Bud Powell, “Cleopatra’s Dream” (1958), w/ Paul Chambers, b, and Art Taylor, dr.
I did hear Bud Powell, though. It was at the same place, the Cotton Club, in the fall of 1957. The Cotton Club was tiny. There was barely room in it to fit Powell’s trio and the seventy or eighty-odd paying customers. The week before, the club had hosted the Basie band –fourteen musicians. I didn’t know where it fit them.
Powell was a phenomenal piano player but the antithesis of Tatum. Where Tatum’s style was built on alternating passages of lush chords and fleet single note lines, underpinned by a strong left-hand attack that came straight out of stride, Powell’s was the other extreme. On mid and up tempos, Powell virtually ignored his left hand, churning out instead strings of right hand single notes that could as easily have been produced by a horn — sax or trumpet, for instance. On one, maybe two beats of the bar, he’d comp (play chords) with his left hand beneath the right hand solo line. The effect was edgy, fast and twisty. It was electrifying.
It wasn’t that Powell couldn’t play with both hands. In context, he showed time and again that he could. He just chose not to. He replicated the fast, sinuous lines of the other great soloists of his age, Parker and Gillespie, who set the tone for boppers with their fleet virtuosity and their expanded use of harmony and rhythm. Before Powell, there’d been a few –very few– piano players who’d made the transition from the less fleet, less flexible rhythm of swing music to the fast, tricky time sense of bop. Nat “King” Cole was the best of them. From all accounts, Dodo Marmarosa qualified too. (I haven’t heard him enough to tell.) But Powell was a true revolutionary on his instrument. He changed the nature of piano playing by ignoring the multi-keyed, pedal-muted potential of the instrument, paring playing down to its essentials.
On slow tunes, he used a different approach. That’s when you could see that Tatum and he came from a common background. He’d slow down his attack and lay out strings of chords. On really slow ballads, the playing was so slow and chord-filled that it sounded dirge-like. On one recording, “Bud on Bach” (The Amazing Bud Powell, vol. 3 [1957]), he reconfigured a Bach solfeggietto, playing it straight, then morphing it into a slow burning blues. But for the most part, when you talked about Powell, you were talking about a musician who used the piano more like a horn than a keyboard.
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Jazz was never a majority taste even in the ’50s, but there was a substantial audience for jazz music then, especially in the colleges. Largely, it was the absence of competitors. Other kinds of music that would coopt college audiences five years down the road were appearing locally but hadn’t yet gone national.
Folk music was just starting as a national craze. More often than I wished, my last two years at college, I suffered listening to Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song (Day-O)” (1956) playing on the juke box at Freddie’s. Fortunately for me, Peter, Paul and Mary weren’t around yet -it was three years too early. And Joan Baez, a singer I’ve never warmed to, was two years away from national fame. Hallelujah!
It was the same with rock and roll. Elvis went national in 1955 and Jerry Lee Lewis in 1957 but it was still possible to avoid listening to them, so I did. Rock was picking up momentum but was -or so it seemed to me with my insular preferences- a minority taste. As was r&b. There were tunes by Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Little Richard on the juke box and I danced to them at college dances but if those artists played the college circuit –they probably did– I didn’t know it.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Bud Powell, “Bud on Bach” (1957)
The dinner table morphs to Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song (from Beetlejuice)
MUSIC & ME 