While the blog posts have slowed down, the ripping hasn’t. But as I dig more and more into the back shelves as well as a number of discs that I have picked up to fill out parts of a collection (for instance, my Idil Biret Chopin discs which are quite good but don’t really hold a special place in my mind) I was finding that I just wasn’t that into writing about everything. Not that the choice discs in my collection have been exhausted – there are still quite a few left. But since most of those were on the visible part of my shelves, it stands to reason that fewer and fewer of those discs are left. I still want to rip them all, just don’t feel a want to talk about all of them.

So there has been some Chopin this week, some more Faure and finally some Bud Powell. In terms of listening to jazz, I came to Bud Powell kind of late. Mostly because I was usually more drawn to horn players. But within the last five years or so, the pianists I have finally gotten around to listening to (Bud Powell, Andrew Bird and Mal Waldron for example) have all given me a much deeper appreciation for the piano in jazz. Though it is not as though I didn’t have some appreciation before. It’s just that it was always in the context of other players. I came to Red Garland and McCoy Tyner through John Coltrane, and I like Nat King Cole’s piano playing, but you really pay attention to his singing. I did start listening to Thelonious Monk pretty early on, and since I really liked him, if I wanted to put on some jazz piano I would put on Monk. So much jazz piano seemed to take the idea of playing as fast as possible (Dizzy Gillespie once said bop was his way to play music so fast that no one else could keep up) didn’t quite fare as well on piano. On trumpet or saxophone playing a single line as fast as possible works well. On piano it can (and often did) become cacophonous. So finding piano players that did play impressively fast bop yet seemed to really focus so much on a melodic line was, for some reason, a surprise. It really shouldn’t have been… but I still remember putting on my first Bud Powell disc and being surprised how melodic his music was. And how interesting the chord voicings were. Most of all, it seemed like there was an aspect of bop I had never noticed, and I was hooked all over again.

And the funny thing is, it was an album cover that made me pick up my first Bud Powell disc (shown above). First – it is a classic Blue Note cover, wonderful filtered pic of the artist. But it is the kid looking over his shoulder that really caught me. The album was recorded later in Bud’s career, when medication for schizophrenia (after a couple of mental hospital stays) has started to slow his playing down. The title of the album (“The Scene Changes”) hints a bit at the poetics of the cover. He knows he is the old guy, and that the younger ones are coming in. There is still a respect for him of course, but he knows that he is on his way out, and it is important that he passes whatever he can on to the younger generation. Blue Note has so many great covers from this period, but I think this one may be the most beautiful one they ever did.