Bud Powell

Earl Rudolph "Bud" Powell was born in Harlem on the twenty-seventh of September 1924, a stride pianist's son, with a brother, Richie, who would die young beside Clifford Brown. At nineteen he took the piano chair in Cootie Williams's orchestra, and on an August day in 1944 played on the first recording ever made of his mentor Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight" — by the accounts, it was Powell who talked the bandleader into it.

In January 1945, in Philadelphia, railroad police beat him about the head after a band engagement. He was twenty. The injuries shadowed every year that remained: Creedmoor and Pilgrim State, electroconvulsive treatment, a guardianship that managed his own earnings away from him. And between the hospitals he remade jazz piano — the 1947 trio sides, Bouncing with Bud, Tempus Fugit, the two volumes of The Amazing Bud Powell, and Un Poco Loco (1951), which stands with the music's monuments. In May 1953 he sat at Massey Hall with Parker, Gillespie, Mingus, and Roach — the quintet the fans call the greatest concert in jazz.

Paris took him in from 1959 — the Three Bosses trio with Kenny Clarke and Pierre Michelot at the Blue Note club, and the friendship of Francis Paudras, the young Frenchman who nursed him through tuberculosis and whose memoir became the film Round Midnight. He came home with Paudras in August 1964 to a Birdland engagement and a city that had partly forgotten how much it owed him.

He died at Kings County Hospital, Brooklyn, on the thirty-first of July 1966, at forty-one — tuberculosis, malnutrition, and drink among the causes the record keeps. Harlem walked his funeral through its streets. Honored be Bud Powell, who answered what was done to his mind with what his hands could still say.