A History Of Blue Note Records: 1949

Bud Powell's Modernists – August 9 1949

Richard Havers – Uncompromising Expression p.76

By August 1949, Blue Note was ready to bop again, this time with pianist Bud Powell along with his Modernists – trumpeter Fats Navarro, Sonny Rollins on tenor saxophone, Tommy Potter on bass, and drummer Roay Haynes. Rollins was 18 years old and had recorded with Babs Gonzales and J.J. Johnson earlier in the year, but this was only his fifth session.

Bud Powell

Roy Haynes

Ira Gitler – Fats Navarro Prime Source Liner Notes BN-LA-507-H2 1975

The August 1949 date was first released under the name, Bud Powell and his Modernists. When Powell was at the top of his game, as he was here, he could be nothing short of miraculous and the equal of any improviser in jazz. More often he was heard in a trio context. so this quintet date is a rare treat with a mature Navarro and a budding Sonny Rollins as the front line. Tommy Potter, best known for his tenure With Charlie Parker in 1947-49, is the bassist and Roy Haynes. who had only played with Monk, Coltrane, Lester Young and Parker — he was between jobs with Pres and Bird at the time—is the drummer.

Monk's 52nd Street Theme was the sign-off theme on "the Street," and Bird used it from then on. There's good riffing behind Rollins and then Fats comes on swiftly, eating up the changes, the notes spitting out of his horn like guided missiles of joy. to be followed by the incomparable Bud.

A Middle Eastern fanfare precedes the theme of Powell's Dance of the Infidels with its augmented blues changes and rhythmic hesitations. Bud strides majestically across the keys in complete command; Fats' strength is delicate: and Sonny is funky. his unique sense of time in evidence even then.

Bud is again magnificent on the alternate: Fats again subdued, power in reserve; and Sonny inventively uses the theme to get off on.

Wail in those days meant to swing hard, to really cook. Bud's Wail does that right from the git-go, with Sonny digging in Fats sets himself up with a neat introductory phrase and then goes on to quote I Hear Music. Bud is at his blazing best. You can sense after his choruses that he is just getting warmed up. Haynes crisply dispatches the final bridge.

The alternate is even faster. Fats begins his solo with the same phrase but then goes off in another direction. The ensemble on the way out is sloppy but the solo by Powell is incredible.

Lover Come Back To Me serves as the basis for Bud's third composition of the date, Bouncing With Bud, presented here in three takes. You can follow even more closely the similarities and the differences as the piece develops.

Speaking of development, the four sessions within afford a clear picture of a young trumpeter's evolution to giant stature. Fats Navarro, heir of Gillespie, progenitor of Clifford Brown.

Who was Fats Navarro? Tadd Dameron said it this way: "He pretty quiet. soulful, sensitive He never found himself, really. He was always searching, I don't know what was looking for — he had it!"

Test Pressing

Richard Cook - Blue Note Records: The Biography – Secker and Warburg 2001

Powell had already recorded as a leader for two other small labels, Roost and Clef - and with a group called the Be Bop Boys, for Savoy - before Lion brought him into the WOR Studios, where Blue Note did much of its recording. Lion enlisted Navarro and a nineteen-year-old tenor saxophonist, Sonny Rollins, as the front line, with Tommy Potter on bass and Roy Haynes on drums, and the group was noted on the Blue Note labels as Bud Powell's Modernists. Where Monk's bebop was always elliptical, Powell's was headlong. Though very different stylists, the two men held a strong mutual respect, and it was Monk who encouraged Powell early on. By the time he came to make his Blue Note debut he had long been regarded as one of the masters of the 52nd Street scene, but his personal history was particularly troubled: hospitalised after a beating in 1945, he subsequently underwent ECT and for much of the rest his life was troubled by mental problems (it has recently been suggested that he may have become epileptic, though if so it was never formally diagnosed).

Powell's music teems with activity, his right hand at times seeming to explode off the keyboard, his close kinship with drummers emphasising his percussive delivery, while his clear thinking at high speed and the often lovely melodies he spun countermand any sense that he is running ragged. The four quintet titles are multifarious. 'Bouncing With Bud', a remote derivation of 'l Got Rhythm', is a harsh jog. 'Wail' is helter-skelter, the soloists flying. 'Dance Of The Infidels' is one of his most particular melodies, beautifully set up for the horns, with Powell's own solo a marvel. He then nods towards Monk by covering that composers '52nd Street Theme', with an urgent Rollins followed by Navarro at his most immaculate and Powell himself, tearing impetuously through the changes and coming up without a stagger.

Fats Navarro and Sonny Rollins

Photos by Francis Wolff

Bob Blumenthal – The Amazing Bud Powell Volume 1 RVG CD Liner Notes

The August 9, 1949 session produced four titles by a quintet called Bud Powell’s Modernists and two more by just the rhythm section. It marked only the third record date as a leader for the already highly influential 24-year-old pianist, and would prove to include Powell’s only recordings at the head of a quintet. Powell had already spent an extended stay in the Creedmore Sanitarium, where he was given shock treatments; yet as Roy Haynes, the session’s drummer, recalled in a 1996 interview, this was one of the pianist’s most productive periods.

