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Something Else

The Tests and Triumphs of a Modernist

He was what you call a real genius. . . . He was something else in his young age.

Cootie Williams, Institute of Jazz Studies Oral History interview

When the contemporary pianist Marcus Roberts presented the music of Bud Powell and Earl Hines in the opulent splendor of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater in the spring of 2011, the event boasted all the trappings of fine-art celebration. The repertory-styled ensemble performed Powell’s compositions in a way that intended to showcase the music’s enduring artistic appeal, beyond its moment of inception, a characterization that always accompanies “art” status. There, in the bosom of one of New York City’s premiere sanctuaries for high culture, the inventive Roberts explored Powell’s unmistakable melodies and clever harmonic turns in a way that pleased the knowing audience and would have certainly thrilled the composer himself. Who could have known that the work of a child born in black uptown New York would be contemplated and revisited in the most prestigious circles some eighty-plus years after his birth?

Any version of Powell’s short life, the contours of which are traced in this chapter, must attempt to make sense of it in relationship to a number of narratives, some dominant and others downplayed in existing accounts. I imbed and interpret his biography’s major elements in several contexts: his family and friends; the sonic worlds that he engaged; the rough-and-tumble, mostly exploitative, emerging business of modern jazz in which he made his reputation; the close network of musicians and members of other art movements who rocked 1940s and ’50s culture in America and beyond; and the difficulties that ravaged the lives of many young African American men of Powell’s ilk: drug and alcohol abuse (or, in his case, self-medication), psychiatric (mis)treatment, and the criminal (in)justice system.

The story begins modestly. Earl “Bud” Powell was born on September 27, 1924, to Pearl and William Powell, Sr., in Harlem Hospital, in the heart of a neighborhood that was rapidly becoming an enclave of diverse black ethnic groups. In the realm of race politics, times were indeed changing, and Harlem figured prominently in those changes. Harlem Hospital, established in 1887 to provide medical care to poor residents of Manhattan’s growing population north of Central Park, became the first hospital in the city to employ a black physician on its staff in 1920.¹ Beyond this and many other firsts, the neighborhood ultimately would become well known throughout the world as an incubator of some of the most dynamic cultural activities, institutions, and artists of its era, one that shaped African American cultural production for decades to come.

The 1936 Harlem Hospital mural project certainly was one symbol of the neighborhood’s progressive attitude. Featuring images of black physicians and backed by the Works Progress Administration, it became controversial among white doctors employed at the hospital for being too “Negro.” The mural shows that Harlem’s air was thickening with social change and artistic energy during the early decades of the century. One must appreciate, however, that notions of black empowerment were juxtaposed with another sensibility in Harlem. In this reality, one in which age-old ideas about race and sexuality were rehearsed and reified, well-heeled whites safaried the nightlife “in search of supposedly more authentic black entertainment, crossracial sexual encounters, and the anonymity necessary to allow themselves to indulge in the ‘primitive’ behaviors and desires they associated with blacks.”² When Powell’s parents moved to Harlem while Pearl was pregnant with Bud, they could not have chosen a more exciting place.³ How could the young Powell not soak up all the dynamic and contradictory elements of this atmosphere? Certainly he did, for a few short years later, he would be part of the network of important musicians who extended (and, in some cases, upended) all these social energies into new conceptions of art for a new time and the next generation.

A family tradition of music making rooted Powell’s muse. His paternal grandfather, Zachary Gregory, it has been reported, learned flamenco guitar in Cuba during the Spanish-American War and fought “side by side” with Theodore Roosevelt.⁴ When he began classical piano The Tests and Triumphs of a Modernist study at the age of six, Powell was taught by a Mr. William Rawlins.⁵ Rawlins, reportedly of West Indian heritage, apparently introduced Powell to classical piano literature. Bebop saxophonist Jackie McLean, a family friend of the Powells’, recalls Rawlins as a diligent pedagogue, “a hidden genius” whose quick raps with a ruler to Powell’s hands encouraged strict observance of the “proper fingerings.”⁶

As a classical musician of African descent, Rawlins was part of a growing rank and file of black musicians who aspired to the highest level of performance in western art music. This group could trace their existence to the earliest years of the nineteenth century through musicians such as the Philadelphian Francis Johnson (1792– 1844), and when the National Association of Negro Musicians formed in 1919, black classical musicians organized themselves and became evangelists for their work among African Americans. Despite the long history of discriminatory practices in the classical world, many black musicians dedicated themselves to the repertoire and its associated decorum, and Powell himself intended to become a concert musician in this ritualized world.⁷

