The art of bebop: Earl Bud Powell and the emergence of modern jazz.

Abstract

Earl Bud Powell (1924-66) came of age musically during the bebop era. Born in New York City, he began piano study at age six, concentrating primarily on the literature of the European masters. At fifteen, Powell began playing New York nightclubs and within a decade became the quintessential modern jazz pianist. Despite his importance to jazz piano, Powell has not been the primary focus of a scholarly study. Through an examination of his early career, this thesis explores Powell's distinctive contribution to jazz as both a soloist and composer (through 1947) during bebop's formative years. The bebop idiom is often depicted as a modernist musical form, the work of an elite class of musicians who consciously moved jazz into the realm of art. But bebop also displays links to black vernacular culture as well as to popular music. Thus, the bebop as fine art interpretation privileges only one part of the bebop aesthetic, overlooking much of its complexity. In this study, cultural and musical analysis of Powell's early recordings and a variety of secondary sources show why bebop can be interpreted both as an African-American expression and as a modernist Western one. While bebop's complexity has often been compared to its European antecedents (as in the notion that jazz is America's classical music), its place within black vernacular and intellectual culture--especially within the context of other arts--has yet to be assessed convincingly.