7:00 pm
Bud Powell—Time Waits: The Amazing Bud Powell (1958)
The invisible man sits at a table by himself, munching on a bread roll. He loves this restaurant—the godfather booths, the mood lighting, the jazz on the speakers—the whole kit and caboodle just has such fantastic ambiance. Normally just being here makes him feel mellow and content, but tonight he's feeling kind of anxious, worrying if his date is going to show up. She's almost forty-five minutes late and he's starting to wonder if he's been stood up, or for that matter, if she even knew they were supposed to meet in the first place. It wouldn't be the first time
that's happened—meeting someone he likes at a party only to discover later that she had mistaken him for a coat hanging on a door and assumed she was talking to the cute guy standing nearby in line for the bathroom. He's not generally a morose sort of person, he usually tries to see the bright side of things, but it's moments like this when his condition definitely feels like a burden. He slouches down in his chair and tries to immerse himself in the sounds of the bebop album that fills the air around him,
Time Waits: The Amazing Bud Powell.
Like our transparent friend sitting alone in the the restaurant, this album is generally upbeat but with a depressive undercurrent running throughout that it fights very hard against. It opens with the latin-esque "Buster Rides Again", which is one of those swinging, upbeat songs where it's almost impossible to keep your body from moving while listening to it, due in a large part to the interplay between Powell's rhythmic keys and the shapeshifting patterns of drummer Philly Joe Jones. The second track, "Sub City" is a little more mellow, but still a toe-tapping bebop classic, with somebody, probably Powell, off-mic scatting nonsense along with the melody. It's not until track number three, the title track, that the album slumps down into melancholy. Sure it tries to sound simply relaxed, but the subtly dissonant, off-kilter piano staggers reveal a heart that belongs more to the sad sack passed out at the bar than the hipster smoking a cigarette by the stage. Once revealed, the sullen soul of this album can't hide itself despite it's best stabs at being cheery. On the subsequent tracks, "Marmelade", "Monopoly" and "John's Abbey", for example, the tunes pump along in groovy bop fashion, but those off-mic vocals show up again, sounding less like scatting and more like a testy drunk arguing with himself in an alley. Beyond that, on the last of those three, the entire piece feels like it's teetering on the verge of mania. On the one hand it's straight-up bebop, but on the other, like a lot of classic bop, its formalism barely able to contain itself within a mechanism that's flying out of control. In the end, the album turns introspective again with "Dry Soul", another late night rambler that sounds anything but dry.
The despondency that seeps in around the edges of this album is unfortunately no surprise. It was recorded late in Powell's career, when his alcoholism and personal baggage were just on the verge of obliterating his talent. His brother had died less than two years before, in the same Pennsylvania car wreck that killed legendary jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown, but even before that Powell was not the most stable of characters. He was abnormally sensitive to the effects of alcohol and sadly also came to be dependent on it. He spent several years of his life in mental institutions, overmedicated and subjected to electroshock therapy. The result was a shattered man. A genius on par with Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, but one who was so tragically broken that in end he died young—only eight years after this album—of tuberculosis, alcoholism and malnutrition, no longer even able to play piano like he used to.