The King of the Hill

By JAY COCKS

There is soul and fuddle here. Heat and hesitation. The grace of real genius and at times a touch of madness. Among the five CDs that constitute The Complete Bud Powell On Verve and the four that make up The Complete Blue Note and Roost Recordings (Capitol), you get a deep experience of his gift and his torment. It is, much of it, great jazz. All of it is vital. These separate CD sets are neither monument nor memorial, even though this year marks the 70th anniversary of Powell's birth. Rather, the recordings provide a map of trails blazed. There are still some byways only Bud Powell dared wander down, and many that only he could find again, but a lot of piano players have followed his path. His work still lights the way. And more, it leads.

It's often said, as a way of orienting anyone coming to him fresh, that Powell did for the piano what Charlie Parker did for the saxophone. Together, and with no small assist from Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, they took a hand in fearlessly turning jazz inside itself, then inside out, as they created bebop. But Powell found distinctive melodic nuances on his keyboard. He wasn't as witty and romantic as Nat Cole or as exuberant a geometrician as Art Tatum, both non-beboppers. But he could find a secret, personal vibrancy on a standard like Jerome Kern's Yesterdays, or combine a dark heart with a soaring spirit in such tunes of his own as Crossin' the Channel and Cleopatra's Dream. And he could make Tea for Two, for God's sake, sound like an entire banquet, with the Mad Hatter himself doing the pouring.

Born in Harlem in 1924, Earl Powell was, on the evidence, something of a prodigy. His father was a building superintendent but also had some skill as a stride pianist, and he started giving his son lessons at the age of three. By the time Bud was seven, his father claimed, neighborhood musicians would come by and take the boy out so everyone could admire his chops. At 10 he could play Fats Waller and Art Tatum. While he was still in his teens, Powell fell in with Thelonious Monk, who after a time would even let Bud take over the piano for an evening's final set. Powell made his first recordings with trumpeter Cootie Williams' orchestra in 1943. He was 19.

His musicianship would grow, but against heavy odds, as Powell was beset by mental problems. In 1945 he was whaled on by a couple of Philadelphia cops when he went to a club to hear Monk. "They'd beaten him so badly around the head," Cootie Williams remembered, "((Bud's mother)) had to go get him ... His sickness started right there." Powell began showing signs of insanity, and that was combined with drinking and drug problems. He was periodically confined to psychiatric hospitals, where he underwent electroshock therapy and was even sprayed with water laced with ammonia. For a few years in the late 1940s, the wizard saxophone player Jackie McLean, eight years younger than Powell, spent a lot of time as a kind of musical apprentice and all-purpose guardian for him. He'd take Powell to performing dates, get him together with musicians like Parker who still revered him, and generally make sure he got through the day, and through the music.

Often enough Powell did need help with that; still, the music could dazzle. The way McLean recalls it in the notes that accompany the elegantly packaged Verve set, Charlie Parker "got used to being king of the hill. But when he stepped on the bandstand with Bud, he wasn't king of the hill anymore, because Bud was going to give him back as much as he got." And that, of course, was near as good as it ever gets.

The Capitol set opens with Powell's first date as a leader, recorded on Roost in 1947, kicking off with a sprung version of I'll Remember April that betrays none of Powell's troubles. It bursts with giddy invention that could have tipped the song into anarchy if Powell hadn't been able to restrain his own abandon. He was so good and so graceful, he could realize his inspirations with tremendously controlled dexterity. The earliest of the Verve recordings are from 1949, and they end with a 1955 session in which Powell, his bass player and drummer close out with a heavyweight combination: Gillespie's Bebop and Monk's 52nd Street Theme. The Capitol compilation ranges a little further, giving a last glimpse of Powell in Paris, where he lived much of his later life, cosseted and honored. His version of Like Someone in Love has a reckless majesty that seems to draw a circle back to the exuberance of his youth, then close it, without a seam showing. He would die three years later, in 1966.

Powell's sad life and wondrous music were in large part the inspiration for filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier's fond 1986 jazz eulogy, 'Round Midnight, but what is so imposing about the music on these CDs -- immediately, insistently impressive -- is not the sorrow but the vigor. Powell's may have been a troubled spirit, compromised and violated, but it was never stilled.