{"id":8739,"date":"2017-03-27T19:25:13","date_gmt":"2017-03-27T19:25:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=8739"},"modified":"2017-03-29T15:25:06","modified_gmt":"2017-03-29T15:25:06","slug":"pianist-tim-whalen-brings-his-powerful-tribute-to-bud-powell-to-the-jazz-estate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=8739","title":{"rendered":"Pianist Tim Whalen brings his powerful tribute to Bud Powell to the Jazz Estate"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cover design for Tim Whalen’s “Oblivion: The Music of Bud Powell” by Jamie Breiwick for \u00a0B-Side Graphics.\u00a0Courtesy www.timothywhalen.com<\/em><\/p>\n

Oblivion: The Music of Bud Powell<\/em> \u2013 Tim Whalen (WayHay Music)<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Tim Whalen Trio will perform on Thursday, April 6 at The Jazz Estate in Milwaukee.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cOblivion,\u201d the title of a Bud Powell tune, might be the single best word to describe the great pianist\u2019s sad legacy. His name is in need of desperate repair, ravaged by the winds of time and his own peculiar fate. Pianist-composer Tim Whalen has gone a considerable distance in accomplishing that with his album Oblivion: The Music of Bud Powell<\/em>. But we must backtrack a bit to understand the title\u2019s significance.<\/p>\n

It remains a matter of bald historical fact that Bud Powell was the mid-and-late 40s bebop era’s most sought-after pianist, yet he remains to this day probably the most underappreciated, given his true stature.<\/p>\n

His direct contemporary Thelonious Monk has had his day in the sun, something to be celebrated, thanks significantly \u00a0to a composing style apart from, and more easily congenial, than the hard-core bebop that Powell excelled at. And their stories interwtine and lead to perhaps the most fateful day of Powell\u2019s career, which also speaks to present-day concerns about police brutality against unarmed black men.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unfortunate that Robin D.G. Kelly\u2019s largely impeccable and voluminous 2009 biography, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original<\/em>, doesn\u2019t note the cruelty and neurological damage done by a police officer on the night of January 21, 1945 to the man that Kelley calls Thelonious Monk\u2019s best friend. \u00a0According to Duck Baker, album annotator of Bud Powell Paris Sessions<\/em> (Pablo 2002), \u201cBud was foolish enough to interfere with some Philadelphia flatfeet who were getting rough with his best friend, Thelonious Monk.” The bludgeoning Powell suffered for his loyal courage \u201cchanged the course of his life, as Bud was led to a series of mental \u2018hospitals\u2019 where he was pumped full of pills and given shock treatments.\u201d<\/p>\n

Powell\u2019s life generally spiraled downward after that, though he managed a resurgence in 1946, as evidenced by several recordings and, after being readmitted to a mental institution in 1947, by his celebrated Blue Note recordings (especially 1951’s The Amazing Bud Powell Vol. 1.<\/em>) Also excellent are recordings in Europe in the late ’50s and early ’60s, including a late reunion with Dexter Gordon on the saxophonist\u2019s superb Our Man in Paris<\/em>. His career ended in \u201cscuffling obscurity,\u201d says jazz historian Alyn Shipton, due to his complicated mental problems and issues with drugs, and ironically to his return to New York in 1964. This was a man who, in his early 20s with the Cootie Williams Orchestra, had accompanied stage acts \u201cso brilliantly that he outplayed the dancers he was supposed to be accompanying,\u201d bassist Ray Brown recalls in Shipton\u2019s book.1<\/p>\n

Regarding the deleterious effects of shock treatment, I can attest, as it has been still used in recent years in sophisticated hospitals and clinics. I witnessed shock treatments given to my late ex-wife who suffered cognitive damage after undergoing them at the Mayo Clinic and other facilities.<\/p>\n

Monk, for one, remained much attuned to Powell\u2019s travails. \u201cBud was a genius, but you know, he was so sick, and now he\u2019s fragile,\u201d Monk once recalled. Another time, Monk commented, \u201cBud is beautiful. But he\u2019s not doing so well in America, he’s sleeping in the gutter.\u201d Those are both quotes from Kelly\u2019s copious Monk biography, which amounts to a new sort of definitive history of the bebop era.<\/p>\n

Nor have I done Powell justice over the years, having become enamored of the late recordings he did of Monk\u2019s music for Verve Records (and his Portrait of Thelonious<\/em> on Columbia), to the neglect of Powell\u2019s earlier work. Those Monk recordings somehow managed to be marvelous but were recorded long after he had lost his prime bebop musical facility and suffered from many medical peaks and valleys. 2.<\/p>\n

\"Whelan\"<\/p>\n

Pianist Tim Whalen\u00a0at the recording sessions for “Oblivion: The Music of Bud Powell.” Courtesy timothywhalen.com<\/em><\/p>\n

All of this underscores the importance and value of Whalen\u2019s recording, which he will be playing from when he performs Thursday, April 6 at The Jazz Estate in Milwaukee with bassist Jeff Hamman and drummer Dave Bayles.<\/p>\n

Comprising all Powell compositions except one by Whalen, Oblivion<\/em> opens appropriately enough with \u201cHallucinations.\u201d It conveys how much Bud possessed a spirit as high as his tragic bop kindred Charlie Parker. Whalen\u2019s solo pushes hard, as if pressing to make a point about the tune\u2019s odd juxtaposition of exuberance and sense of suffering. His heavy percussive attack recalls another bop-era pianist Eddie Costa, although he negotiates the knotty changes with aplomb.<\/p>\n

