Audio
Charles A. Robertson : February, 1958

To say that this session finds Bud Powell back in the form which marked his first great solo sides on this label, after a hiatus of several years, should be recommendation enough to his followers. By presenting him in a trio with bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Art Taylor, and uniting him in a quartet with trombonist Curtis Fuller, it also recapitulates the concepts and innovations which made him the greatest influence on young pianists in the post-war years. His five originals are seasoned by many changes of mood and tempo to offer a rounded introduction to his style and technique.

Most important is Bud on Bach, described as “a piece called Solfeggietto which I played when I was a child,” which goes further than nay words in contributing to an understanding of his intentions. Not distorting Bach‘s scope and form to the ends of jazz, he plays as Bach might had he listened to Powell. The opening passage is taken at an amazing clip to define its linear aspects clearly. When his accompanists join in, the lines are broken up and formed by a vibrant and undefinable syncopation that is too seldom heard in modern jazz. Not only does he pay his respects to Bach, but to the countless jazz and ragtime pianists whose efforts he absorbed to make his accomplishments possible. It will play a significant part in any discussion of Powell and will be analyzed by critics for years to come.

Frantic Fancies, a fluent exposition of his single note melodic line, applies the same concept to a different form. Some Soul and Keepin’ in the Groove are exercises on the blues in contrasting tempos, and Blue Pearl is a moody piece with a fine Chambers solo. Fuller, a rapidly maturing young Detroiter, is added on Idaho, Don’t Blame Me, and Moose the Mooche to allow Powell to show he still has his knack for feeding a horn. Like Thelonious Monk, Powell seems to have mellowed and his most satisfying work may lie ahead.

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Billboard : 12/02/1957
Special Merit Jazz Album

Powell, perhaps the most influential and unswervingly modern pianist, in a return to form. The pianist shows great facility, roots in the older as well as as newer formats of jazz. He is emotionally penetrating on the blues selections – Some Soul, Keepin’ the Groove – an experience on Bud On Bach, completely satisfying thruout. The extremely sensitive support of drummer A. Taylor and bassist P. Chambers on side one; addition of trombonist C. Fuller on side two add appeal.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 01/05/1957

These were some of the great figures of bop: Parker, Powell, Monk, Gillespie, Roach and Davis.

Parker is dead. Monk is heard but seldom. Gillespie has become an institution. Roach keeps busy playing solid jazz but has added little that is new. Davis’ great horn tends more and more to sweetness. There remains Bud Powell who, like Parker, has been one of “the troubled ones,” a man for whom the excitement of life is too much to be expressed even on his brilliant keyboard.

Like Parker, Bud has spent much time in mental hospitals and more time in recovery; much of his recent life has been spent in the shadows.

It is, then, a delight to be able to report that Powell is back and his newest record shows his piano has lost nothing of either its brilliance or its excitement in the years between.

It was said of Parker that his horn taught him to relax during, and after, his days in Camarillo – but that, in escaping from the pressures of life he had also escaped from the excitement which was so much a part of his early playing. This cannot be said of Powell. Unlike Bird, he has not grown lax, unlike Gillespie he has not grown institutionalized and unlike Miles he has not tended to sweetness. This is Powell at his best. It suggests that his is the only authentic bop voice still playing today.

His backing is more than adequate: Chambers, Art Taylor and, on three of the tracks, Curtis Fuller, the new trombonist. A set you will not want to miss if you are rooted in the exciting days when bop was new.

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Down Beat : 02/20/1958
Dom Cerulli : 4.5 stars

The A side of this collection, Powell pacing the trio, is a full and swinging five. The B side, with Fuller added on trombone, just doesn’t come up to the spark and fire of what preceded.

However, Bud takes one of his most moving, lyrical solos on Don’t Blame Me on the quartet side. The five trio sides display Powell in his element; the leader, the melodic voice, the daring improviser, the scatterer of handfulls of phrases, the off-and-running galloper. There are some moments here when Bud almost doesn’t finish one idea before rocketing into the next.

The opening and closing blues on side one are fine, particularly the folkish Soul, which is not without funk. Pearl and Fancies are apart in tempo, yet one in unity. But it’s Bud on Bach that is bound to be THE track in the set. On this, Bud displays such artistry and such genuine genius, that it may well stand among the classic examples of his work in the years to come.

