Bud Powell, Sideman

Most of what Bud Powell played on records before 1949 has never been heard.

The Bud Powell everyone knows is the leader on the Blue Note and Verve records. Before that he spent six years as a sideman, mixed the way sidemen were in the forties: horns in front of the microphone, piano behind, audible as a rustle between phrases.

I have been running these sessions through source separation for a transcription project. On one of the 1944 Cootie Williams sides, most of the left hand we transcribed is not audible in the released record. It is there in the stem: full voicings under every horn phrase, from a teenager who had already mastered swing, absorbing Tatum, Basie, Teddy Wilson, and Billy Kyle.

The mixer below runs from January 1944 to July 1950, piano up hot by default. Pull it down to hear the records as the world heard them, or solo it to hear Bud invent modern comping.

Listen · Bud behind the band, 1944 to 1949

Start in 1944, with nineteen year old Bud in the Cootie Williams Sextet. Cootie was the teenager's legal guardian on the road, at his mother's request. On "You Talk a Little Trash" Bud comps behind Eddie Vinson's blues alto and the lineage is Basie's. Much of it is the low style, a four-note closed voicing in the right hand over a lone bass note. The rest sits high on the keyboard, the open plinking chords Basie punctuated his band with. He kept that vocabulary well into the bebop years; the stem on "Dance of the Infidels" five years later is full of it. He also walks bass lines now and then. Solo the piano on "Sweet Lorraine" and you get something rarer: teenage Bud on a ballad under Cootie's trumpet, filling every gap with runs straight out of Art Tatum, though the concept is already his own. The full 1944 run is in the dropdown, including the big band sides and the first recording ever made of "'Round Midnight."

The 1946 Savoy dates bury the piano worst, so the stems pay off most there. "Long Tall Dexter" and "Jay Jay" put him behind two horns playing riff heads at a shout. In the released mixes his comping reads as texture; isolated, it is a running commentary, jabs against the horn lines and sendoffs into every solo. "Fat Boy" adds a baritone to the front line and Kenny Clarke behind the kit, and Bud threads it without crowding.

Two of these sessions put him behind a singer. In May 1946 he is in the rhythm section of Tadd Dameron's orchestra for four Musicraft sides with Sarah Vaughan; in July 1950 he turns up on both sides of a Columbia single under Norman Leyden. On "If You Could See Me Now" Vaughan sits on a fader of her own, so pulling her down leaves Dameron's writing and Bud comping inside an arrangement instead of under a voice. These six came out of a separate sweep of every transfer I could find, covered in its own post; what loads here is the best transfer of each.

Then the Bird sides. "Donna Lee," "Chasin' the Bird," and "Cheryl" from May 1947 are among the most studied records in jazz, and almost all of that study has gone to the saxophone. "Chasin' the Bird" has the contrapuntal head, Bird and Miles winding two lines around each other, and the stem shows Bud underneath, steady through the densest head in the book. On "Donna Lee" he comps under Bird's solo nearly wall to wall, feeding him chords at that tempo.

"Bouncing With Bud" from August 1949 is his own date, with Fats Navarro and an eighteen year old Sonny Rollins in the front line, so the piano finally gets a fair shake from the engineers. "All God's Chillun Got Rhythm" with Sonny Stitt closes the decade at the door of the trio years, when the piano moved to the front of the stage for good.

This listening feeds a larger project. Rowan Hudson and I are transcribing everything Bud recorded in these years, note for note, toward a book on his comping and soloing style. The videos, synced to these stems, are going up on this YouTube playlist as we finish them.