Collard Greens and Black Eyed Peas. Bud Powell. 1954. Blue Note.

 In 1953, only two years following the completion of the studio sessions for The Amazing Bud Powell, the pianist returned to WOR Studios in New York to resume the series. The two years were a period of intense personal crises for Powell. Hospitalizations, arrests, prolonged stays in mental institutions where he was administered electro convulsive therapy, on and off drug use, even a court ordered declaration of mental incompetency resulting in a loss of legal and financial autonomy; the harrowing drama of these circumstances impacted Powell’s playing style considerably. Though still in possession of extraordinary technical dexterity, Powell’s approach to his instrument is distinctly less playful than on The Amazing Bud Powell, having tasked himself instead with reconfiguring the failed mental processes that on The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume 2, are fixed to cohere brilliantly as mid-century jazz artistry. Playing with a smaller band, Powell takes a carefully considered full measure of the virtues of beauty, and its redemptive power, then translates them with brio and nuance into an American colloquialism rooted in cultural and social self-determinism. Amid the trauma-emboldened material of Volume 2, Powell revisits the inspired ebullience of the first volume for Collard Greens and Black Eyed Peas, written by Oscar Pettiford. Collard Greens begins appropriately enough with an understated bass riff, establishing an allegro tempo which Powell then picks up before improvising over verse melodies that, along with the introductory chorus, shape a classically structured pop song that swings. The audacious humor required to conceptualize soul food as a metaphor for the creation of a jukebox tour de force was one of those aesthetic virtues that once pulsed through so much of American jazz. Though it’s painful contemplating the details of Powell’s life—he died in 1966, aged forty one—they nonetheless captivate our imagination, giving historical evidence of the onerous circumstances which gay way to our most lyrical twentieth century art form. In the coming plutocracy, how many generations before the dehumanized class uncovers its power to shock?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

City Slang. Sonic’s Rendezvous Band. 1978. Orchidé.

  Near the start of Sonic’s Rendezvous Band—The One That Got Away, Ken Shimamoto’s authoritative online account from 2002     of that band’s searing yet short lived history, which can be found with a Google search, you come across an anecdote told by SRB bassist Gary Rasmussen about a backstage encounter between Fred Sonic Smith and Eric Clapton, following a Cream show at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, which the MC5 opened. What is remarkable about the recollection of this exchange isn’t so much what it’s about—the absence of a Cream rhythm guitarist—as its setting. Shimamoto, a practicing guitarist with stage and studio experience, whose influences span Hendrix to Pete Cosey, arranges his interviews with band members Rasmussen and Scott Morgan—along with Radio Birdman founder Deniz Tek, MC-5’s Wayne Kramer, Michael Davis, and Dennis Thompson, Stooges’ guitarist Ron Asheton, and Detroit bassist Ron Cooke—along traditional narrative/oral history structures, and features a recu...
Read more

Circles. The Fleur de Lys. Immediate. 1966.

Is there any more durable a symbol of middle class consumer excess than an outdoor neighborhood shopping mall with manicured grounds and vigilantly maintained water fountains, and a semi-detached General Cinema twin screen, first run movie theater, featuring nationwide major distribution titles? My childhood enchantment with Seminary South Cinemas I & II began in an edifice erected as an environmental correlative to the late century American personality; non-descript and functional. The lobby, a vast and empty square room with two glass half walls near the entrance, and beyond that, crimson red upholstered walls, is where the intrigue began. From the ticket dispenser machine, a dull silver contraption that functioned at the ticket seller’s wrist level, elegantly spitting out a stamp sized ticket when one of two buttons on a register was pressed, to the mysterious relationship between the concessionaires and their wide variety of candied snacks and sodas, which inventory never seeme...
Read more

CIA Man. The Fugs. 1967. ESP Disk.

  The excitement begins almost at once. An introductory guitar lick followed by the authoritative voice of the Ghost of History Present, also known by his stage name, New York genius Tuli Kupferberg. Equal parts reportage, cultural unmasking, and satirical agitprop—all of it definitively rock and roll—the Fugs’ CIA Man generates excitement by shrinking the distance between audience and performers, the Fugs’ instinct for spontaneity connecting us with inspired creative thought processes rooted in the traditions of high and low cultural Jewish modernity. Before the academic and literary acknowledgment of the voice of multiculturalism, post-modernism drew attention to the artistic potential for restating twentieth century modernist ideas in audio, video, and written languages appropriated from popular culture. This, along with Kupferberg’s personal history of lower east side radical bohemianism and political left wing activism, shaped the sensibility that emerges from CIA Man. Both Ku...
Read more