The Amazing Bud Powell, Vols. 1 & 2 are a pair of separate but related albums by American jazz pianist Bud Powell, recorded on August 8, 1949, May 1, 1951, and August 14, 1953, and released on Blue Note in 1956, compiling Powell's first three sessions for the label, originally released on ten-inch LPs as The Amazing Bud Powell (1952) and The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 2 (1954).
Background
Recording Powell recorded his first three session for Blue Note at WOR Studios in New York. In the first session, Powell performed in quintet with Fats Navarro, Sonny Rollins, Tommy Potter and Roy Haynes, and in trio with Potter and Haynes. In the second, Powell performed in trio with Curley Russell and Max Roach, and solo. In the third, Powell is backed by rhythm section George Duvivier and Art Taylor.
Release history Volume 1 was initially released in March 1956; Volume 2 was released the following month.
After 10"s became less popular, Blue Note began reissuing its Modern Jazz Series on 12"s. The three sessions were subsequently recompiled across The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume 1 (BLP 1503) and The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume 2 (BLP 1504), the second pair of releases on Blue Note's 1500 series, their first one hundred 12" records after they discontinued their line of 10" records.
The two volumes were recompiled for their CD reissue, ordering the three sessions chronologically, placing the first session and the solo takes from the second session on Volume 1, and three trio takes and the third session on Volume 2. These remasters were also included on The Complete Blue Note and Roost Recordings, a four-disc box set.
When Rudy Van Gelder remastered the pair of the 2001 RVG edition, he placed the first two sessions on Volume 1 and the third session on Volume 2, mirroring the original 10" releases. Prior to this, on all releases bar the first, the album also contained a number of tracks from sessions originally on The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 1.
Reception The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings included both albums in its suggested “core collection” of essential recordings.
The albums are highly rated within Powell's musical library, described by All About Jazz as "among the pianist's most important recordings" and by The Complete Idiot's Guide to Jazz as "a great introduction to this awesome pianist". Jazz critic Scott Yanow characterized them in his book Jazz on Record as "full of essential music".
In Bebop: The Best Musicians and Recordings, Yanow identifies among the highlights of the album "Bouncing with Bud", "52nd Street Theme" and "Dance of the Infidels," performed by the "very exciting quintet" of 1949, and also the 1951 trio's "three stunning versions of 'Un Poco Loco'". In The Blackwell Guide to Recorded Jazz, Barry Kernfeld notes with regards to "Un Poco Loco" that "the three takes [of the song]...enable us to hear the evolution of a masterpiece", a label with which a critic at The New York Times concurred.
While the song "Un Poco Loco" has been identified as musically outstanding, it has also been discussed as culturally significant. According to Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop, although Afro-Cuban jazz had been introduced in the 1940s by such artists as Dizzy Gillespie and Machito, "Un Poco Loco" is a significant marker in the establishment of this musical genre, as it revealed "the Afro-Cuban turn settling into bebop's acceptable field of rhetorical conventions". More than Afro-Cuban, the authors of that book detect what they describe as a "Pan-African" musical influence in the composition's repetition, harmony and cyclic solo that, while not as obviously Afro-international as Gillespie's "A Night in Tunisia', "certainly signaled a 'blackness' that became part of the language of subsequent expressions of modern jazz."Ramsey and Ramsey, 128–130. The book Jazz 101 indicates that Powell's performances of this material in 1951 was "all the more astonishing" in its "level of creativity, and even authenticity" because little was known at the time of African music or how Latin music (aside from the Cuban influence) could be applied to jazz. According to Yanow, in Afro-Cuban Jazz: The Essential Listening Companion, this composition was Powell's only involvement with Afro-Cuban Jazz.
Track listing
The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume 1 (1956, 12", BLP 1503)
The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume 2 (1956, 12", BLP 1504)
CD reissues
1989 reissue
2001 RVG edition
Personnel
Musicians
August 8, 1949
Bud Powell – piano Fats Navarro – trumpet (except "You Go to My Head", "Ornithology") Sonny Rollins – tenor saxophone (except "You Go to My Head", "Ornithology") Tommy Potter – bass Roy Haynes – drums
May 1, 1951
Bud Powell – piano Curley Russell – bass (except "Over the Rainbow", "It Could Happen to You") Max Roach – drums (except "Over the Rainbow", "It Could Happen to You")
August 14, 1953
Bud Powell – piano George Duvivier – bass Art Taylor – drums
Technical personnel
Original
Alfred Lion – producer Doug Hawkins – recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder – mastering John Hermansader – design Francis Wolff – photography Leonard Feather – liner notes
Reissue
Michael Cuscuna – producer Rudy Van Gelder – disc transfers (1989); disc transfers, digital audio restoration and mastering (2001) Ron McMaster (1989) – digital transfers Leonard Feather (1989), Bob Blumenthal (2001) – liner notes
References