Powell’s father appears to have been the first guiding force in his musical life. Powell once stated, in a rare interview with Sharon Pease, a writer for Down Beat, that he had received “much advice, inspiration, and encouragement” from his father, whom he identified as a professional stride pianist.⁸ McLean says that the senior Powell was still playing in the early 1960s, and also working as a building superintendent in Harlem.⁹ According to William Sr., his son was an exceptional and gifted pianist, and by age seven, Bud was being chauffeured from place to place to perform for older musicians.¹⁰ William Sr.’s, circle of friends included musicians who had significant influence on the younger Powell’s musical development. In his father’s report, by age ten Powell was reproducing with ease what he heard, including some of the music of Art Tatum and Fats Waller, a friend and frequent visitor to the Powell home. William Sr., took great pride in his son’s musicianship and supposedly preserved some of his performances for posterity. Francis Paudras claims to have heard in 1964 William Sr.’s homemade recordings, made between 1934 and 1939, which featured Bud as a young virtuoso playing Bach, Chopin, and Debussy, as well as jazz interpretations of “Tea for Two,” “How High the Moon,” and “Honeysuckle Rose.”¹¹

Powell’s musical activities eventually expanded into his church, school, and social life. In the mid- to late 1930s, Powell served as an acolyte at Harlem’s St. Charles Roman Catholic Church, at 211 West 143rd Street.¹² Reverend Monsignor Owen J. Scanlon remembers Powell singing in the choir and playing the organ for services. He also recalls that while Powell was still in school, the church hired a band that Powell played in for what Scanlon describes as “teen-age dances.”¹³ Bob Doerschuk notes that during this period Powell “tried his hand at playing written pieces on the organ, and with his boyhood friend, Elmo Hope . . . he would pass the hours listening to classical records.”¹⁴ In fact, Hope had begun to win medals for his solo recitals by 1938.¹⁵ Both Hope and Powell would eventually devote themselves to full-time careers in jazz and popular music, perhaps because very little opportunity existed for blacks to work in classical music.

In his early teens, Powell became more interested in jazz, and according to pianist Walter Davis, a friend of Powell’s, his parents and teacher were let down: “They had been working on him like a Frankenstein monster, perfecting, perfecting, perfecting. They wanted him to be the best classical pianist in the country. That’s why they made him learn all of that music. But Bud broke their hearts going another way.”¹⁶ Powell became enchanted with the work of pianist Billy Kyle (1914– 66).¹⁷ Kyle is best known for playing in the John Kirby Sextet, billed as “The Biggest Little Band in the Land.” He performed with the group from February 1938 until he was drafted into the armed services in late 1942. It was probably during these years that Kyle first caught Powell’s attention. Born in Philadelphia, he studied classical piano and organ in childhood and then branched out into various local bands. Among his earliest influences were Teddy Wilson, Earl Hines, and the tradition of classical piano he learned as a child.¹⁸ Powell’s attraction to Kyle’s abilities can be understood in the context of his own eclectic musical background: Kyle possessed a sure technical command of the piano, a light touch, and an ample musical imagination. The repertoire of his sextet—mainly arrangements by Kyle himself and the group’s trumpeter, Charlie Shavers—included pieces by such composers as Grieg (“Anitra’s Dance”), Chopin (“Minute Waltz,” “Fantaisie-Impromptu”), and Beethoven (“Beethoven Riffs On,” based on the second movement of Symphony No. 7), all of whom would have been familiar to Powell from his classical training.

William “Skeets” Powell, Jr., Bud’s older brother and a trumpeter and violinist, provided him with his first real taste of playing music professionally. William, Jr., led his own band around 1938 and 1939, and Bud joined the group as they began working in small clubs around Coney Island and greater New York. Although he had matriculated to the DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, the all-boys’ institution that produced writer Countee Cullen, James Baldwin, and artist Charles Alston (the director of the Harlem Hospital mural project), school could not compete with the lure and excitement of show business. Some days Bud probably never made it to the Bronx, instead cutting classes to see shows at the Apollo Theater, which began its rolling itinerary at ten in the morning.¹⁹ When Powell dropped out at age fifteen, music became the dominant force in his life, and he joined the ranks of professional musicians. In these early years, Powell is known to have taken solo piano jobs at the Place (later known as the Limelight Coffee Shop) in Greenwich Village, and he also worked at Canada Lee’s Chicken Coop in Harlem. But he remained interested in classical music as well, continuing his piano lessons and possibly still clinging to his childhood dream of becoming a recitalist—at least part-time.

