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,