“What happens to a genius deferred? If that genius is Bud Powell, it finds resonance in the prose and cultural exegesis of Guthrie Ramsey, Jr., whose brilliant The Amazing Bud Powell offers one of the most compelling and generative views into this enigmatic giant of Black Modernism.”–Mark Anthony Neal, author Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities

Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the prize-winning Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (UC Press).

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 their devotion. His recordings, together withthe lore, myth, and gossip that circulated around him, have sustained hisreputation as one of jazz’s greatest, and indeed most mysterious, stars. Evencasual knowledge of Powell and his exploits seems to anoint the jazz fan withinsider, aficionado status. His work has remained important because of theextent to which jazz pianists have imitated his innovations, the scholarlyanalysis that it (and the work of his colleagues) has stimulated, and thedevotion and awe that exists among his fans.

FROM THE JOOK TO THE CLASSROOM: BEBOP’S PEDIGREE OF BLACK MULTIPLICITY

Powell’s and his colleagues’ version of serious black music has often inspiredthe notion that theirs was an aesthetic in opposition to crass commercialismand, I would argue, to certain aspects of art discourses as well. A recurringtheme in bebop literature (one that still shapes its reception), for example,presumes that modern jazz intentionally tried to sever itself from theentertainment business, from the “jooks” and nightclubs of its origins, and fromits social legacy in the black “vernacular.” It is quite remarkable that such adiverse range of writers—music scholars, journalists, cultural critics—framebebop’s profile in the same way: as a challenge to a diverse set of orthodoxies.

Musicologist Frank Tirro writes, for example, that bebop musicians attempted “tocreate a new elite.” The cultural critic Cornel West believes that “bebopmusicians shunned publicity and eschewed visibility.” Likewise, journalistNelson George argues: “The bebop attitude overrode any lingering connection tothe black show-business tradition that turned any cultural expression into apotentially lucrative career (though eventually that would happen to thebeboppers as well). Its adherents found it a higher calling than mereentertainment.” Music historian William Austin maintains that Charlie Parker’s”music required for discriminating appreciation as thorough a specializedpreparation as any ‘classical style.’ … He stood for jazz as a fine art,knowing that this meant exclusiveness…. Thus with ‘bop,’ jazz met thedifficulties that had bewildered critics of new serious music ever since 1910.The best work was so complex in harmony and rhythm that it sounded at firstincoherent, not only to laymen but to professionals very close to it. Good workcould no longer be discriminated with any speed or certainty from incompetentwork.” English music critic Wilfred Mellers writes that although Parker’s rootsin the black music tradition are evident, the “expressivity” of his rapidlypaced music shares “affinities with the development in European art-music thatwas (contemporaneously) associated with Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono.”

Writers who valued beboppers’ achievements borrowed critical rhetoric from themost prestigious and status-building model available to them—the moderniststrain of western art music. But where did this leave Powell and his associates?Did the rhetoric of elite modernism serve well their aspirations?

One important writer believed it did not. Martin Williams, the influential jazzcritic and compiler of the landmark anthology The Smithsonian Collection ofClassic Jazz, writes that Charlie Parker helped renew jazz “simply by followinghis own artistic impulses.” Williams argues that bebop musicians made a self-conscious effort to change the social function of jazz. But he characterizes theresult of this effort as a kind of “dream deferred,” questioning its successbecause although social dancing is, for the most part, not done to modern jazz,”for a large segment of its audience it is not quite an art music or a concertmusic. It remains by and large still something of a barroom atmosphere music.And perhaps a failure to establish a new function and milieu for jazz was, morethan anything else, the personal tragedy of the members of the bebopgeneration.”

Williams writes in the same essay that although Parker and others “repudiatedwhat they thought of as the grinning and eye-rolling of earlier generations ofjazzmen…. [they] courted a public success and a wide following that weredefined in much the same terms as the popular success of some of theirpredecessors.” Naturally, the process of elevating bebop to this lofty newpedigree meant critically endowing the musicians themselves with artisticautonomy. But at the same time, Williams seems to recognize that jazz was notcompletely free from its social roots, that it seemed stuck between aestheticdiscourses. So what is the truth about modern jazz’s pedigree?

Bebop musicians such as Powell did represent an elite group, and my discussionof his music will show that he merits this claim. But his elite status, like thepedigree of bebop itself, is quite a complex matter. At one time the word elitedescribed “someone elected or formally chosen”; by the end of the nineteenthcentury, however, the term “became virtually equivalent with [the] ‘best.'”Writers have framed beboppers’ achievements in this latter sense, and morespecifically, as an elitism within the framework of western art music. Yet Ibelieve it is important to show that bebop retained powerful connections toblack communal values and to the commercial, popular music industry. Ultimately,I wish to show through Powell’s music that any argument about bebop as fine artshould take into account its dynamic relationship to art discourses, blackculture, and commerce.

