Bud Powell

Bud Powell (1924-1966) was born in Harlem and raised in a musical family, playing in New York clubs by his mid teens. At Minton's Playhouse and Uptown House he fell in with the young modernists, and Thelonious Monk took him under his wing, guarding a talent that was already startling. Powell toured with Cootie Williams's band in the early 1940s, but it was as a soloist that he changed the instrument. He translated the language of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie into pianistic terms, thinning the left hand to sharp, offbeat chords so the right could run free.

His finest work was cut in a short, intense span around 1949 to 1951, much of it collected on Blue Note as The Amazing Bud Powell. Originals like Un Poco Loco, Bouncing with Bud, Dance of the Infidels and the eerie, through-composed Glass Enclosure show a composer as well as a virtuoso. That brilliance was shadowed by illness. A police beating in 1945 and years of hospital confinement broke the arc of his career, and a long stay in Paris from 1959 brought some calm before his death in New York in 1966.

Almost every bebop and post-bop pianist who followed, from Barry Harris to Bill Evans, worked in the space Powell opened. His lines move fast and think faster, which is exactly why they reward patient study: slow a recording down, isolate the two hands, and open a transcription in practice mode to hear how the phrasing and the chords fit together.