Throughout the early to mid-1940s, Powell gradually secured new connections in the New York music world. Soon his path crossed with that of another pianist who would deeply influence both his musical outlook and his professional life: Thelonious Monk. They met at an uptown bar sometime in late 1942, when Powell was not yet eighteen. Together with his close friend Elmo Hope, Powell grew to idolize Monk, an older musician who taught him some of bebop’s idiosyncratic approaches to the harmonic parameters of American popular song that he had been developing. And some of these lessons probably involved learning harmony through the study of Monk’s growing list of original compositions. Although Powell had been studying classical piano since he was six, that kind of training doesn’t always translate directly into a deep knowledge of how harmony works. Such insight, for many, is earned through the kind of specific attention which Monk paid to harmony, and he obviously shared his insight freely with the admiring younger musician.²⁰

Powell’s and Monk’s backgrounds were probably the basis for their fast friendship. Monk had also studied classical piano in childhood, beginning at age eleven. As his biographer Robin D. G. Kelley points out, despite the lore to the contrary, Monk “possessed an impressive knowledge of, and appreciation for, western classical music, not to mention an encyclopedic knowledge of hymns and gospel music, American popular songs, and a variety of obscure art songs that defy easy categorization.”²¹ Both came from musical families. Monk’s mother could play piano; his father played piano, the “Jew’s harp,” and harmonica. The Monk family also formed a singing gospel quartet after they moved to New York City from North Carolina.²² Both Powell and Monk shared a fascination with and cut their teeth in the dynamic musical universe that was black New York City. And both left high school to become working musicians. Kelley’s observation about Monk probably applies to Powell as well: “For a young African-American man in Depressionera New York, any income was welcome.”²³ A divergence can be found, however, in Monk’s two-year stint with a traveling tent evangelist, through which he saw the country as a teenager, matured as a responsible and focused musician, and may have begun to discover how to work up the Holy Ghost for eager congregants through intensive and exhaustive harmonic explorations of the repetitive forms upon which sanctified church aesthetics thrive. This experience, together with the exposure he obtained in the Baptist hymn tradition through his mother’s affiliation with the church, was quite different than Powell’s, whose background in Catholicism would have exposed him to another sound world altogether.

Powell and Monk shared personal struggles, too, as each bore the burden of staggering mental and physical health issues. Kelley succinctly captures the difficulties of maintaining a creative life and livelihood while trying to stabilize one’s equilibrium:

Various mental and physical ailments began to take an even greater toll [on Monk], exacerbated by poor medical treatment, an unhealthy lifestyle, the daily stresses of a working jazz musician, and an unending financial and creative battle with the music industry. Some writers romanticize manic depression and/or schizophrenia as characteristics of creative genius, but the story of Monk’s physical and mental ailment is essentially a tragedy, a story of his slow decline and the pain it caused to those closest to him. Its manifestations were episodic, so he continued to function and make incredible music up until the day of his retirement in 1976. During these nearly twenty years, his ability to lead a band and to dig out fresh interpretations of compositions he had been playing for decades, in spite of his illness and protracted struggle with the industry, is astonishing.²⁴

Though Kelley says this of Monk, it surely describes Powell as well, although the latter’s ailments were a more constant specter and played a larger and disruptive role in his life and in the tales surrounding him.

Monk introduced Powell to the jam sessions at Minton’s.²⁵ But Powell was not immediately accepted among the musicians who would soon compose bebop’s inner circle. Ira Gitler writes that the shy, young, and apparently a little socially awkward pianist almost managed to get himself put out of Minton’s on his first visit to the club: “Powell sat on a chair and put his feet up on the fresh white tablecloth. When a waiter started to throw him out, Monk intervened on behalf of his protégé: ‘Don’t do that. That kid’s got talent.’ “²⁶ As Monk was a respected figure on the scene in Minton’s, he took it upon himself to force others to give the young pianist opportunities to play, even going as far as to threaten to quit if his protégé was not allowed to sit in.²⁷

Monk and Powell remained close throughout the decade. Jackie McLean recalls that in the late 1940s, Powell “spoke of Monk quite a bit. . . . He would always play Monk for me.”²⁸ Powell was one of the few musicians who played Monk’s music publicly at a time when, according to Gitler, it was generally misunderstood. Powell would later introduce Monk’s composition “Off Minor” on his first recording date as a leader in 1947. Bebop innovator and drummer Kenny “Klook” Clarke believed that “Monk wrote for Bud. All his music was written for Bud Powell. All this piano music, he deliberately wrote for Bud because he figured Bud was the only one who could play it. He wrote for Bud just like a composer writes for a singer. And when you hear Bud play Monk’s music, then you really hear something.”²⁹

Between 1940 and 1942, Powell made professional connections with musicians other than Monk. He met and played with many who over the next ten years would introduce a new idiom to the jazz world, and he broadened his contacts beyond local musicians. When trumpeter and vocalist Valaida Snow (1900–56) opened at the Apollo Theater in April 1943 with the Sunset Royals, Powell had just joined the group. The American Federation of Musicians (Local 802) Directory shows that Powell joined the union sometime in 1943. The engagement with Snow’s band appears to have been his first important job, so he may have joined the union to secure the position in her band.³⁰ He remained active in the small club scene as well, frequenting “carving sessions” at the Hollywood Club with other pianists, including Clyde Hart, Dorothy Donegan, and Art Tatum.³¹