What follows is one of Powell\u2019s dazzling masterpieces, an impressionistic miniature comparable to Duke Ellington\u2019s \u201cDaybreak Express.\u201d After a fine chordal intro, Powell\u2019s \u201cParisian Thoroughfare\u201d glitters with an ensemble line evoking a bustling street scene, with the band sounding like a crazy chorus-line of dancing cabs in a Folies Bergere fever dream.<\/p>\n

Whalen finds fresh inlets of light by carving out spaces and adding garlands, a sort of blending of street smarts with Francophile ornamentation. Tenor saxophonist Elijah Jamal Balbed is a modern post-Coltrane player with a rich yet grainy texture to his tone that alludes to classic tenor players and adds an offhanded gravitas to his playing. Guitarist Paul Pieper proves a swift co-conspirator in Powell\u2019s most challenging harmonic gauntlets. Drummer Sharif Taher here has a powerful chugging style reminiscent of Tony Williams.<\/p>\n

\u201cKind Bud\u201d is a deeper, darker aspect of Powell\u2019s bebop and for its blues lament, almost intimates a political statement about the tragic fate of such a gifted artist, especially regarding his awareness of his place in society as a black man in a white man\u2019s world.<\/p>\n

\u201cUn Poco Loco\u201d is another ironic commentary on his own afflictions and perhaps the album\u2019s hardest swinging tune, especially on Balbed\u2019s surging sax solo. Whalen, by contrast, allows the music to breathe a bit, while never betraying the tune\u2019s structural integrity.<\/p>\n

The CD\u2019s ensuing \u201cBlue Pearl\u201d is a rather glimmering beauty with a slight Latin tempo. The comparatively little-known tune has a lapidarian quality, reflecting a craftsman of precise discipline that begets beauty. Here and elsewhere, bassist Eliott Seppa’s harmonizing with the piano-guitar-saxophone frontline recalls the Heath Brothers at their peak.<\/p>\n

One would expect the title tune \u201cOblivion\u201d to sound as abject as say, Billy Strayhorn\u2019s \u201cLush Life,\u201d but the band understands it as a \u201cbouncing with Bud\u201d blues that signifies a devil-may-care attitude. That suggests Powell\u2019s peculiar brilliance as searingly self-possessed in the knowledge of how his black genius was betrayed. Yet he\u2019d never let on, never let you see him pitying himself.<\/p>\n

\"BudBud Powell during the years he recorded with Blue Note Records.\u00a0Courtesy estaticos 02.elmundo.es<\/em><\/p>\n

Sometimes Powell\u2019s themes and solos can be almost overwhelming, but you get a heaping helping of bop at its most modernistic and visionary and yet with a long shadow cast over it, as the CD cover\u2019s noirish watercolor landscape superbly conveys.\u00a0So perhaps even now, this music isn\u2019t for everyone, but there\u2019s no doubt it\u2019s a bracing and historic statement of an art form evolving to extraordinary artistic heights.<\/p>\n

Whalen offers his own ode to Bud, in “I\u2019ll Keep Loving You,\u201d a brooding ballad that feels like a stealthy suitor stealing into the beloved\u2019s heart even if the lover\u2019s been long gone, off in another world.<\/p>\n

Still, Whalen and company assure that Bud Powell has returned, in hallowed honor.<\/p>\n

Whalen is a distinctly ambitious musician who has led both a popular R&B\/funk jazz ensemble and a nonet, largely of Madison-based musicians, for a number of years. Among numerous accomplishments since moving to Washington DC in 2010, he orchestrated the string arrangement for the Oscar-winning song \u201cEl Otro Lado del Rio\u201d by Jorge Drexler from the film The Motorcycle Diaries<\/em>.<\/p>\n

___________<\/p>\n

1 Alyn Shipton recounts Powell\u2019s triumphs and tragedy in his A New History of Jazz<\/em> on pages 491-495.<\/p>\n

2. Despite Powell’s apparent loss of top-end technical facility in later years, the musical relationship between him and Monk remained crucial and vital. Some argue that Powell was Monk’s best<\/em> interpreter. Seminal bebop drummer Kenny Clarke reputedly said, “Monk wrote for Bud. All his music was written for Bud, because he figured but was the only one who could play it.”\u00a0https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Portrait-Thelonious-Bud-Powell\/dp\/B000002AHT<\/a><\/p>\n

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Cover design for Tim Whalen’s “Oblivion: The Music of Bud Powell” by Jamie Breiwick for \u00a0B-Side Graphics.\u00a0Courtesy www.timothywhalen.com Oblivion: The Music of Bud Powell \u2013 Tim Whalen (WayHay Music) The Tim Whalen Trio will perform on Thursday, April 6 at … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[231,227,224,221,222,126,230,21,229,225,228,226,232,105,223],"class_list":["post-8739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-www-kevernacular-com","tag-the-motorcycle-diaries","tag-alyn-shipton","tag-bebop","tag-bud-powell","tag-charlie-parker","tag-dexter-gordon","tag-eddie-costa","tag-jamie-breiwick","tag-kenny-clarke","tag-modern-jazz","tag-ray-brown","tag-robin-d-g-kelley","tag-the-jazz-estate","tag-thelonious-monk","tag-tim-whalen"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hJWE-2gX","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8739"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8757,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8739\/revisions\/8757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}