The Amazing Bud Powell. Guthrie P. Ramsey
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу The Amazing Bud Powell - Guthrie P. Ramsey страница 6
Название: The Amazing Bud Powell
Автор: Guthrie P. Ramsey
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Музыка, балет
Серия: Music of the African Diaspora
isbn: 9780520955158
isbn:
Chapter 5 provides a technical working through of the particularities of Powell’s contributions within the developing language of modern jazz. The presentation of this part of my discussion may challenge some readers not familiar with music theory. I have nonetheless tried to make the main ideas accessible to nonspecialists. Throughout the book, I show that modern jazz’s quite fascinating historiography has forwarded theories of its sound organization and cultural politics from the very beginning. Together with the details of Powell’s musical rhetoric, we witness a new style crystallizing through the recordings of a gifted yet challenged musician. As I stated above and reiterate throughout this book, with bebop, jazz expanded its social pedigree and became “art”; and it also morphed jazz itself into a genre distinct from other contemporary vernacular forms. This trajectory is easily traced from Powell’s earliest recordings to his later work.
In many ways, this book, one that centralizes the contributions of Bud Powell, details the collision of two vibrant political economies: the discourses of art and the practice of blackness. The “race” discourses that have formed a persistent source of controversy in jazz history are important (and certainly fascinating) enough to scrutinize here. As we will learn, the story of bebop is about the discourses of art and blackness meeting head-on and tussling it out in both musical and critical terms. Modern jazz occupies a singular position in American musical thought and scholarship. The so-called bebop revolution has been generally perceived as a radical break with “tradition,” particularly because of the perceived absence of social dancing in its aesthetic. This turn has signaled to some the music’s break with black vernacular expression and even the harsh realities of race in twentieth-century America. I argue, however, that the social energies resulting from this fissure spiral out into broader questions of artistic production in American society. As such, chapter 6 concludes with Powell’s move to Europe in an attempt to escape the complexities of race and art in America.
1
“Cullud Boys with Beards”
Serious Black Music and the Art of Bebop
Little cullud boys with beards
re-bop be-bop mop and stop.
Little cullud boys with fears,
frantic, kick their draftee years
into flatted fifths and flatter beers
that at a sudden change become
sparkling Oriental wines rich and strange . . .
Langston Hughes, “Flatted Fifths”
In her treasury of private memories, Bud Powell’s daughter, Celia, recalls her father as an uncomplicated man, “content with the simple things in life, not wanting much more than a meal and to play.”1 But in the public world where he established his fame, Powell cut a more challenging figure. His work represents, for many, a pinnacle of artistic achievement among the pantheon of brilliant jazz pianists. His relentless flow of musical ideas—their unsettling rhythmic disjunction; those explosive launches into beautifully crafted passages of push, pull, run, and riff, punctuated by the perfect landing at ferocious speeds—remains an inspiring, though intimidating, factor for pianists who come behind him. Indeed, his brilliance in the bebop idiom pushed jazz musicians of all stripes to high standards of performance that have rarely been matched. His contributions have been as germane to the modern jazz pianist’s training as Czerny five-finger exercises and Bach Inventions are to that of classically trained pianists. Despite his importance to jazz, he remains one of the music’s lesser-known figures. Yet he was a towering pianist who inspires awe and respect among those in the know.
As one of the select group of gifted mid-twentieth-century “cullud boys,” Powell can teach us much about what made his chosen idiom such a dramatic and poignant musical statement. Here and in following chapters, I discuss some of the themes and issues—musical and otherwise—that show how Powell’s bebop worked as a commercialized, racialized, gendered, and age-specific enterprise. Throughout his lifetime, jazz developed from a cultish, ethnic-infused vogue to the sound of American pop to a demanding avant-garde. Within this dynamic continuum of pedigree shifts, Powell’s work can also be seen as entangled in the aesthetic legacies of musicians such as Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, and Teddy Wilson, among others whose artistic lives helped to create a cultural space for the learning, practice, and dissemination of the art of jazz. At the same time, there are those who believe that we should retain the political edge that bebop once possessed as a stand-alone tradition. Eric Lott, for example, has lamented what he sees as the casual commercialization of a style that at one time represented the political and aesthetic avant-garde: “We need to restore the political edge to a music that has been so absorbed into the contemporary jazz language that it seems as safe as much of the current scene—the spate of jazz reissues, the deluge of ‘standard’ records, Bud Powell on CD—certainly an unfortunate historical irony.”2 Bebop is, indeed, an abundant site of expressive force.
Despite Powell’s brilliance as a pianist, composer, and innovator, his work remains a curious and understudied force in jazz history. Indeed, looking for Bud Powell involves a search through “cullud boys’ beards and fears”: it’s an investigation of the meanings embedded in all manner of styles, musical and otherwise, and how all of them signified in the world. Black male musicians of the 1940s streamed self-conscious ideas about who they were in the world through their art. In the flatted fifths, rhythmic disjunction, and sheer velocity of bebop convention, we can find Bud and his peers. But we also find him (and others like him) in other forms of representation, such as photography, and even in the other kinds of art that shaped his social world, such as poetry and the visual arts. In other words, we must examine the world into which Powell walked, a world in which life and musicianship challenged the post–World War II world on many levels. When we look for Bud, we sift through many riches.
THE MUSIC, THE WRITING, AND THE ART IDEA
Powell’s accomplishments invoke a generation of musicians whose innovations during the 1940s and 1950s are some of jazz’s greatest artistic triumphs. Through them, jazz became a bona fide “Art,” an expression that is considered by many to be an elitist music deserving formally trained devotees, a vigorous criticism, and a rigorous scholarship. With bebop, the accepted wisdom goes, jazz shed its populist impulses and moved up the cultural ladder. This book meditates on, among other things, this dramatic transition through the example of Powell’s musical contributions.
But “Great Art-Jazz” did not just happen; it had to pay its dues. In the scholarly world, for example, jazz would need to be analyzed with tools from beyond its immediate cultural borders. Jazz needed to be imbedded into the nineteenth-century Eurocentric notion of Great Art’s transcendence of the social and political “everyday,” and this move was a major hurdle for this body of music. And naturalizing the shift has been achieved primarily, though not exclusively, by the acts of formal musical analysis and written criticism. Let’s begin with “analysis,” by which I mean the study of musical structures as applied to specific works and performances.
One СКАЧАТЬ