High Fidelity
John S. Wilson : May, 1958

One side of firmly played, neatly stacked piano solos by Powell is offset by a side marked by sloppy recording and sloppy performances. Powell’s full talent flashes on and off throughout the disc, but bassist Ray Brown consistently plays with distinction.

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Metronome
Jack Maher : May, 1958

This is probably the most significant record made by Bud in some time. On its tracks you can hear more complete and confident Bud than on any of his other current efforts. The music still has that oddly lugubrious quality in the choice of chords, and there are moments of dissolution, but you will also hear a more confident and secure Bud, than you’ve heard for some time.

This confidence seems to have been born out of a quality of violence and impatience. You can hear that in the way he continues to chord while Osie Johnson is playing four bar solos; and while Ray Brown is soloing. For some reason, Bud smashes in with chords that almost destroy the continuity of Ray’s solos.

CODA: A piece of Bud Powell is an open book on this LP; the best Powell of recent months.

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Oakland Tribune (Oakland, CA)
Russ Wilson : 05/04/1958

Some of the finest work that Bud Powell has put in the grooves is on this LP, made with bassist Ray Brown and drummer Osie Johnson. The liner notes by Nat Hentoff are a valuable assessment of Powell’s personality and its effect on his playing.

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Down Beat : 05/29/1958
Martin Williams : 2 stars

Here, frankly, is the way it is and the way it often is nowadays, alas): there is bad time and bad fingering at up tempos (I Know, Be-Bop, etc.) and sometimes at medium as well (Heart, Swingin’, etc.). There is a kind of pounded Tatum on Care; and it and Fall in Love contain some of those flowery keyboardisms that have always been disconcerting in Powell’s work. Heart has one of the “stride” sections that seem to be his practice lately.

There are compensations, to be sure. Time It Was sustains a unique mood quite well, and on Woodyn’ You there are good improvised melodies, comparatively simple, genuinely imaginative — perhaps some kind of answer lies therein.

Powell’s work in the late forties was important — and not important just because his style happened to acquire so many popularizers. But it implies no blindness to that importance to say that he sometimes played as if he had not entirely assimilated his own style. His early work with Cootie Williams, for all its lack of the linear and harmonic technique he later developed, suggests an emotional control, a maturity of conception, a relaxation, and a completeness of statement that the later virtuoso soloist did not always show.

It would be exceptional to say the least, for an artist to have worked more surely, on the whole, without his having discovered what technical resources he could utilize, but I cannot help feeling that may be the case with Powell. And I confess that I wonder if this Woodyn’ You may not indicate the way a new maturity might come.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

In the early ’40s, four men emerged with raw individual force and commanding imagination as the tradition-makers of their jazz generation, the first modern jazz class. The desperate dean, whose only deep satisfaction came from music but didn’t last very long at any one time, was the late Charlie Parker, who determined the careening way in which every jazz instrument was to adapt itself to the new challenges of the music. Dizzy Gillespie, whose satirical pantomime-wit is annealed to an unshakable determination to be and remain himself musically and every other way, led the trumpets and also became a prestige symbol to many young modern jazzmen when his uncompromising big band played Carnegie Hall and Europe in the late ’40s and even commissioned works. Thelonious Monk, then as now not enigmatic but uninterested in talk of music, worked as he felt on his songs and his playing, both pungently spare and bony with implications. He was a Lewis Carroll who didn’t have to go through the looking glass.

The fourth, Earl “Bud” Powell, became the first pervasive piano influence in modern jazz. As his records began to be heard in this country and abroad, the younger pianists knew that they must absorb his churning grammar before they could develop their own style, and the older pianists knew that while they still belonged, they had to move and make a place in history for lord knows what earthquakes to come. Bud, of course, had come from the roots. In addition to Bird and Dizzy and the other members of the compulsive junta, there were strong marks of Tatum in his work. In fact, in the most honest article yet written on Bud, Allan Morrison’s essay in the August, 1953, Ebony, Allan tells of Tatum’s brusque dismissal of Powell one night at Birdland as a one-handed pianist. Bud thereupon played Sometimes I’m Happy at a sports car tempo-with left hand alone. Tatum was impressed.

Now, in the last years of the next decade, Bird is dead. Dizzy is so accepted by a society that once found only his goatee worth extensive examination that he has been selected to deputize for the State Department on band trips through the Near and Middle East and Latin America. Monk has continued to explore Monk, and the releasing, testing results have slowly and permanently become a making and shaping element in modern jazz. Monk has affected the ear, inner and outer, of diverse empiricists from the scholarly French critic-composer André Hodeir to Sonny Rollins.

Bud is the unwitting tragedian of the three left. For more than ten years, he has intermittently rushed into himself, afraid or wounded or stunned at the complex of twisting tensions that our civilization has become. He has spent some time at a State Hospital; he has had analytical sessions with a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. There have been other periods when he has been able to enjoy his position, his music, and more recently, his son. In whatever state of clarity or opaqueness he has been, the piano has been his most primary need, his one way to express his feelings without having to worry about articulating words and without further worry about how they may be taken and thrown back at him. With and in the piano, he is safe.

There is an often shaking intensity in his playing, as you can hear in sections here, an intensity that comes in part from what he has made the piano symbolize—and actually be—for him. It is an object of love, a confidante, a source by which he can reaffirm his identity and even his manhood; and in an ambivalency inevitable in so closeted a vector of emotions, the piano is also for him at times an object of hate—hate against society, hate against Jim Crow, hate against himself for not yet, maybe never, fulfilling more of the startling, burning promise he had indicated when he turned jazz piano upside down. When Bud Powell plays the piano, the music is all the pain and some of the small joy and much of the awakening musical insights of his short, brutal life.