Audio : February 1960

As Bud Powell made this recording just before leaving for Paris last year, the prevailing atmosphere is one of pleasant reminiscence on past achievements. All of the themes are his own and manifest an inner assurance which stems from the pianist’s knowledge of an area he is still unexcelled. Like many other innovators, Powell is at his best when improvising on his own ideas and has progressed to the stage where the creation of an overall design is more important than new effects. When figures characteristic of his early work reappear, they are now patterned to fit more snuggly. In this process of assimilation, he bears a certain relationship to such elder statesman as Earl Hines and Thelonious Monk, both of whom are also actively engaged in broadening the base of concepts which they originated.

In fact, Powell’s Gettin’ There, with its horn-like phrasing, is an extension of the trumpet style developed by Hines and sounds remarkably like him. Comin’ Up, a cheerful Latin-flavored opus lasting almost eight minutes, is often amusing as the pianist reacts to the rhythmic pulse of bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Art Taylor. Borderick, a tune dedicated to his three-year-old son, seems to be less related to jazz than to Bartok’s Mikrokosmos. And the nostalgic feeling of an empty ballroom permeates Danceland.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 02/28/1960

This may be one of the most important jazz albums ever issued. It certainly is one of the most important piano albums – in my own book it is THE most important in that category.

As most jazz fans know, Powell was the great bop pianist of the 40s. Nobody – not even Monk – has approached him as a living exemplification of bop style. Yet Powell’s life was clouded with mental illness; it was only rarely that he was able to record and, even on those occasions his execution of his most brilliant concepts was frequently interspersed with sheer musical nonsense.

In The Scene Changes, the scene has changed. Here is the music of sanity – sometimes as thoughtful, precise and logical as Miles Davis, but always brilliant, tremendously inventive and swinging. Here, in other words, is the music as we so often wanted to hear Powell play it (and, with passing years, have as frequently despaired.)

Listen, particularly to Duid Deed and to Down With It to Comin’ Up and Gettin’ There, as well as to Borderick, the enchanting nursery rhyme done by Powell for his son.

True, this is “far out,” to many listeners. Even “out” fans will require, I think, from three to a dozen hearings before the full importance of every track will begin to come through. But after that, you have it made.

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Down Beat : 10/29/1959
George Hoefer : 4 stars

Here is Bud Powell back playing his own tunes, which is significant: most of his recent tracks have been improvisations on the material of others. And he is best when he is on his own.

These tracks were recorded in April, 1959, just before he left for Europe. (he is at present located in Paris.) He tries in this set to illustrate the idea that “the scene changes.” And, as the point of departure, there is the frequent bop figure, a nostalgic phrase used during the Groovin’ High days, which crops up in Duid Deed, Down With It, and the title tune.

Danceland and Borderick are noval and charming, the former highlighted by a danceable quality and the latter by a warm feeling towards the pianist’s son, Earl Douglas John Powell, to whom he dedicates the composition. Not surprisingly, it smacks of a nursery rhyme.

The track Comin’ Up, one of Powell’s longest recorded solos, is full of surprises. Here he is superbly supported by drummer Art Taylor and bassist Paul Chambers in a Latin-styled, yet strictly Powell-flavored creation.

Powell on these tracks is original, and he sounds secure in what he is playing. It is good to hear.

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Liner Notes by Leonard Feather

It is one of the ironies of Bud Powell‘s career that while his contemporaries have constantly looked to him for inspiration and guidance, his treatment in the musical press have been only intermittently observant and all too often concerned with his psychological and professional problems. A glance through the large body of jazz literature dumped on the market in recent years reveals that alone among the navigators of modern jazz he has been bypassed, while others who could not have existed musically without him have earned fuller consideration.

Bud was a figure of powerful impact among musicians as early as 1945, when he began to be heard often in the combos along 52nd Street. He has never ceded his position as the most vital of the original bop pianists; yet there is not a single sentence about him, for instance, in Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, while in the André Hodeir book there is a brief dismissal with these words: “Circumstances that we won’t dwell on here have prevented Bud Powell from achieving a full realization of his immense possibilities. It is in some of his quick-tempo solos, and perhaps only there, that we must look for an echo of that world of musical madness into which Charlie Parker tried to lead us.”

It is my belief that M. Hodeir underestimates the extent of Bud’s achievements; that he may be confusing cause and effect in relating the “circumstances” of Bud’s life and the attainment of his goals. Moreover, his successes manifestly are not merely a matter of dazzling the listener with up tempos, as the present album demonstrates.

Even Barry Ulanov, the first and most perceptive critic to study Bud seriously, was inclined in his History of Jazz in America to accentuate the negative: “He will set up an intriguing pattern of ideas, aptly constructed, brightly developed, and then suddenly will break the structure and the development to repeat one or two of his phrases in a seemingly endless and senseless reiteration. His solos sometimes have a nagging, fragmentary quality, like a series of boxes piled precariously on top of one another, without point or purpose.” But, he is careful to add, there are other solos that “swing furiously from the first to the last bar, that add lines in a constant enrichment of ideas, that gave bop its only real piano voice.” It seems to me that the fragmentary qualities imputed by Ulanov (this book was published in 1952) may have been observed in person a decade ago but are rarely found on his more typical recordings. Listen to the third and fourth choruses in Crossin’ the Channel. The boxes are piles in a careful, orderly heap; there is nothing precarious about their placement. This is true of most of Bud’s best work, a substantial proportion of which can be found in his Blue Note LPs.

