Bud Powell playing Birdland in 1949. Photo by Herman Leonard.
To our KSDS members, the jazz curious, the jazz adjacent, the community-minded, and the philanthropically inclined:
Matt Silver here, host of “Breaking Jazz,” writing to let you know that our Fall Membership Drive begins this Friday, Sept. 20 and runs through Sunday, Sept. 29.
This season’s drive is dedicated to celebrating the principal architects of bebop—Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie, or “Bud, Bird, and Diz” for short.
It’s not uncommon to celebrate the holy trinity of bebop, but, in this case, we do so with extraordinary attention centered on Powell. After all, this is an extraordinary year, the 100th anniversary of his birth, his centennial year.
Bud Powell in May 1953. Photo by Duncan Shiedt.
The life of Earl Rudolph “Bud” Powell was brief, mystifying, and tragic… but remarkably consequential. His career unfolded unevenly, with periods of dysfunction punctuated by fits of brilliance that enabled Powell the musician to discover exotic musical redoubts either previously unknown or long forgotten.
There were stints in psychiatric facilities and treatments administered to him that today would be condemned as inhumane. There were arrests and brutal beatings at the hands of police officers. There was addiction and a bent toward self-destruction.
But in those moments when Powell gave fellow musicians, biographers, and documentarians a window into his innermost self, the picture of Powell that emerges is one of a man almost exclusively concerned with the realities occurring inside his consciousness’s vast, labyrinthine interiority and completely agnostic to the practical considerations of the external, material reality to which even the most prolific world-building artists must occasionally pay grudging deference.
By most credible accounts, his soul was gentle, his natural disposition childlike, at times antagonistic, and his mind, in its native state, distant, off somewhere else, working out concepts in service to his own creative compulsions, no real line of demarcation between work and play. The play was the work, and the work was the play.
Don’t just take my word for it. If you can, try and find a copy of the 1963 French documentary Stopforbud (originally aired on French TV, our GM Ken Poston has a copy of it. If you see him and ask him nicely, I’ll bet he’ll arrange a screening of it, and other rare archival Bud Powell film and TV footage, for KSDS members. I’ve watched it. It’s delightfully bizarre and endlessly fascinating).
Directed by Jørgen Leth and narrated by Dexter Gordon, much of the film simply depicts Powell walking the streets, alleyways, and even, at one point, the landfills of Paris, immersed in his own thoughts with a casual obliviousness toward everything else — not distressed, just exclusively beholden to his own mind.
Bud in Paris, where he was revered.
“Together with the narration, the visual setup — the white background, the avoidance of camera …makes Powell seem to be some kind of specimen, albeit an exceptional one,” writes the pianist and music historian Guthrie Ramsey in 2013’s The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop (Univ. of Calif. Press).
One can understand Ramsey’s concern that Stopforbud’s filmmakers have fetishized Powell somewhat, perhaps overplaying an absent-minded artist stereotype that renders Powell more as two-dimensional archetype and less as three-dimensional human being.
It’s not an unfair criticism. In yesterday’s parlance, the commentary class would’ve labeled him a "savant"; in today’s, “on the spectrum.” Even if true, these immutable characteristics wouldn’t necessarily be the most important thing about him, or sufficiently explain the true sources of his genius and/or madness and the extent to which the two existed independently or were co-dependent, two sides of the same coin.
These labels, of course, don’t serve a good faith pursuit of truth but rather our peace of mind, to satisfy our own sense-making impulses as machines programmed to analogize and distinguish, to habitually classify.
We shouldn’t beat ourselves up for having this impulse; it’s evolutionary. Like a lot of what comes pre-installed, this instinct mostly serves our need to make sense of the world, not a higher capital-T truth-seeking purpose.
And besides, someone like Powell is endlessly fascinating in no small part because the potential for speculation and pontification is endless. He was a universe unto himself, and as with the cosmos, our inherent limitations as a species allowed us only to perceive the tiniest sliver of the depths of both his brilliance and darkness. Still, what ultimately made Powell an artist was his desire and ability to communicate at least part of his inner creative world with an audience. He was never able to do it consistently, but that he was able to do it at all, and to such an extent that we consider him to be among three most important architects of bebop, modern jazz’s foundational idiom, is pretty miraculous under the circumstances.
Bud’s weight fluctuated, and the quality of his performances, especially toward the end of his life, was inconsistent. But just when people thought he was cooked, he’d flash a seductive bit of that old magic. Photo by Duncan Schiedt.
This enigmatic, unreliable quality to Powell’s genius is what always fascinated Powell biographer and prolific jazz critic and commentator Gary Giddens. Giddens, in Bud Powell: Strictly Confidential, Visions of Jazz, notes that he’s never been fascinated with Powell’s psychopathology for its own sake.
Rather, he writes, “My fascination [with Powell’s psychological condition] is inseparable from my interest in his art, and the mystery of how it wilted and blossomed, blossomed and wilted, for twenty years, never entirely disappearing, yet always averting the sustained brilliance that would have represented a complete fulfillment of its original promise.
“With Powell, we are always listening beneath the surface for premonitions, disclosures, revelations, the deepest and most profane secrets. His disposition and technique obviously derive from different parts of his brain. Sometimes the technique fails him, but the ideas and emotions are vividly specific; at other times, the fingers do his bidding precisely, but the bidding is mechanical and remote.”
