All things told, jazz criticism and scholarship have helped to usher the music into a new age of quasi-respectability. Coupled with corporate interest in promoting this new profile, it would seem that we are in the sway of a new orthodoxy that might be called Jazz, Inc. With respectability as one of its core impulses, Jazz, Inc., embodies all of the tensions and contradictions of late capitalism, a state in which a discourse attempts to marshal and stabilize styles, critiques, and theories into something manageable and consumable even as it exploits its perceived marginal status. The emergence of jazz studies in the academy developed in the context of the larger movement of multiculturalism. This leftist-inspired 1990s shift allowed “people of color culture” to gain ground as subjects and objects of study in the academy. And, of course, commerce has played an important role here. Institutional support, in particular funding from foundations, provides financial backing for symposia, endowed chairs, publications, concert series, and artist-in-residence posts—all the trimmings and trappings of an established art form.
This new jazz orthodoxy is reminiscent of similar moves in other areas. The late painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, for example, rose to prominence in the 1980s. He burst onto the scene first as a marginal, self-styled graffiti artist. Later, by virtue of his outsized talent, growth, and ambition, he quickly became an art star whose works today command “some of the highest prices of any African American artist in United States history.” Basquiat’s important 2005 touring retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, was sponsored by none other than JP Morgan Chase.79
Closer to jazz’s home, Wynton Marsalis, a gifted jazz musician who emerged as a young titan in the early 1980s, has become a notable ambassador of Jazz, Inc., in his highly visible roles as the artistic director and philanthropic pitchman for Jazz at Lincoln Center, a powerful institution with a reported $31 million operating budget, supported by both sponsors and ticket sales. A newcomer to the Lincoln Center complex, jazz first became a strong presence there in 1987 when it took its place next to opera and concert music, genres with much longer American histories of philanthropic backing.80 These “from margins to center” narratives—be they about specific artists or entire genres— did not occur in vacuums, but within a political economy that is constituted by the obvious suspects of race, class, gender, commerce, and other discourses that always mediate interactions between the powerless and the powerful.
Now we can begin to examine the relationship between the historic figure (Powell) and the “historiographic,” the world of histories of and ideas about expressive culture. I seek to understand Powell and his music from many perspectives and interpretive positions and with many tools, an exercise that is in sync with other recent examples of contemporary jazz scholarship. These studies, as John Gennari notes, investigate how “jazz has been imagined, defined, managed, and shaped within particular cultural contexts. [They consider] how jazz as an experience of sounds, movements, and states of feeling has always been mediated and complicated by peculiarly American cultural patterns, especially those of race and sexuality.”81 With an ambitious model of investigation in mind, this study of Powell illuminates his life’s work, but also takes this opportunity to address larger issues in African American music.
2
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