The Amazing Bud Powell. Guthrie P. Ramsey
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Название: The Amazing Bud Powell
Автор: Guthrie P. Ramsey
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Музыка, балет
Серия: Music of the African Diaspora
isbn: 9780520955158
isbn:
When Powell joined him, Williams was enjoying popularity with the American public as well as respect among his peers. His star had first risen through an eleven-year association with Duke Ellington. After brief stints with the Chick Webb and Fletcher Henderson bands, Williams joined Ellington in 1929, replacing Bubba Miley during Ellington’s long engagement at Harlem’s Cotton Club from 1927 to 1930. Williams’s initial role was to master the growl and plunger techniques that Miley had made a staple feature of the “Ellington sound.” Williams not only mastered these techniques, but extended them into a highly personal style.33 The fruit of Ellington and Williams’s long professional association crystallized in Concerto for Cootie (1940), a piece that one writer considers “an ongoing continuity of gradual masterly development” in Ellington’s work as a whole.34
In addition to the high visibility and quality of his work with Ellington, Williams’s association with Benny Goodman, whom history has dubbed “The King of Swing,” increased his popularity and raised his stock. In the late 1930s, Williams recorded small group sessions under his own name and also with Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Billie Holiday, and others. Williams’s appearance on the bill of Goodman’s famous Carnegie Hall concert (January 1938) confirmed his stature in the jazz world.35 In fact, according to Goodman, the success of the concert, long considered a watershed event in the history of jazz, was due in large part to Williams’s participation. In November 1940, Williams left the Ellington Orchestra to join Goodman, who hired him to play primarily in his sextet. After a year with Goodman, Williams’s reputation had grown to such a degree that at Ellington’s urging, he formed his own permanent band.
Williams’s associations with Ellington and Goodman influenced his leadership style and his band’s repertory. And his work ethic served him especially well when dealing with both the enormous talent and the impulsive behavior that the young Powell displayed while a member of his group. Like Ellington and Goodman, Williams had a knack for discovering new talent. From time to time during the 1940s, his band featured young musicians who won great respect in jazz. Powell, Charlie Parker, pianist Ken Kersey, and saxophonists Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis were all employed by Williams at various times. During his Ellington years, Williams described himself as a surrogate disciplinarian, settling personal and musical disputes among band members such as Sonny Greer, Johnny Hodges, and Barney Bigard: “Duke would never say nothing to them. I’d be the one that had taken over that spot.” But Williams tolerated unruly behavior among some of his own band members, including young, reckless ones such as Powell: “Now, like Bud Powell, and those types of people would come in half-high and messed up. I’d overlook it. Because when they would be straight, I would get some great sound.”36 Goodman, in contrast, ran a tight ship—musically and otherwise.
Williams created his own style of leadership, balancing traits from both of his former employers. Charles Holmes, once a member of Williams’s band, fondly recalls his days with Cootie: “I’ve never in all my life played with such a bad band that sounded so good. There were more people in there who couldn’t read a note as big as a house, and they had no more conception of music than the man in the moon, but they could play, and they could swing, and it sounded good.”37 Likewise, “Lockjaw” Davis describes Williams as “good to his sidemen” and says that his group was “musically . . . ahead of the others.”38
At least two stories exist about how Powell first came to Williams’s attention. One comes from the bandleader himself. According to Williams, he learned of Powell through one of his former sidemen, trumpeter George Treadwell. Treadwell may have known Powell from Monroe’s Uptown House, where the former served as a house band member in the early 1940s. Powell came to one of the band’s rehearsals, played for Williams, was hired immediately, and, in the bandleader’s words: “He was what you call a real genius. . . . He was something else in his young age.”39
“Lockjaw” Davis tells another story about Powell’s joining Cootie. Davis was working at a club in Greenwich Village in October 1943 with a combo that included Powell. Cootie, according to Davis’s recollection, hired five members of the group on the spot. Shortly thereafter they played the Savoy Ballroom: “Now I’m in New York,” Davis recalls, “working at the Savoy—earning 42 dollars a week! That was the beginning.”40 Davis considered his tenure with Williams—an established soloist with an international reputation—the beginning of his professional musical life.
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