Bud Powell: The most enigmatic and most influential forefather of all modern jazz pianists.
Most people who get paid to make such assertions agree that Bud Powell is the progenitor of all modern jazz pianists. Sure, Monk predates him, but Monk…Monk is Monk, another universe unto himself but different, reflective of everything that’s come before or since but in the way of a funhouse mirror. Monk notwithstanding, if you’re playing or listening to anything that would be considered post stride or ragtime jazz, you’re almost certainly dealing with something bearing some trace of Powell’s musical DNA. Along with Bird and Diz, Bud Powell is the (all-too-often overlooked) Bopfather.
Ted Gioia, the great jazz historian and commentator presently enjoying a star-turn as one of the big Substack popular intellectuals of the moment, has an interesting theory about why Powell is so frequently and easily overlooked that has little to do with his inconsistency and myriad health problems.
“Powell’s reconfiguration of the jazz piano vocabulary would have a deep and lasting impact on later players of the instrument,” Gioia writes in 1997’s The History of Jazz (Oxford Univ. Press). “As such, he is one of those select players (others are Armstrong, Parker, Young, Gillespie, Christian, Blanton, Evans) whose influence is so pervasive that it is easy to overlook. When one person steals your stuff, it is robbery; when everybody does it over and over again (emphasis mine), your belongings sooner or later become common property.”
This week, and throughout our Fall Membership Drive, running from Friday, Sept. 20 to Sunday, Sept. 27 , that whole “overlooked” part changes — at least here at KSDS, on 88.3 FM across our heavenly little enclave of Southern California, and all around the world via the 24/7 jazz stream at jazz88.org or the KSDS mobile app.
Chick Corea, joined by Roy Haynes, Kenny Garrett, Christian McBride, Joshua Redman, and Wallace Roney set the standard for all other contemporary interpretations of Powell with 1997’s “Remembering Bud Powell.”
On the air, you’ll hear the staples of Bud’s catalogue — “Parisian Thoroughfare,” “Dance of the Infidels,” “Tempus Fugit,” “Bouncing with Bud,” “Un Poco Loco,” and so many more. But we’ll also bring you the deep cuts, the Real Book standards most memorably interpreted and immortalized by Bud, and selections from the incomprehensibly vast universe of Powell tunes interpreted by subsequent generations, from Powell’s oldest acolytes like Toshiko and Barry Harris and Walter Davis, Jr. to successive generations dominated, first, by names like Chick Corea, Benny Green, and Vijay Iyer, then by names like Spike Wilner and Brad Mehldau and Ethan Iverson, and now by names like Gerald Clayton, Sullivan Fortner, and Emmet Cohen. This is far from an exhaustive list; I’m leaving out a lot of names. You’re just going to have to tune in to understand the vastness of the Bud Powell universe and the steady rate of its expansion.
Ethan Iverson’s “Bud Powell in the 21st Century,” released in 2021, offers thrilling contemporary takes on Powell’s tunes in a big band setting.
Our programming during the week, however, will all be an amuse-bouche to prime you for Friday, Sept. 27’s pièce de résistance. The artists we’ve booked to co-headline the Bud Powell Centennial Concert triple bill are, in addition to being modern masters on the order of those mentioned above, among the foremost interpreters of the Bud Powell songbook living today. Starring the Gilbert Castellanos Quintet featuring Joshua White, solo piano specialist Alan Broadbent, and The Bill Mays Trio, expect an evening of unforgettable, definitive musical testimony that will leave no doubt about Powell’s enduring artistic influence.
If you’re looking to be of similar influence — at least in the eyes of humble, personable, and always entertaining KSDS staff — join us and volunteer throughout the 10 days of our membership drive (Friday, Sept. 20 to Sunday, Sept. 29). As far as work goes, it’s got a very positive laugh to stress ratio (lots of laugh, little stress), plus you do this community non-profit that you cherish, KSDS Jazz 88.3, a truly meaningful service. Plus, you know…..we’ll feed you. And feed you well, too. Though you might feel the urge to diet or rededicate yourself to your workout regimen of choice at the drive’s conclusion.
You can’t truly understand how relevant Bud Powell still is without hearing his work interpreted by modern masters of this caliber.
That’s all for now. Tune in throughout the next 12 days. Listen and discover — or rediscover — for yourself why a station like KSDS is an even more vital culture resource than ever. Pledge your dollars where you’re able; lend your time when you seek fellowship and community with fellow arts and music devotees — or when you’re hungry for pizza and want to BS with a colorful cast of radio characters in exchange for answering a few phone calls.
We live in contentious times, where there’s good money in harvesting and exploiting our most primitive impulses. Music may not be THE antidote, but it’s AN antidote. The music we play on KSDS isn’t idle entertainment; when it’s working to its highest capability, the music we champion has a direct line to our most aspirational selves. There’s no way you can tell me you’re not more willing to let someone in on the freeway when you’re listening to jazz; I’ve been there, and when someone kindly lets me in, I just assume they're listening to us.
Public media outlets like ours are an endangered species. The inertia of an ever-corporatizing world does us no favors. Sustaining ourselves means fortifying against a tide we can’t all articulate but nevertheless feel acutely. We can only do this thing together.
Whether it’s on the phone, over the air, or in-person at our Bud Powell Centennial concert, I look forward to connecting with you. In the meantime, enjoy discovering (or rediscovering) Bud Powell.
With gratitude,
Matt Silver
