Bud Powell - The Complete Blue Note And Roost Recordings album flac

It’s been claimed by those wiser than I, that Bud Powell would be the fourth face on a bebop Mount Rushmore … right up there with Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie. And while that’s a bold sentiment for sure, once you’ve listened to this versatile and volatile piano player, one who was at home with scripted as well as improvisational music, all drawn from Powell’s most productive period, you too may just come to believe that that statement isn’t so ridiculous. There are many who have issues with compilation collections, believing that with these collections one loses the fluidity that comes with bopping down the avenue with an artist, taking the turns the artist takes, and ending up in the same venue, where you’re face to face with what these cats are laying down at any given moment in time. Though I prefer to consider a compilation to be more of a sampling, a place to get your feet wet, both with an artist and perhaps with a period of sound you might want to engage in for further exploration. And that’s enticingly what you’re given here, a cohesive collection drawn from Powell’s middle and most productive years, a collection that’s been not only systematically placed together, but compositionally as well. If there’s one flaw to be found here on his Roost and Blue Note recordings, it’s the great indulgence of repetition for alternative takes, songs that are tracked together, one after the other, where the repetition can slide you into the feeling that you’ve had enough already. With that in mind, the best material runs between three and five minutes in length, for as good as Powell is, to my way of thinking, his more lengthy experimental works, tracking in at seven, eight or more minutes, lack a certain authenticity, labored with drum solos, leaving me to feel that these numbers are lengthy for the sake of being lengthy alone.Powell can be devilishly fast with his playing and his direction, so fast that most artists would spin off into a chaotic storm, yet Powell finds a way of encompassing nearly all that he lays down, able to dance you out into the middle of the floor, and bring you home safe and sound. Dying so young, it’s hard to wonder if Powell reached his peak, or if he was just hovering near it, ready to push through to a new level before he left the planet, meaning that there seems not to be a sense of connoisseurship with Powell, where like Monk or Parker, where each of their notes and phrases have been exhaustively courted and caressed. And like the other greats, his sidemen, who were certainly wonderful, were not of the caliber one might have hoped for. Yes, of course there is Max Roach on five tracks, along with Art Taylor on drums, and while Sonny Rollins holds down tenor sax on seven tracks, the rest of the lineup comes across as pickup bands of very accomplished musicians, but not a who’s who.The music rides between the currents of hard driving intense piano styling that later musicians such as Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum would gain more recognition for, to slight of hand mid tempos bebop, music that is warm expressive and very emotional.Sadly he was another great artist who found himself in and out of mental health institutions over the years, emotionally unstable before his death at 41, with drug and alcoholism plaguing this quintessential musical master, leaving all of us to wonder if he was attempting to quiet the demons that seemed to haunt him, or if it was his addiction that brought these demons to life, and he simply could not live with them. With that in mind, and the self destructive tragic life lead by Bud Powell, perhaps it wasn’t all of his making, perhaps it was being hit over the face with a bottle that laid him out cold for hours in 1947, and most surely his multiple bouts with electroshock therapy that same year, makes me think that I’m never really hearing him in top form, that his true genius has been forever tailing after him, and wondering what he might have brought to the table had he managed to dive into the music without so much baggage surrounding and tripping up every step he took.Review by Jenell Kesler