Bud Powell behind Sarah Vaughan
Bud Powell backed Sarah Vaughan twice: May 1946, in the Tadd Dameron Orchestra rhythm section for four Musicraft sides, with Freddie Webster, Kenny Clarke, and nine strings; July 1950, both sides of a Columbia single under Norman Leyden. Seven titles, counting the alternate take of My Kinda Love the discography lists but that does not survive.
These were the sides missing from the Bud Powell sideman post; the best transfer of each plays there. Same problem as the Morton records: a 78 has no master tape, so what you hear depends on the pressing and its speed. For each tune I collected every transfer findable: shelf pressings, CD issues, collector uploads, 78 channels. That came to 55 transfers across six tunes, eight to eleven per tune.
Vaughan sang most of these titles for thirty years, so title alone proves nothing. Each candidate was checked against a known copy of the 1946 or 1950 master by chroma comparison across twelve transpositions; that eliminated a lot of correctly titled wrong records. A second pass compared survivors on a log-mel fingerprint, catching what chroma cannot: the same digital master re-posted under another channel name. True re-posts match at 0.999; different masterings run 0.78 to 0.98. Six turned up that way.
Every transfer went through the same pipeline: source separation pulls the piano out, a tuning pass corrects transfer speed varispeed-style so pitch and tempo move together, and a transcription model reads the corrected stem. Corrections ran from −34 to +42 cents.
Vaughan comes off the band stem onto her own fader, mixed forward as a 1946 vocal side is; one fader puts her on top of the band. Split out, what's left is Dameron's writing: Freddie Webster's trumpet, Leo Parker's baritone under the strings, Powell comping inside an arrangement rather than under a singer. She starts at −8 dB so the arrangement comes first; raise her for the record as issued.
On the best transfer of each tune the orchestra is peeled apart further: bass, drums, guitar, strings, winds, each pass fed what the last one left. The guitar fader appears only on the 1950 sides, where Mundell Lowe returns at 76 and 81 percent continuity; on the 1946 date it returns silence on three tunes and eight percent scattered transients on the fourth. Dameron's personnel has no guitarist; a model finding one there would be inventing it. Those six get a fader per section, named for the players where personnel is known; the other forty-nine keep the three-fader set, since they're there to compare pressings.
The drums do not survive that. Kenny Clarke comes back at −85 dB on My Kinda Love and lower still on I Can Make You Love Me: silence rather than a quiet stem, so those tunes get no drum fader. He's playing brushes on ballads, and brushes are the one thing these models can't find. Only If You Could See Me Now holds a usable drum stem from 1946; Terry Snyder survives on the 1950 side, playing with sticks.
One transfer shows what a worn pressing does. On I Can Make You Love Me, the copy marked Musicraft 78 (copy B) scores 54.7 percent and yields 202 notes, where the other seven sit between 77 and 87 percent and give 875 notes or more. Chroma confirms it's the same recording: groove wear the separator couldn't read, not a different take. The pressing filed here as copy A is labelled I Could Make You Love Me, the real Musicraft 396 issue title, not a mistake, and matches the Powell side rather than the 1945 song of that name.
The two 1950 Columbia sides sit ten to twenty points below the 1946 ones throughout, which is Powell inside a full studio orchestra rather than a separation failure.
Every transfer, ranked
Continuity is the fraction of half-second windows above −50 dB in the piano stem: higher means fewer holes. Notes is how many notes the transcription model heard. The waveform shows where the gaps fall. Neither number settles anything; both point to where to listen. Click a name to load that transfer in the mixer.
More Bud Powell on Founders of the Jazz Rhythm Section.