By this time, Powell appeared to be closer to his French guardian than to his own family. His mother had died and his father, by Paudras’s account, had no room for Powell in his home or psyche. When Bud showed up one night at his father’s Harlem apartment, unannounced and drunk, the elder Powell called Paudras to come and take him back to the hotel and warned Bud to not come back; his presence was too much to handle. Bud’s then teenaged daughter, Celia, and her mother, Frances Barnes, had moved to North Carolina. At Paudras’s invitation, they made the trip to Birdland, reuniting father and daughter for the first time since she was a little girl. They moved back to Brooklyn, and Powell soon began living with them. He began to drink heavily, too, growing weaker and weaker physically.
His last public performances of note took place at Carnegie Hall at a Charlie Parker memorial concert in March 1965 and at Town Hall on May 1 of the same year. Reports from observers of those concerts toggle among shock at his deteriorating physical appearance, memories of his once stunning musicianship, and disappointment in his failure to live up to them. Some called the Town Hall date (which was arranged by Bernard Strollman, Powell’s attorney since his return to the United States) simply disastrous. But all around him remained hopeful that they could get a glimpse of the musician who had rocked the jazz world to its core and helped to shift its aesthetic center.
He was hospitalized on June 28, 1965, and given a moderate chance of survival because of his serious pulmonary complications and other issues, including jaundice and abdominal dropsy. He remained at Cumberland Hospital for five weeks, some of that time spent in critical condition. Powell was not a forgotten man, as evidenced by the many visitors, cards, and letters that came to the hospital. Mary Lou Williams and Max Roach, old friends from the glory days, both visited before he was discharged in August.
Amsterdam News reporter George Todd visited Powell as he convalesced in Brooklyn. Described as “the home of friends,” the apartment in which Powell stayed was on the second floor, and the climb, Todd noted, exhausted Powell to the point of breathlessness. Powell could not, or at least would not, respond to questions. Celia Powell and Frances Barnes cared for Powell in his last days. Even with this support system, however, his physical and mental health continued to spiral downward. His drinking also increased, which meant, of course, that his music languished. Insisting on drawing Powell out and apparently keeping the best face on for the press, Frances told George Todd that she’d been in love with the pianist since she was fifteen and that Powell had planned to spend his time composing new music.5
Concerned friends reported by letter any information that they learned about Powell to his friend Francis in Paris. The news was mostly bad. Making matters worse for Paudras, he was in a battle with Strollman over some recordings of Thelonious Monk’s compositions that Powell had made when he lived in Paris. A letter from Alan Bates announced that Powell once again had been institutionalized by November 1965, this time in Kings County Hospital, where he was making progress and losing some excess weight, although his teeth were rotting from neglect. He was allowed to play in “a half-assed band” in the hospital twice a week.6
By April 1966, he was living in Brooklyn with Frances Barnes and her and Bud’s teenaged daughter, Celia, and he was struggling physically but mentally stabilized. A circle of Paudras’s friends plotted in vain to take Powell back to France, where they believed he would thrive once in his friend’s constant care again. Their hopes were dashed by news reports that he had fallen seriously ill in early July. After another stint in Cumberland, Powell was transferred to the psychiatric hospital in Kings County, where doctors, against his wishes, were planning shock treatments to his brain. Frances intervened, but he couldn’t hang on. Earl “Bud” Powell was given the last rites of the Catholic Church and passed away on the night of July 31, 1966, at the age of forty-one.7
The jazz community, together with Powell’s family, associates, and fans, honored his memory in grand style and with reverence. His body lay in state for three days at Unity Funeral Chapel in Brooklyn, surrounded by impressive floral displays, provided by his family, Duke Ellington, Max Roach, Mary Lou Williams, and Alfred Lion, among others. Close to five hundred visitors—an interracial crowd of young and old—paid their last respects at the police-managed event. Following this, a New Orleans–style funeral was held in Harlem. The procession, which was led by the Harlem Cultural Council Jazzmobile and an honor guard, slowly filed up Seventh Avenue toward St. Charles Catholic Church on 141st Street, which he had attended as a child. It was truly a jazz community affair: pianist Barry Harris was among the musicians performing; Nellie Monk, Thelonious Monk’s wife, was on the committee planning the funeral; and Max Roach and Local 802, American Federation of Musicians, were among those recognized for their role in the financial arrangements. Powell was laid to rest in a family plot in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, the town outside of Philadelphia where his mother had lived.
BUD POWELL: THE EXCEPTIONAL ARCHETYPE
The extent to which the public and the jazz community celebrated Powell’s life is a testament to his contributions to American music. This book discusses some of the reasons that he continues to be one of the most intriguing musicians of his time. The Amazing Bud Powell is not an exhaustive biography. Rather, it puts what we know about Powell’s life and music in dialogue with ideas that made possible, among other things, his reputation as a musical “genius” and bebop’s social identity as a singular art form. Jazz letters have circulated these notions about Powell’s impressive artistic stature, and these sentiments are directly aligned with the music’s ever-evolving social pedigree.
Throughout this book—which is the first extended scholarly study of its kind on Powell—I explore questions concerning the relationships among Powell as a figure in American music, bebop as a sonic discourse, and the writing of jazz history as a political activity that engages many issues beyond musical aesthetics. Within these connections, Powell emerges as a complicated subject, both typical and exceptional among his peers in modern jazz. Powell was an archetypal bebop musician, and his accomplishments, much like those of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, Max Roach, and Thelonious Monk, inspired the expansion of artistic horizons for black artists across varied media at midcentury and beyond.
And yet within this paradigm of African American experimentation, narratives of Powell’s exceptionalism abound, and this book treats, but does not attempt to resolve, these tensions. Like the dissonant intervals that define the art of bebop itself, they are allowed to languish here, resisting my desire to manage—to make stable, consonant, and neat—what is truly a robust, multidimensional, and unruly historical subject. With that in mind, then, Powell’s life, music, and the analyses of them reveal a complex and dynamic picture of one of the twentieth century’s most beautiful and fiercely adventurous musical minds. His artistic commitment not only codified bebop piano, but also beat a path for the language of musical abstraction that would stun the jazz world during his final years.
This book is about more than one musician’s inspiring accomplishments. It is also about the various meanings that can be derived from the bebop movement, in which Powell was an innovator. Powell’s amazing muse—his expansive musicianship, riveting improvisations, and inventive compositions—can be best understood within the broad social, musical, historical, and especially marketing frameworks in which listeners experienced and understood him. Thus, this book considers the relationship between the sonic details of bebop—particularly Powell’s engagement with them—and the “performance rituals, visual appearance, the types of social and ideological connotations associated with them [the musical details], and their relationship to the material conditions of production.”8 This book, then, is also about how bebop and the social networks in which meanings about it