The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop by Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. (review)

Bud Powell was a prodigiously gifted pianist who became one of jazz’s most formidable talents as well as one of its more confounding personalities. While his parents wanted a career for him as a concertizing classical pianist, his equally prominent jazz impulses—inspired by the likes of Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Fats Waller, Mary Lou Williams, and Thelonious Monk—won out, and by his teenage years, Powell was a notable fixture at jam sessions at Minton’s in Harlem and eventually earned a prominent position in Cootie Williams’s orchestra. Yet in 1945, Powell was beaten by police and put in jail for disorderly conduct, after which he was severely traumatized and underwent psychiatric care. So began, according to Ramsey, the oscillation of “triumph and trouble” that was to haunt the pianist for the rest of his life (pp. 61–62).

Equal parts biography, historiography, and music analysis, Ramsey’s brilliant study represents a much-needed examination of one of jazz’s most influential pianists and artists who was just as crucial to bebop’s beginnings as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, yet who has not received nearly as much scholarly attention. Further, by filtering the political, social, and artistic tensions that coalesced around the beginnings of bebop through Powell’s life and music, Ramsey creates not only a fascinating portrait of a jazz icon, but also a more nuanced understanding of bebop’s role in twentieth-century American musical life.

From the beginning Ramsey makes clear that this book is not an exhaustive biography of Powell’s life, but rather a focused account of Powell’s contributions to American music and the way these aspects interfaced with numerous issues associated with the development of bebop. For this reason, Ramsey’s monograph makes a suitable companion to more exhaustive studies of bebop, notably Scott DeVeaux’s The Birth of Bebop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) and Eddie Meadows’s Bebop to Cool (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003), as well as extensive treatments of jazz, politics, and identity such as Eric Porter’s What is This Thing Called Jazz? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) and Ramsey’s own Race Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

Ramsey introduces his elaborate discussion with “‘Cullud Boys with Beards’: Serious Black Music and the Art of Bebop,” inspired by a line from Langston Hughes’s poem “Flatted Fifths.” Following a vignette about Powell told through his daughter, Celia, Ramsey begins to establish the foundation for the turbulent zeitgeist that gave rise both to Hughes’s poem and the artistic milieu in which Powell made his most lasting contributions. For instance, Ramsey reminds the reader, correctly, that the desire for a new form of creative expression on behalf of African American musicians—evidenced in the irregular rhythms, enhanced dissonance, and blazing tempos of bebop—was also demonstrated by photographers, artists, and poets. Further, to examine Powell’s music is to consider it alongside complex issues of high and low art, aesthetic expression and overt commercialism, and most importantly, as a renewed means of African American cultural expression in the face of more pervasive artistic modernism in the 1940s. Thus, bebop’s oft-cited migration from Harlem to 52nd Street not only demonstrated its increased acceptance by white, mainstream audiences, but also its ability to undermine the longstanding ghettoization of black music in Harlem. In addition, the move was necessary in order for bebop—and ultimately modern jazz—to be considered “art” music alongside the European canon. Finally, this perceived “invasion” into the midtown establishment fomented racial, gender, and sexual tensions between subcultures and underpinned the complex environment in which Powell developed his musical voice. After reviewing the role of jazz critics who espoused the “jazz-as-art” concept (p. 30), Ramsey concludes the chapter by...