The Amazing Bud Powell
Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop
By Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-24391-0
Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. "Cullud Boys with Beards": Serious Black Music and the Art of Bebop2. Something Else: The Tests and Triumphs of a Modernist3. Notes and Tones: Black Genius in the Social Order4. Making the Changes: Jazz Manhood, Bebop Virtuosity, and a New Social
Contract5. Exploding Narratives and Structures in the Art of Bud PowellCoda: Cultural Validation and Requiem for a HeavyweightNotesSelected BibliographyIllustration CreditsIndex
CHAPTER 1
"Cullud Boys with Beards"
Serious Black Music and the Art of Bebop
Little cullud boys with beards
re-bop be-bop mop and stop.
Little cullud boys with fears,
frantic, kick their draftee years
into flatted fifths and flatter beers
that at a sudden change become
sparkling Oriental wines rich and strange ...
Langston Hughes, "Flatted Fifths"
In her treasury of private memories, Bud Powell's daughter, Celia, recalls herfather as an uncomplicated man, "content with the simple things in life, notwanting much more than a meal and to play." But in the public world where heestablished his fame, Powell cut a more challenging figure. His work represents,for many, a pinnacle of artistic achievement among the pantheon of brilliantjazz pianists. His relentless flow of musical ideas—their unsettling rhythmicdisjunction; those explosive launches into beautifully crafted passages of push,pull, run, and riff, punctuated by the perfect landing at ferocious speeds—remainsan inspiring, though intimidating, factor for pianists who come behindhim. Indeed, his brilliance in the bebop idiom pushed jazz musicians of allstripes to high standards of performance that have rarely been matched. Hiscontributions have been as germane to the modern jazz pianist's training asCzerny five-finger exercises and Bach Inventions are to that of classicallytrained pianists. Despite his importance to jazz, he remains one of the music'slesser-known figures. Yet he was a towering pianist who inspires awe and respectamong those in the know.
As one of the select group of gifted mid-twentieth-century "cullud boys," Powellcan teach us much about what made his chosen idiom such a dramatic and poignantmusical statement. Here and in following chapters, I discuss some of the themesand issues—musical and otherwise—that show how Powell's bebop worked as acommercialized, racialized, gendered, and age-specific enterprise. Throughouthis lifetime, jazz developed from a cultish, ethnic-infused vogue to the soundof American pop to a demanding avant-garde. Within this dynamic continuum ofpedigree shifts, Powell's work can also be seen as entangled in the aestheticlegacies of musicians such as Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, and Teddy Wilson, amongothers whose artistic lives helped to create a cultural space for the learning,practice, and dissemination of the art of jazz. At the same time, there arethose who believe that we should retain the political edge that bebop oncepossessed as a stand-alone tradition. Eric Lott, for example, has lamented whathe sees as the casual commercialization of a style that at one time representedthe political and aesthetic avant-garde: "We need to restore the political edgeto a music that has been so absorbed into the contemporary jazz language that itseems as safe as much of the current scene—the spate of jazz reissues, thedeluge of 'standard' records, Bud Powell on CD—certainly an unfortunatehistorical irony." Bebop is, indeed, an abundant site of expressive force.
Despite Powell's brilliance as a pianist, composer, and innovator, his workremains a curious and understudied force in jazz history. Indeed, looking forBud Powell involves a search through "cullud boys' beards and fears": it's aninvestigation of the meanings embedded in all manner of styles, musical andotherwise, and how all of them signified in the world. Black male musicians ofthe 1940s streamed self-conscious ideas about who they were in the world throughtheir art. In the flatted fifths, rhythmic disjunction, and sheer velocity ofbebop convention, we can find Bud and his peers. But we also find him (andothers like him) in other forms of representation, such as photography, and evenin the other kinds of art that shaped his social world, such as poetry and thevisual arts. In other words, we must examine the world into which Powell walked,a world in which life and musicianship challenged the post–World War II world onmany levels. When we look for Bud, we sift through many riches.
THE MUSIC, THE WRITING, AND THE ART IDEA
Powell's accomplishments invoke a generation of musicians whose innovationsduring the 1940s and 1950s are some of jazz's greatest artistic triumphs.Through them, jazz became a bona fide "Art," an expression that is considered bymany to be an elitist music deserving formally trained devotees, a vigorouscriticism, and a rigorous scholarship. With bebop, the accepted wisdom goes,jazz shed its populist impulses and moved up the cultural ladder. This bookmeditates on, among other things, this dramatic transition through the exampleof Powell's musical contributions.
But "Great Art-Jazz" did not just happen; it had to pay its dues. In thescholarly world, for example, jazz would need to be analyzed with tools frombeyond its immediate cultural borders. Jazz needed to be imbedded into thenineteenth-century Eurocentric notion of Great Art's transcendence of the socialand political "everyday," and this move was a major hurdle for this body ofmusic. And naturalizing the shift has been achieved primarily, though notexclusively, by the acts of formal musical analysis and written criticism. Let'sbegin with "analysis," by which I mean the study of musical structures asapplied to specific works and performances.
One of the goals of formal analysis—to expose organic unity—is a musical valuein which few major jazz musicians have expressed much interest. Enter JosephKerman, one of musicology's progressive voices during the 1980s. This was a timewhen analysis of this kind came under increasing scrutiny as well as the timewhen the first dissertations on jazz began to appear in the field. Kerman arguesthat musical analysis is not a politically benign act, but "an essential adjunctto a fully articulated aesthetic value system": western art music of the commonpractice period. Musical analysts extended their techniques to all of the musicthat they valued, and eventually to jazz, as part of this book exemplifies.
At the same time, it should be understood that this brand of formal analysis,embedded as it is in nineteenth-century western European music history, has donelittle to raise the music's prestige among the average jazz fan. Many Powellenthusiasts, for example, have never required musical scores or scholarlytreatises to validate or affirm...
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