BLP 5041

The Amazing Bud Powell - Volume 2

Released - 1954

Recording and Session Information

WOR Studios, NYC, August 14, 1953
Bud Powell, piano; George Duvivier, bass; Art Taylor, drums.

BN510-6 tk.8 Autumn In New York
BN509-1 tk.9 Reets And I
BN511-2 tk.17 Sure Thing
BN512-2 tk.20 Collard Greens And Black-Eyed Peas
BN513-0 tk.21 Polka Dots And Moonbeams
BN514-1 tk.23 I Want To Be Happy
BN515-0 tk.25 Audrey
BN516-0 tk.27 The Glass Enclosure

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Reets And I	Bennie Harris	August 14 1953
Autumn In New York	Vernon Duke	August 14 1953
I Want To Be Happy	Vincent Youmans	August 14 1953
Sure Thing	Kern-Gershwin	August 14 1953
Side Two
Glass Enclosure	Bud Powell	August 14 1953
Collard Greens And Black-Eye Peas	Oscar Pettiford	August 14 1953
Polka Dots and Moonbeams	Burke-Van Heusen	August 14 1953
Audrey	Bud Powell	August 14 1953

Liner Notes

Between these covers lies the harvest of a journey through the mind of Bud Powell. It is a journey in which beauty and darkness, pleasure and sorrow are to be gleaned along the way; for this mind is a strange land, endowed with a glow of genius yet beset by illness and deprivation.

Bud Powell's career has been an erratic one, gregarious months along 52nd Street alternating with lonely months in the hospital. For all the inconsistency of his march to fame, he has managed to earn the unanimous admiration of his contemporaries and to forge an ineradicable place for himself in the international hall of jazz fame.

A year ago, on his return from a year's absence, he was approached by Alfred Lion of Blue Note Records to make his first return to the recording studios since his illness. Bud at that time was enjoying two weeks' vacation between engagements at Birdland.

The session that resulted was no hasty, impromptu venture. It was the product of many meetings between Lion, Powell and Duvivier and Taylor. Each tune was selected to show a certain aspect of Bud's style, and the entire set offers a comprehensive picture of this extraordinary talent.

The choice of a rhythm section for Bud could not have been happier. George Duvivier's superlative sound and beat have graced the big bands of Lunceford and Millinder, the vocal accompaniments of Lena Horne and Nellie Lutcher, the guitar quintets of Chuck Wayne and Johnny Smith. Arthur Taylor, a 24 year old New Yorker, has worked exclusively with small modern groups, rounding out the rhythmic impulses with Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins and others. Taylor complements and "feeds" Bud's solos as every drummer should.

Reets And I is built on a theme by Bennie Harris, trumpeter and early acolyte of the bop giants, and is named for Bennie and his wife. Its foundation is a chord pattern used for many tunes ( such as All God's Children Got Rhythm) but its melody is entirely original and Bud's improvisations on the familiar pattern are suggestive of some of his earlier work.

Autumn In New York is a remarkable demonstration of Bud's ability to retain the essence of a popular melody while investing it with his own personality. There is no "Martian music", nothing in the way of deliberate attempts to distort the basic harmonic structure of the original piece. An interesting departure, though, is Bud's overlapping of the 24th and 25th measures, which has the effect of telescoping the melody into a 31-bar chorus.

In I Want To Be Happy Bud changes the melody slightly on the third and fourth measures to make them fit a diminished chord, giving the tune's line a smoother overall quality. Here George Duvivier, who worked closely with Bud in preparing the date, has a remarkable chorus on his own. The protracted ending is a Powell characteristic intriguingly in evidence on this excursion.

The remarkable cooperation between Bud and George is especially impressive on Sure Thing during the passages on which Bud's left hand and George's bass line are locked in unison. The tune, incidentally, is not Neal Hefti's instrumental, but a 1943 Jerome Kern song from Cover Girl.

The second side opens with what may soon gain stature as Bud's greatest composition. Class Enclosure was built up gradually from an odd theme that Alfred Lion heard him play one night when visiting his apartment off Times Square. Greatly impressed, Lion asked Bud what he was playing. He replied he had something in his mind he was trying to express. Lion then repeatedly asked Bud and encouraged him to develop the piece; a few days later he heard the idea further advanced, and was asked whether he would care to take a chance on it for inclusion in the record date. By the next time Lion heard it, Powell had worked out the entire pattern and Duvivier, who learned it along with him, put the parts down in writing.

Glass Enclosure, despite its brevity, manages to display each of Bud Powell's qualities in the areas of melody, harmony and rhythm. The work is more or less divided into four movements: the first somewhat on a maestoso level, the next a swinging fragment on two 10-bar phrases; then a pensive yet flowing movement with a stirring bowed-bass underline, followed by a reminder of the first movement.

In sharp contrast, the next piece, Collard Greens and Black-Eye Peas, offers something as down-to-earth as that southern dish: the basic 12-bar blues, in a setting first fashioned by Oscar Pettiford (and once recorded by him under the title Blues In The Closet). Here, after playing the theme, Bud is on an ad-lib blues kick for seven choruses, of which the third and fourth are shared with Duvivier, the next two with Taylor.

There have been many treatments by jazz musicians, especially in the past year or two, of the lovely Johnny Burke-Jimmy Van Heusen melody Polka Dots and Moonbeams, written in 1939. While hugging the melody throughout as closely as if he were Garner, Bud sparks it with that unique incisiveness of touch, that perfect timing and placement of rich right-hand chords, that unmistakable Bud Powell sound.

Audrey, named for Mrs. Powell, has a theme that is simpler in melodic line than in construction. A careful inspection of the repeated main phrase, which proceeds downward an octave in uneasy stages, reveals a group of two 12-bar stanzas; and indeed, Bud proceeds from there into some choruses on the regular blues.

If you know Bud Powell only by repute, or through the media of radio and night clubs, this LP is the definitive set to represent him in your collection. If you already have his earlier recordings (such as Blue Note 5003), you will probably agree with me that in this group of performances Bud Powell is at his peak. Let us hope that today, at the age of 30, he may have a future studded with many more such achievements.

—LEONARD FEATHER ( Down Beat Magazine)

Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover design by JOHN HERMANSADER