dancing in its aesthetic. This turn has signaled to some the music’s break with black vernacular expression and even the harsh realities of race in twentieth-century America. I argue, however, that the social energies resulting from this fissure spiral out into broader questions of artistic production in American society. As such, chapter 6 concludes with Powell’s move to Europe in an attempt to escape the complexities of race and art in America.
1
“Cullud Boys with Beards”
Serious Black Music and the Art of Bebop
Little cullud boys with beards
re-bop be-bop mop and stop.
Little cullud boys with fears,
frantic, kick their draftee years
into flatted fifths and flatter beers
that at a sudden change become
sparkling Oriental wines rich and strange . . .
Langston Hughes, “Flatted Fifths”
In her treasury of private memories, Bud Powell’s daughter, Celia, recalls her father as an uncomplicated man, “content with the simple things in life, not wanting much more than a meal and to play.”1 But in the public world where he established his fame, Powell cut a more challenging figure. His work represents, for many, a pinnacle of artistic achievement among the pantheon of brilliant jazz pianists. His relentless flow of musical ideas—their unsettling rhythmic disjunction; those explosive launches into beautifully crafted passages of push, pull, run, and riff, punctuated by the perfect landing at ferocious speeds—remains an inspiring, though intimidating, factor for pianists who come behind him. Indeed, his brilliance in the bebop idiom pushed jazz musicians of all stripes to high standards of performance that have rarely been matched. His contributions have been as germane to the modern jazz pianist’s training as Czerny five-finger exercises and Bach Inventions are to that of classically trained pianists. Despite his importance to jazz, he remains one of the music’s lesser-known figures. Yet he was a towering pianist who inspires awe and respect among those in the know.
As one of the select group of gifted mid-twentieth-century “cullud boys,” Powell can teach us much about what made his chosen idiom such a dramatic and poignant musical statement. Here and in following chapters, I discuss some of the themes and issues—musical and otherwise—that show how Powell’s bebop worked as a commercialized, racialized, gendered, and age-specific enterprise. Throughout his lifetime, jazz developed from a cultish, ethnic-infused vogue to the sound of American pop to a demanding avant-garde. Within this dynamic continuum of pedigree shifts, Powell’s work can also be seen as entangled in the aesthetic legacies of musicians such as Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, and Teddy Wilson, among others whose artistic lives helped to create a cultural space for the learning, practice, and dissemination of the art of jazz. At the same time, there are those who believe that we should retain the political edge that bebop once possessed as a stand-alone tradition. Eric Lott, for example, has lamented what he sees as the casual commercialization of a style that at one time represented the political and aesthetic avant-garde: “We need to restore the political edge to a music that has been so absorbed into the contemporary jazz language that it seems as safe as much of the current scene—the spate of jazz reissues, the deluge of ‘standard’ records, Bud Powell on CD—certainly an unfortunate historical irony.”2 Bebop is, indeed, an abundant site of expressive force.
Despite Powell’s brilliance as a pianist, composer, and innovator, his work remains a curious and understudied force in jazz history. Indeed, looking for Bud Powell involves a search through “cullud boys’ beards and fears”: it’s an investigation of the meanings embedded in all manner of styles, musical and otherwise, and how all of them signified in the world. Black male musicians of the 1940s streamed self-conscious ideas about who they were in the world through their art. In the flatted fifths, rhythmic disjunction, and sheer velocity of bebop convention, we can find Bud and his peers. But we also find him (and others like him) in other forms of representation, such as photography, and even in the other kinds of art that shaped his social world, such as poetry and the visual arts. In other words, we must examine the world into which Powell walked, a world in which life and musicianship challenged the post–World War II world on many levels. When we look for Bud, we sift through many riches.
THE MUSIC, THE WRITING, AND THE ART IDEA
Powell’s accomplishments invoke a generation of musicians whose innovations during the 1940s and 1950s are some of jazz’s greatest artistic triumphs. Through them, jazz became a bona fide “Art,” an expression that is considered by many to be an elitist music deserving formally trained devotees, a vigorous criticism, and a rigorous scholarship. With bebop, the accepted wisdom goes, jazz shed its populist impulses and moved up the cultural ladder. This book meditates on, among other things, this dramatic transition through the example of Powell’s musical contributions.
But “Great Art-Jazz” did not just happen; it had to pay its dues. In the scholarly world, for example, jazz would need to be analyzed with tools from beyond its immediate cultural borders. Jazz needed to be imbedded into the nineteenth-century Eurocentric notion of Great Art’s transcendence of the social and political “everyday,” and this move was a major hurdle for this body of music. And naturalizing the shift has been achieved primarily, though not exclusively, by the acts of formal musical analysis and written criticism. Let’s begin with “analysis,” by which I mean the study of musical structures as applied to specific works and performances.
One of the goals of formal analysis—to expose organic unity—is a musical value in which few major jazz musicians have expressed much interest. Enter Joseph Kerman, one of musicology’s progressive voices during the 1980s. This was a time when analysis of this kind came under increasing scrutiny as well as the time when the first dissertations on jazz began to appear in the field. Kerman argues that musical analysis is not a politically benign act, but “an essential adjunct to a fully articulated aesthetic value system”: western art music of the common practice period. Musical analysts extended their techniques to all of the music that they valued, and eventually to jazz, as part of this book exemplifies.3
At the same time, it should be understood that this brand of formal analysis, embedded as it is in nineteenth-century western European music history, has done little to raise the music’s prestige among the average jazz fan. Many Powell enthusiasts, for example, have never required musical scores or scholarly treatises to validate or affirm their devotion. His recordings, together with the lore, myth, and gossip that circulated around him, have sustained his reputation as one of jazz’s greatest, and indeed most mysterious, stars. Even casual knowledge of Powell and his exploits seems to anoint the jazz fan with insider, aficionado status. His work has remained important because of the extent to which jazz pianists have imitated his innovations, the scholarly analysis that it (and the work of his colleagues) has stimulated, and the devotion and awe that exists among his fans.
FROM THE JOOK TO THE CLASSROOM: BEBOP’S PEDIGREE OF BLACK MULTIPLICITY
Powell’s and his colleagues’ version of serious black music has often inspired the notion that theirs was an aesthetic in opposition to crass commercialism and, I would argue, to certain aspects of art discourses as well. A recurring theme in bebop literature (one that still shapes its reception), for example, presumes that modern jazz intentionally tried to sever itself from the entertainment business, from the “jooks” and nightclubs of its origins, and from its social legacy in the black “vernacular.” It is quite remarkable that such a diverse range of writers—music scholars, journalists, cultural critics—frame bebop’s profile in the same way: as a challenge to a diverse set of orthodoxies.
Musicologist Frank Tirro writes, for example, that bebop musicians attempted “to create a new elite.” The cultural critic Cornel West believes that “bebop musicians shunned publicity and eschewed visibility.” Likewise, journalist Nelson George argues: “The bebop attitude