In order to parse this relationship, one has to move beyond the sonic. Bebopwas, of course, sound, but it also embodied a look composed of the berets,goatees, and thick horn-rimmed glasses that were popular among the postwar”Museum of Modern Art set.” The clothing worn by the beboppers represented an”intellectualized” adaptation of the zoot suit, the dress code for World War II–erahipsters. Photographs of bebop musicians show that many chose tochemically straighten their hair in the “conk” style popular among many urbanblack males in the 1940s. Along with the look came an insider language.Trumpeter Miles Davis is only one of many who recalls that early bebopperscultivated a colorful vocabulary that grew out of black slang or jive talk, apopular dialect in the jazz world during the late 1930s and early 1940s.

The bebop look and language gave the popular press an image to promote (ordenounce) and lent more than a dash of human interest to the scene. Both Lifeand Ebony magazines featured articles in the late 1940s that focused primarilyon these features. These seemingly peripheral aspects of bebop culture revealmuch about the music’s political import. Robin D. G. Kelley argues that clothingsuch as the zoot suit (and variations thereof) does not carry a direct politicalstatement in itself, but its cultural context renders it into a statement. Bebopmusicians belonged to a larger underground culture of black working-class youth,in which the “zoot suit, the conk, the lindy hop, and the language of the ‘hepcat’ [were] signifiers of a culture of opposition among black, mostly male,youth.” Such acts have traditionally allowed the construction of a collectiveidentity that challenges dominant stereotypes and forms insularity.

Consider, for example, Miles Davis’s account of Dexter Gordon coaching him inthe art of “bebop hipness” in 1948. Gordon urged Davis to buy new clothes and totry to grow a moustache or a beard to affirm his affiliation with the bebopsubculture—onstage and off. Davis recalls that after he had saved enough money,he purchased a big-shouldered suit that felt much too large for him. Gordon’sresponse upon seeing Davis in the suit resembles an initiation rite: “Now youlooking like something, now you hip…. You can hang with us.” Bebop dressnegotiated a musician’s identification as an insider of bebop subculture.

Kelley connects bebop’s sonic language to the hipster vocabulary that MilesDavis refers to above. Young black males, he writes, “created a fast-paced,improvisational language that sharply contrasted with the passive stereotype ofthe stuttering, tongue-tied sambo.” Dizzy Gillespie also recognized therelationship between the spoken words of the hipster and the musical rhetoric ofbebop: “As we played with musical notes, bending them into new and differentmeanings that constantly changed, we played with words.” Gillespie’s “play”represents some important cultural work, firmly situating bebop within thepriorities of black vernacular culture.

Moving back to the musical, how do we interpret bebop’s artistic pedigreethrough the lens of its sonic complexity? Did its intricate approach to harmonyand rhythm and its virtuosic solos situate it outside the realm of black popularculture? Certainly this notion of complexity is crucial among those who believethat western art music is superior to other musical forms. EthnomusicologistJudith Becker has argued that many believe “that Western art music isstructurally more complex that other music; its architectural hierarchies,involved tonal relationships, and elaborated harmonic syntax not only defycomplete analysis but have no parallel in the world.” And many jazz writersbelieve this sentiment to be true because a good deal of jazz literature assignsjazz prestige by arguing that it is just as complicated (and that it iscomplicated in the same way) as western art music. As I will show later,Powell’s music certainly embodies a good deal of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmiccomplexity—so much so that it would seem to support a perception of bebop as artmusic. Yet we will also see how Powell’s early career in swing grounds the musicin the repertory, not to mention the social histories, of other 1940s blackpopular music. (This is not a new point by any means; it is simply amplified inthe specific case of Powell.)

Susan McClary has made clear how “within the context of industrial capitalism,two mutually exclusive economies of music developed: that which is measured bypopular or commercial success and that which aims for the prestige conferred byofficial arbiters of taste.” The bebop-as-fine-art notion seems to have movedjazz from McClary’s first musical economy to the latter. The much-promoted ideathat jazz is “America’s classical music” seems to suggest that philosophy. Butsuccessful music making in the United States has always depended on attractingand satisfying the needs of paying customers, and bebop was no exception.Beboppers worked under these assumptions, as Gillespie himself has pointed out:”We all wanted to make money, preferably by playing modern jazz.”
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