The quartet sides are paced at comfortable or ballad tempo, with Fuller’s straight-forward sounding trombone sharing solos with Bud and Chambers. While all the sparks are flying at the keyboard, don’t neglect hearing what Chambers is doing in the background and in his solo spots. Recommended.

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Liner Notes by Leonard Feather

The return of Bud Powell to the sympathetically comfortable covers of a Blue Note LP has some of the elements that suggest a reversion to normalcy, the arrival back home of a wanderer who remembers and cherishes the scenery and setting of his first full maturity. For it was at Blue Note that the young Bud Powell became the Amazing Bud Powell; at Blue Note that he recorded his greatest solo sides, his first memorable combo session. The historically important fruits of those and other dates have been preserved, alternate masters and all, on BLP 1503 and BLP 1504.

There were those of us who feared that the Bud Powell of those days might never again raise his full voice, that the impediments of time and illness had wrought irreparable damage to a piano style that had started a new keyboard generation in the late 1940s. That we were wrong, and glad to be wrong, became evident in recent months with Bud’s appearances at Birdland and other old stomping grounds; the conclusive proof that he is playing like Bud Powell again, after a period during which he was struggling to retrieve and reestablish his own personality, came with his visit to the Rudy Van Gelder sound cradle, and the taping of these, his most important and imposing sides in recent years.

The story of Bud Powell, touched on by this writer in the notes to the earlier Blue Note LPs, is familiar by now to most of his followers, but because this album may enlarge the legions of the faithful, and because so much of his work mirrors the mind and personality of its creator, a brief recapitulation may be in order.

Bud was described, in a perceptive essay some years ago by Allan Morrison in Ebony, as “a troubled man, an artist seemingly unable to adjust to life, to make his peace in a strife-torn world…” Morrison then cited the details of Bud’s case-history, ending with his release from the hospital and convalescence in 1953.

Bud’s mother was my own main contact with him during those years in and out of the shadows. Every once in a while, after I had failed to observe him on the scene for a few months and fell to wondering what had become of him this time, I would receive a kindly note from her at the farm in Willow Grove, PA, where she would report that she had taken Bud home and he was coming along just fine. And then a few weeks later I would run into Bud at one of the clubs, and he would have the old gang around him and I would worry about what might happen next.

But in the past year or two Bud has shown himself able to overcome physical and mental problems that may well have seemed insurmountable to many who observed him. Possibly he has found satisfaction in meeting each challenge. I remember one night when I saw him working with his left hand bandaged after some unexplained accident. Between sets he showed friends a gash so deep that it was incredible that he could play at all. Then there was the incident Morrison recalled involving Art Tatum, who on meeting Bud accused him of being no more than a “one-handed piano player.” The next night, at Birdland, Bud played Sometimes I’m Happy at a terrific tempo entirely with his left hand, while Tatum listened. Art later admitted he had been wrong and Bud went home ecstatic; he had won the respect of the man he himself idolized.

For his reunion with Blue Note Bud had the assistance of Art Taylor, the same drummer who had played on his superb 1953 session for this label, and of Paul Chambers, who, though not on records as a previous associate of Bud, has made himself known through innumerable Blue note dates, including a most impressive set under his own leadership on BLP 1534. On three tracks there is an extra added attraction in Curtis Fuller, of whom more in a moment.

As his fellow-participants observed, Bud was in impressively good spirits and the prevailing mood was congenial enough to insure pilot Alfred Lion of a smooth flight without a sign of turbulence. As Paul Chambers has recalled, “This was one of those lucky, one-take dates – maybe on some numbers two at the most, but we were all generally happy with the first take on most of the numbers.”

Bud spent a little time working out routines on the originals, but here too there were few problems, as two of them were just blues and the others had chord progressions that were no problem for Chambers’ fast ears.

Some Soul, the opener, is held together by the harmonic network that tends to bring out the soul in everyone who has ever played jazz: the blues. A funky mood is established as Bud imbues the opening chorus with a “down-time” atmosphere and proceeds to encapsulate himself in the blues framework for a half dozen choruses. A curious reflection of Bud’s disregard for the conventions, or possibly of his ability to subjugate formalization to mood, is the fifth chorus, which is only nine or ten measures long (the point at which it is telescoped into the next chorus is indeterminate, yet Chambers follows him without difficulty). It is characteristic of Taylor’s sympathetic backing that one feels rather than hears his gradual easing into a double-time beat with the brushes. Bud maintains some intriguing two-hand octave unison lines during part of Chambers’ solo, then moves to a finale that goes out with the same basic blues spirit that informed the opening.

