on tragedy and grace

Bud Powell didn’t know he was inventing a new genre of music. But when he “transformed his piano into a horn”, it was hard not to notice the iconic spirit emanating from his sound.

At only 15 years old, Powell strung together his rigid classical education with a street-like passion and dropped out of high school, destined to call himself the greatest piano of his era.

And in ways more than one, he was. Less than two years later, Bud was swinging with the biggest players of his time – Dizzy, Parker, Monk – over at Minton’s Playhouse, and holding his own as well. Known for blistering tempos and percussion-esque runs spanning the length of the keys, Powell had unknowingly cemented himself as the “golden boy” of bebop – and helped to shape the genre as we know it today.

The rest of his career is known as fairly lackluster, despite being remarkably successful. A sideman for some of his Minton pals, a leader on a few of his own records, and a touring pianist with Cootie Williams’ big band typically lead his musical headlines; yet it’s often not the music he’s known for.

In 1945, Powell was beaten by the police almost to the point of death. Two years later, a bar fight with a stranger launched a chain of events resulting in eleven months at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. And four years after that, he and Monk were arrested for drug possession, sending him back to Creedmoor for another sixteen months.

It was a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, one reminiscent of an old Sophocles tale. After being released from Creedmoor, Powell was placed into the custody of Oscar Goldstein, his legal guardian and subsequently Birdland’s latest manager, in which he was pressured to marry a woman for the purposes of controlling his business.

He became silent on the bench. “He was so messed up when he came out,” one colleague recalled, “I think they experimented on Bud.” A Kafkaesque situation in which Powell wasn’t in control of – mental decline, corrupt businessmen, “shades of the old plantation” linking him into a social and racial contract which held no place in the bebop community.

His decline was not a personal tragedy – it was a reflection of the unavoidable systemic issues that plagued him throughout his storied career. Even as those around him struggled to reconcile the brilliant pianist they once knew with the withdrawn figure before them, Powell turned to the one friend he knew best – the keys.

And in his last performance, a remarkable comeback at Birdland, the “complete loss” that Bud Powell was called out to be took on a different form of expression – one that required a deeper, more empathetic understanding.

“People think Bud is crazy or lost or silent,” they would conclude, “but all he really is is in a state of grace.”