JAZZ: The King of the Hill

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There is soul and fuddle here. Heat and hesitation. The grace of real genius and at times a touch of madness. Among the five CDs that constitute The Complete Bud Powell On Verve and the four that make up The Complete Blue Note and Roost Recordings (Capitol), you get a deep experience of his gift and his torment. It is, much of it, great jazz. All of it is vital. These separate CD sets are neither monument nor memorial, even though this year marks the 70th anniversary of Powell's birth. Rather, the recordings provide a map of trails blazed. There are still some byways only Bud Powell dared wander down, and many that only he could find again, but a lot of piano players have followed his path. His work still lights the way. And more, it leads.

It's often said, as a way of orienting anyone coming to him fresh, that Powell did for the piano what Charlie Parker did for the saxophone. Together, and with no small assist from Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, they took a hand in fearlessly turning jazz inside itself, then inside out, as they created bebop. But Powell found distinctive melodic nuances on his keyboard. He wasn't as witty and romantic as Nat Cole or as exuberant a geometrician as Art Tatum, both non-beboppers. But he could find a secret, personal vibrancy on a standard like Jerome Kern's Yesterdays, or combine a dark heart with a soaring spirit in such tunes of his own as Crossin' the Channel and Cleopatra's Dream. And he could make Tea for Two, for God's sake, sound like an entire banquet, with the Mad Hatter himself doing the pouring.

Born in Harlem in 1924, Earl Powell was, on the evidence, something of a prodigy. His father was a building superintendent but also had some skill as a stride pianist, and he started giving his son lessons at the age of three. By the time Bud was seven, his father claimed, neighborhood musicians would come by and take the boy out so everyone could admire his chops. At 10 he could play Fats Waller and Art Tatum. While he was still in his teens, Powell fell in with Thelonious Monk, who after a time would even let Bud take over the piano for an evening's final set. Powell made his first recordings with trumpeter Cootie Williams' orchestra in 1943. He was 19.

His musicianship would grow, but against heavy odds, as Powell was beset by mental problems. In 1945 he was whaled on by a couple of Philadelphia cops when he went to a club to hear Monk. "They'd beaten him so badly around the head," Cootie Williams remembered, "((Bud's mother)) had to go get him ... His sickness started right there." Powell began showing signs of insanity, and that was combined with drinking and drug problems. He was periodically confined to psychiatric hospitals, where he underwent electroshock therapy and was even sprayed with water laced with ammonia. For a few years in the late 1940s, the wizard saxophone player Jackie McLean, eight years younger than Powell, spent a lot of time as a kind of musical apprentice and all-purpose guardian for him. He'd take Powell to performing dates, get him together with musicians like Parker who still revered him, and generally make sure he got through the day, and through the music.