A curious aspect of this latest set is its emphasis on minor keys. On the first side all but the closing track are minor compositions; a fifth minor theme is heard on the second side in Gettin’ There. More important than the matter of mode is the happy circumstance that Bud felt very much like blowing on the day of this session, pausing less often than usual for bass or drum interludes and maintaining a consistently inventive and technically impeccable level throughout.

Cleopatra’s Dream, the opening track, typifies the prevailing temper; a medium-bright minor theme, itis uninterrupted Powell throughout, its melody a simple attractive structure on a tonic-and-dominant base, its improvisations fluctuating between long single-note lines, a couple of excursions into octave unison lines and one brief passage using chords horizontally.

Duid Deed, slower and still minor, reveals itself immediately as a typical bop line of the kind that prevailed in the mid-40s. The familiar construction – one beat rest followed by a four-note phrase and a three-note phrase, the two final notes being a “bepop” on the first beat of the second bar – has persisted for close to fifteen years for a logical reason: it swings.

Down With It, too, is unremittingly bop, its extensive single-note lines recalling the halcyon days of the revolution; one can almost feel at times that on the next chorus Fats Navarro may take over. But then Paul Chambers walks up to the microphone, bow in hand, and we are reminded of a newer generation, and of the younger talents that are constantly added as the scene changes.

Danceland presumably was so titled because its moderato pace and basically stated main phrase – starting with eight quarter notes, each right on the beat – combine to lend it a simple and danceable quality.

Borderick is, by Powell standards, a maverick. Dedicated to his three-year-old son Earl Douglas John Powell, for whom he improvised it one night, it is virtually a melodic nursery rhyme, a tuneful eight-bar fragment that is repeated, with syncopations and other minor alterations, throughout the entire brief performance here. The second chorus includes a passage in which Bud sounds as is if he has been listening to Fats Waller. Aside from being an ideal weapon with which to confuse one’s friends on a blindfold-test basis, this track is valuable in the reflection of a seldom-considered aspect of Bud’s personality, his life as a family man.

Crossin’ The Channel is not related to the early bop blues recorded some years back by Winding, Mulligan and Wallington. An up tempo theme that sounds like a reworked scale or exercise, it is notable not only for the continuity of the improvised passages, as discussed above, but also for the firmness and strength with which Bud makes his statements. This assurance, a quality associated with his best performances and and missing on some of his less felicitous recording dates, is a quintessential component of the true Powell character. Lacking the unique dynamism, the peculiar articulation that can only be produced exactly in this manner by the originator himself, Bud’s imitators tend to sound like victims of pernicious musical anemia when they parade the identical phrases.

Comin’ Up, which runs almost eight minutes, is one of Bud’s longest recorded piano solos and certainly one of the most strikingly different. There are moments when this could be the work of a pianist in a mambo band, yet every once in a while a seemingly trivial dynamic or harmonic touch will emphasize the important difference that lifts it out of that mundane zone. Starting with a six-note statement by Art Taylor, then taken up by Chambers and finally by Powell, it is built around a phrase that acquired its character from the opening and closing F (in the key of E Flat). There is a benevolent, cheerful note in the Latin passages here that may seem atypical to most Powell students; personally I am past the stage where it surprises me to be surprised by Bud. Comin’ Up might have been the product of an evening spent listening to Machito or Joe Loco, yet there is in it something that Powell alone could create. Art Taylor’s conservative supplementary rhythmic impetus, a notable asset to the entire album, is particularly valuable here.

Gettin’ There reverts to the minor made, at medium-bright tempo. During this track I was particularly impressed by the horn-like nature of much of Powell’s ad libbing; try listening to this while imagining the same lines performed by, say, Clifford Brown. If Earl Hines was the original trumpet style pianist, the concept is by no means incompatible with the even more essentially horizontal ideations of Bud.

The Scene Changes is another boppish theme, one that could have been written by Bird, with a basically upward trend to the melody. This time there is a pause for solo by Chambers and Taylor and Bud goes out with one of those sudden bop endings, the kind that became boring while they were being overdone during the 1940s but now have some validity again when not used immoderately.

When Bud saw the cover photo for this album, showing him with Earl Douglas John Powell, he immediately reacted by suggesting: “Call the album The Scene Changes.” In terms of generations and hierarchies he was right; yet in some respects the scene is less changed than it might seem to be. It changed when Bird and Pres departed, yet the central scene, of which they were an unvarying focal point, remained unfadingly printed in our minds, a photograph still immutable in a setting where everything else seemed restless and questing. Bud Powell is part of the changing scene, true; but as long as he remains true to himself, to the fundamental qualities he brought to music, a certain part of the scene will remain unchanged, and I for one will be among the grateful.