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Earl Rudolph "Bud" Powell (September 27, 1924 – July 31, 1966) was an American jazz pianist, born and raised in Harlem, New York City. Though Thelonious Monk was a close friend, his greatest piano influence was Art Tatum.
Along with Charlie Parker, Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie, Powell was a leading figure in the development of modern jazz, or bebop. His virtuosity led many to call him the Charlie Parker of the piano. Powell was also a composer, and he "greatly extended the range of jazz harmony."
Powell's father was a stride pianist. Powell took to his father's instrument at a very young age, starting on classical-piano lessons at age five. His teacher, hired by his father, was a West Indian man named Rawlins.
But by age ten, Powell also showed interest in the swing-era jazz that could be heard all over the neighborhood. He first appeared in public at a rent party, where he mimicked Fats Waller's playing style. The first jazz composition that he mastered was James P. Johnson's "Carolina Shout".
Though underage, Bud listened to the musically adventurous performances at the Uptown House, an after-hours venue near where he lived. Here, the first stirrings of modernism (bebop) were heard nightly, and where Charlie Parker first appeared as a solo act when he briefly lived in New York.
Thelonious Monk had also played at the Uptown House. When he and Powell met (around 1942) the elder pianist/composer introduced Powell to the circle of bebop musicians that was forming at the venue known as Minton's Playhouse. Monk was resident there, and he presented Powell as his protégé. Their mutual affection grew and Monk became Powell's greatest mentor. For his part, Powell eagerly experimented with Monk's latest ideas on the piano. Monk's composition "In Walked Bud" is an enduring tribute to their time together in Harlem.
The Parker session aside, Powell made no other records and seldom appeared at nightclubs in 1947. In November, he had an altercation with another customer at a Harlem bar. In the ensuing fight, Powell was hit over his eye with a bottle. When Harlem Hospital found him incoherent and rambunctious, it sent him to Bellevue, which had the record of his previous confinement there and in a psychiatric hospital. It chose to institutionalize him again, though this time at Creedmoor State Hospital, a facility much closer to Manhattan. He was kept there for eleven months.
It is generally agreed that from 1949 through 1953 Powell made his best recordings, most of which were for Alfred Lion of Blue Note Records and for Norman Granz of Mercury, Norgran and Clef. The first Blue Note session, in August 1949, features Fats Navarro, Sonny Rollins, Powell, Tommy Potter and Roy Haynes, and the compositions "Bouncing with Bud" and "Dance of the Infidels". The second Blue Note session in 1951 was a trio with Curley Russell and Max Roach, and includes "Parisian Thoroughfare" and "Un Poco Loco"; the latter was selected by literary critic Harold Bloom for inclusion on his short list of the greatest works of twentieth-century American art. Sessions for Granz (more than a dozen) were all solo or trios, with a variety of bassists and drummers, including Ray Brown, George Duvivier, Percy Heath, Russell, Lloyd Trotman, Art Blakey, Kenny Clarke, Osie Johnson, Buddy Rich, Roach, and Art Taylor.
After several further spells in hospital, Powell moved to Paris in 1959, in the company of Altevia "Buttercup" Edwards, whom he had met after an incarceration in 1954. She kept control of his finances and overdosed him with Largactil, but Powell continued to perform and record. The 1960 live recording of the Essen jazz festival performance (with Clarke, Oscar Pettiford and, on some numbers, Coleman Hawkins) is particularly notable.
Jazz pianist Bill Cunliffe, whose music was influenced by Bud Powell, said in an interview with All About Jazz:
He was really the first guy; before Bud Powell, pianists were playing boom, chuck in the left hand and a lot of melodic figures in the right hand that tended to be arpeggios. But with Bud Powell, Bud Powell was imitating Charlie Parker. So Bud was the first pianist to take Charlie Parker's language and adapt it successfully to the piano. That's why he is the most important pianist in music today because everybody plays like that now.
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