giants of modern jazz...

...But the elders vetoed the plan and instead sent Bud out on the road for two years seasoning with the Cootie Williams band...

...At a recent benefit for Powell at Birdland, Oscar Goodstein, the club's proprietor and Bud's long-time friend and patron, told me that he is now out of danger with the tuberculosis, though he will have to spend a year in a convalescent home...

...What is more, he found these books (including one he had originally praised) basically inaccurate...