“A BAD BAND THAT SOUNDED SO GOOD”

Many early bebop musicians began their careers in swing/dance bands. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, and Dexter Gordon, among others, all paid their dues in big bands of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Likewise, Powell began his ascent to prominence in the jazz world under the watchful eye of trumpeter Charles Melvin “Cootie” Williams (1911– 85), one of jazz’s best-known soloists. Powell joined Cootie sometime in 1943, and this association circulated his name and growing reputation in jazz circles. During his tenure with Williams, Powell toured the country and made studio and live broadcast recordings in a variety of settings. (Porter, Ullman, and Hazell note, for example, that pianist Tommy Flanagan first heard Powell with the Williams band during a riveting live performance in Detroit.)³² Furthermore, the group’s repertoire and musical approach placed Powell in a unique environment where swing, rhythm and blues, and an emerging bebop style intersected.

When Powell joined him, Williams was enjoying popularity with the American public as well as respect among his peers. His star had first risen through an eleven-year association with Duke Ellington. After brief stints with the Chick Webb and Fletcher Henderson bands, Williams joined Ellington in 1929, replacing Bubba Miley during Ellington’s long engagement at Harlem’s Cotton Club from 1927 to 1930. Williams’s initial role was to master the growl and plunger techniques that Miley had made a staple feature of the “Ellington sound.” Williams not only mastered these techniques, but extended them into a highly personal style.³³ The fruit of Ellington and Williams’s long professional association crystallized in Concerto for Cootie (1940), a piece that one writer considers “an ongoing continuity of gradual masterly development” in Ellington’s work as a whole.³⁴

In addition to the high visibility and quality of his work with Ellington, Williams’s association with Benny Goodman, whom history has dubbed “The King of Swing,” increased his popularity and raised his stock. In the late 1930s, Williams recorded small group sessions under his own name and also with Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Billie Holiday, and others. Williams’s appearance on the bill of Goodman’s famous Carnegie Hall concert (January 1938) confirmed his stature in the jazz world.³⁵ In fact, according to Goodman, the success of the concert, long considered a watershed event in the history of jazz, was due in large part to Williams’s participation. In November 1940, Williams left the Ellington Orchestra to join Goodman, who hired him to play primarily in his sextet. After a year with Goodman, Williams’s reputation had grown to such a degree that at Ellington’s urging, he formed his own permanent band.

Williams’s associations with Ellington and Goodman influenced his leadership style and his band’s repertory. And his work ethic served him especially well when dealing with both the enormous talent and the impulsive behavior that the young Powell displayed while a member of his group. Like Ellington and Goodman, Williams had a knack for discovering new talent. From time to time during the 1940s, his band featured young musicians who won great respect in jazz. Powell, Charlie Parker, pianist Ken Kersey, and saxophonists Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis were all employed by Williams at various times. During his Ellington years, Williams described himself as a surrogate disciplinarian, settling personal and musical disputes among band members such as Sonny Greer, Johnny Hodges, and Barney Bigard: “Duke would never say nothing to them. I’d be the one that had taken over that spot.” But Williams tolerated unruly behavior among some of his own band members, including young, reckless ones such as Powell: “Now, like Bud Powell, and those types of people would come in half-high and messed up. I’d overlook it. Because when they would be straight, I would get some great sound.”³⁶ Goodman, in contrast, ran a tight ship—musically and otherwise.

Williams created his own style of leadership, balancing traits from both of his former employers. Charles Holmes, once a member of Williams’s band, fondly recalls his days with Cootie: “I’ve never in all my life played with such a bad band that sounded so good. There were more people in there who couldn’t read a note as big as a house, and they had no more conception of music than the man in the moon, but they could play, and they could swing, and it sounded good.”³⁷ Likewise, “Lockjaw” Davis describes Williams as “good to his sidemen” and says that his group was “musically . . . ahead of the others.”³⁸

At least two stories exist about how Powell first came to Williams’s attention. One comes from the bandleader himself. According to Williams, he learned of Powell through one of his former sidemen, trumpeter George Treadwell. Treadwell may have known Powell from Monroe’s Uptown House, where the former served as a house band member in the early 1940s. Powell came to one of the band’s rehearsals, played for Williams, was hired immediately, and, in the bandleader’s words: “He was what you call a real genius. . . . He was something else in his young age.”³⁹

“Lockjaw” Davis tells another story about Powell’s joining Cootie. Davis was working at a club in Greenwich Village in October 1943 with a combo that included Powell. Cootie, according to Davis’s recollection, hired five members of the group on the spot. Shortly thereafter they played the Savoy Ballroom: “Now I’m in New York,” Davis recalls, “working at the Savoy—earning 42 dollars a week! That was the beginning.”⁴⁰ Davis considered his tenure with Williams—an established soloist with an international reputation—the beginning of his professional musical life.