7. Glass Enclosure

Bud Powell: The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 2 (Blue Note, 1954);
composed by Earl Rudolph Powell

This is a through-composed miniature suite that Powell wrote, reportedly, while semi-imprisoned by the owner of Birdland who wanted to ensure Powell would be in shape to play a scheduled date. But even though the “enclosure” was probably that apartment rather than Bellevue, where Powell had been committed more than once by then, it does not matter all that much to the nightmare the music immediately brings to mind. Bud Powell’s brilliance is something we know primarily by implication. Not that he left no artifacts; he made some astounding recordings that only began to bland out after the mid-‘50s when the schizophrenia got too much for his playing to fend off. But that he was fully a peer of Parker and Monk is something we have to deduce from clues like this recording, which is unlike anything else Powell did and unlike anything any of his peers put on record, but still emblematic of what Mingus once said about the bebop theoreticians: that they should go down as composers above all else. Their improvisational calculus was as much about opening up unkown galaxies of musical material as to constitute some sentimental ideal of free expression, which is a sunk cost.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).