Bud Powell

Bud Powell did for the piano what Charlie Parker did for the saxophone: he found a way to play bebop’s fast, intricate lines on an instrument that wasn’t built for them. His right hand spun out long, horn-like melodies while his left dropped spare, stabbing chords underneath. Almost every bebop and hard-bop pianist who followed learned the vocabulary from him.

At his best, in the late 1940s and early ’50s, he was untouchable – fast, fierce, harmonically deep, swinging like mad. Records like the ones collected on The Amazing Bud Powell set a standard for modern jazz piano that still holds.

But his life was brutal. A police beating in 1945 caused head injuries that, combined with mental illness and the era’s grim psychiatric treatments, including electroshock, damaged him lastingly. He was institutionalized repeatedly. His playing grew uneven, flashes of the old genius surfacing through the struggle.

He spent some better years in Paris in the late 1950s, celebrated by European audiences, the subject of a friendship that inspired the film Round Midnight. He came home and died at 41. The recordings remain the bedrock of how jazz piano is played.