Things I Will Keep #20: BUD POWELL, Broadcast Performances 1953, Vol. 1

Bud Powell
Broadcast Performances 1953, Vol. 1
1973, ESP-Disk

Even at my advanced age, I still feel that someday I will be into jazz. Someday I’ll be a guy who references Miles Davis and knows what the fuck he’s talking about. Someday I’ll have strong opinions about alto saxophone players. Someday I’ll put on a jazz record and follow the notes like each one is a hundred dollar bill blowing by in the wind. Someday I’ll hear the emotion in these sounds that dart through the air faster than summer wasps. Someday it’s all gonna hit me.

Until then, I just “like” jazz. I like it when it twinkles in the background. I’m your regular dilletante, a total bird-brain and a complete fuckface. I enjoy jazz, but I’m not conversant in it. I’m like a guy who has a picture of the Eiffel Tower hanging in his living room, but hasn’t spent more than a day or two in Paris.

Someday, though…

I DID have a jazz phase when I was a young pimple farm, but it was for old, old, old jazz. Jazz older than Larry King. Jazz that people listened to while drinking bathtub liquor and debating Hoover vs. Roosevelt. Duke Ellington and Django Reinhardt were my big guys. Coleman Hawkins. Fats Waller. I loved Cab Calloway’s unhinged vocal records. I even loved the all-treble old sound. All of that was sweet stuff to me.

Every now and then, I would step outside the comfort zone and try out something from the 50s or 60s. Hard-bop. Avant-garde stuff. Eric Dolphy. John Coltrane. Thelonious Monk.

Little things in it would appeal to me, but I never enjoyed it. It was like being a kid and eating your vegetables. In fact, I was a kid.

Now, I’m old. And I kinda like vegetables. And maybe that music that I once dismissed isn’t so over my head anymore.

We’ll see…

Maybe by Things I Will Keep #50, I’ll be jazzin’ it up all over the place.

While I wait for the Big Epiphany, I DO like to throw little parties. No more than ten people, preferably less. I have decent wine, good liquor, candles, plenty of conversation pieces around. I also love to joke, carry on, find new thoughts at the bottom of my rocks glass and generally mouth-off.

And what’s the best music for these occasions?

It’s not rock music. Too aggressive. Too dependent on vocals most of the time. At my kinda party, people shouldn’t be listening to music with words. They should be speaking their own words.

It’s also not electronic music. Electronic music makes me feel like I should be on drugs that I don’t have.

Classical music would be creepy, for some reason. You can’t talk shit about your co-workers over a Brahms concerto.

What’s left? JAZZ. Jazz is the perfect party music. Jazz is both classy and rebellious. It moves to the rhythm of a human body and nervous system. When it swings, you want to swing along with it. When it’s cool, it convinces you that cool is the only thing that you should ever be.

At the very least, there’s nothing at all grating about a raw and silky piano-bass-drums trio, particularly when recorded live in 1953 with plenty of warm air around the microphones and a few smartly selected standards to dismantle and that’s why THIS little record is one of my go-to party albums. There’s no other music over which I’d prefer to make a new friend over one too many Bombay Sapphire martinis.

I don’t have all of the references and language at my disposal to describe the luscious sounds of Bud Powell’s piano work here except to say that its beauty is matched only by its agility. Powell’s whirling piano sounds exactly like the movements of my brain, back-and-forth, up-and-down, frantic, except that Powell always hits the right notes (while I fuck up most of the time). Meanwhile, drummer Roy Haynes and bassist Oscar Pettiford provide the sturdy legs that keep it all moving.

I first became aware of Bud Powell about a thousand years ago when I was Jason the Teenage Half-Assed Jazz Dork and I bought a few volumes of the Cole Porter Songbook series put out by Verve Records on CD in the early 90s. They were compilations of Cole Porter songs as performed by every top-shelf jazz legend in the Verve catalog, taken from their old albums. There was a vocal disc and an instrumental disc, and I preferred the instrumental disc by far. The best track on it was Bud Powell’s speed demon take on “Just One of Those Things”. It’s a breakneck performance that not only captures the melody, but that also captures urbanity itself. City lights. Traffic. A hectic pace. All of the life that’s happening both within and around the song as presented in its most romantic light. It’s a vivid picture made up of simple parts. The recording is also more low-tech than the other tracks on the CD, but that only made it sound more alive.

 

This album has the same soul. The recording is on the raw side (it was meant for the radios of 1953), but you can still tell that Powell plays the piano like God plays a hurricane.

You don’t see this record everyday. How does a dumbo like me end up with it? I found it way back in my vinyl-scrounging days. It’s on the legendarily eccentric ESP-Disk label, who were devoted to bohemian sounds and the Esperanto cause, complete with Esperanto-language catalog ordering information on the back cover. It’s the only vintage ESP release that I ever found at an affordable price. It’s also on pretty red vinyl and it was only $10, according to the price sticker that’s at least a decade old on my well-worn copy.

Both sides are excerpts from performances at the Royal Roost club in New York City on February 7, 1953 (side 1) and February 14, 1953 (side 2). Sixty-seven years later, here I am still listening to Bud Powell hammer out a gig for a club audience and a radio audience. I think it’s damn beautiful and It’s a Valentine’s Day tradition in this domicile.