Blue Pearl is an original, the mod and changes of which, for a few measures, evoke an old pop song, You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To, though it soon becomes clear that there is no relationship. Chambers again has a solo that demonstrates how well he qualified as one of the few young bassists entitled to keep (and keep up with) such distinguished company.

Frantic Fancies is taken at the fast tempo that brings out the fleetest in Bud’s linear conception. One is reminded again of the extraordinary degree of finesse to which he has coaxed the single note melodic line, and of the complaints of some contemporaries that he does not make full use of the piano. The argument is a specious one; whether Bud is playing one note at a time or ten, whether his left hand plays one, two or four chords to the measure, or nothing but punctuations, must be considered no more relevant than, say, whether or not a guitarist uses a plectrum or a trumpeter blows out his cheeks while playing. All that counts, all that should count, is the emotional impact, the musical value of the result. Invariably the end must justify the means in all music, and Bud’s means, whether they hew to traditions or flout them, lead to impeccable ends. Paul has a fine bowed solo on this track; Bud trades some fours with Art’s eloquent brushes.

Bud on Bach will certainly be the most discussed item in this album, just as Glass Enclosure was the briefest but most shattering experience in an earlier set. (Bud says, “This was a piece called Solfeggietto which I played when I was a child.”) If ever proof were needed of Bud’s ambidexterity it can be found in the first 58 seconds of an unaccompanied piano, before he sails serenely and with seemingly irrefutable logic into rhythm. Or, rather, into syncopation; for a natural, inherent pulsation was as much a part of Bach as it is of Bud, with the result that the opening passage seems rhythmically natural and differs from the later developments only in its lack of syncopation. Bud’s technique and articulation will have many a Powell student wearing out the grooves on this track.

Keepin’ In The Groove closes the side as it began – with a blues. But this time the tempo is bright, and there’s a more definite theme, an old-timey repeated riff that gets things swinging immediately. After the two choruses of theme, Bud ad libs for four – notice, by the way, the Tatumesque run that leads into the second of these ad lib choruses. Paul brings out the bow again for a solo that blends inspiration with a touch of humor.

The second side unites Bud with Curtis Fuller, the brilliant trombonist from Detroit, not quite 23 years old, who has his own album on BLP 1567. J.J. Johnson steered Fuller to Alfred Lion, and Lion in turn pointed him at Bud for a guest shot on this session. Fuller, whose Army service in 1952-4 was followed by studies at Detroit and Wayne Universities and by a period of gigging around Detroit, came to New York in the spring of 1957 and has been a source of wonderment to such skeptical professionals as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins, for all of whom he has worked during the past year.

Idaho insures a quick opportunity for scrutiny of Fuller’s talents, for he has the first three choruses – one around the melody and two ad lib. His performance here is amazingly mature for one who has had so short a career as a big time professional. The influence of J.J. is unmistakable, though there is evidence that an original style is evolving here and that every chorus is completely confident and emotionally personal. Bud follows with a solo that has one remarkable aspect: at times he uses a swing-era left hand technique that sounds almost like the Fats Waller stride. Paul bows his solo; Fuller and Taylor have some exciting fours before the melody returns.

Don’t Blame Me, three slow and compelling choruses in duration, is a showcase for Fuller, who has the first and third, and Bud, who is at his masterful ballad peak on the second.

Moose the Mooche, a rhythmically kicking Charlie Parker tune of the mid-1940s, is played by Bud and Curtis in unison. Then Curtis takes over for a masterful chorus – notice particularly the ease and grace with which he plays the triplets in the second four measures, and the pond-smooth phrasing of the last eighth. Bud, too, is in rare form: you may observe, on his solo here, his characteristic and enticing habit of toppling downward form the highest note of a phrase almost in the manner of a trumpet player who has just reach for, and made, a tough one. Chambers’ solo this time is pizzicato; Art takes over for a chorus before the closing reprise.

Obviously the musicians on the session weren’t just being polite when they told me later how well it had gone. Bud is back in every sense – back in the public eye, back in his pristine form, back on Blue Note. It would be superfluous to elaborate on how welcome he is at each of these levels.