“I lived close to Bud ¡n 1949,” Haynes said. “He was on St. Nicholas Avenue near 141st Street in Harlem, and I lived closer to the river at 149th. He had his ups and downs, but he was beautiful then. When I’d come to his home, he’d say, ‘We don’t want no geniuses here,’ slam the door, laugh, then say ‘Come on in!’ Kenny Dorham and I were two of the older guys who would visit. Mostly, younger guys hung out there, Sonny Rollins and Jackie McLean and their friends. I don’t think we ever rehearsed, even when we had a job or when the record date came up. Bud would be in his bathrobe writing songs when we arrived; then he would play for us, like a private concert.”.

Haynes, Rollins, trumpeter Fats Navarro and bassist Tommy Potter joined Powell for the Modernists recordings. “I remember what a hot August day it was in the studio," Haynes recalled. “And I remember, at the end at the session, Bud saying, ‘Ten years from now, people will be playing what I played today.” Powell’s appraisal was both accurate and too modest. The ensemble’s trumpet/tenor front line, and its prominent interaction between strong horn soloists and interactive rhythm section, anticipated the hard-bop style that would dominate jazz n the late ‘50s. Of course, musicians are still playing Powell’s compositions, and emulating his solo style and that of the brilliant Navarro (near the end of his tragically brief career on this date) and Rollins (at the start of what 50 years later is his ongoing reign).

The jovial “Bouncing With Bud” immediately calls our attention to Powell’s oft-overlooked strengths as a composer. Not only is the main melody intriguing, but there is an arresting introduction, a written bridge (Charlie Parker and many other modernists left open blowing space on the “channel”) and a terse interlude to launch the soloists. The master, recorded after the two alternates and taken at a more confident tempo, finds Haynes playing the breaks in the interlude rather than Powell and Potter; otherwise the solo order is the same, with 16 bars each by Rollins and Navarro and a full chorus from Powell. The heraldic entrance of the young Rollins on the master particularly effective. Navarro begins with the same “Lover Come Back To Me” quote on each take, then spins it in different directions.

“Wail” is a more idiomatically boppish line, albeit still containing a written bridge. The alternate take, recorded first, is faster, and was probably rejected because Navarro is two bars late on the final chorus. The less frantic master finds both hornmen beginning their choruses as they did on the alternate, then adding fresh ideas. Powell takes two lucid choruses on both takes, and Haynes gets the bridge on the out chorus to himself.

“Dance Of The Infidels,” convoluted yet lyrical, ¡s a blues on altered chord changes. The stop-and-start melody, which sounds like both ends of a conversation, is 14-bars long, although the soloìsts play on the conventional 12-bar form. Powell gets four choruses on each take, with outstanding articulation and melodic invention, followed by Navarro and then Rollins for one each. The master, taped after the alternate, is played at a brighter tempo.

“52nd Street Theme” ¡s by Powell’s fellow composer/pianist and good friend Thelonious Monk. Critic Leonard Feather named the piece (according to his liner notes to an earlier reissue) “when the little groups along that thoroughfare were using it to open and close each set.” This version features a playful theme chorus, a chorus each by Rollins and Navarro, two by Powell, and the familiar 16-bar shout chorus leading to a Haynes bridge before the melody returns. The drummer’s powerful beat is at its most inspirational.

“You Go To My Head,” the first of two trio perforrmances is one of Powell’s most magisterial ballads. Only one chorus long, it is rich in melodic invention, broken by moments of judicious repetition and a brace of block chords near the end.

“Ornithology,” the Charlie Parker/Benny Harris line on “How High The Moon” chord changes, provides the clearest example of Tommy Potter’s important contribution to this immortal session. It features Powell all the way, and in this instance the three-chorus master was cut before the four-chorus alternate. Both takes find the pianist launching into double-time and beyond. “Bud loved to play fast,” Haynes noted. “Of course, that session was done before he went back into the hospital for 18 months. I picked him up when he was discharged, and that’s when you started thinking of Bud as having two periods, before and after. Before, he was much sharper.”

Photo by Francis Wolff

Michael Cuscuna – Bud Powell – Alternate Takes - BST 84430

On August 8, 1949, the pianist made his first record date for Blue Note and his first with horns. While all of the master takes are available on The Amazing Bud Powell, volumes one and two (1503 and 1504), the four alternates herein were only anthologized into The Fabulous Fats Navarro, volumes one and two (1531 and 1532). Though Navarro and a young Sonny Rollins play very well, it is Bud's forceful improvisations that make these alternates so fascinating.

Carl Woideck - The Complete Blue Note And Capitol Recordings Of Fats Navarro And Tadd Dameron

The recording session by “Bud Powell’s Modernists” (August 8, 1949) is one of Powell’s best dates and is also unusual in his early discography in that Bud added two horns to his usual trio on four of the pieces recorded that day (all four of which are included here.) Certain aspects of Powell’s quintet predict the conventions of the “hard-bop” style of the mid- to late-1950s. For example, tenor-trumpet front lines like Powell’s became much more common in the 1950s than previously, and, more specifically, the timbre and attack of Fats Navarro’s trumpet and Sonny Rollins’s tenor sax anticipate the incisiveness that led people to call bop “hard”. Like hard bop composers such as Horace Silver, Benny Golson and Clifford Brown, Bud Powell put a lot of care into his three compositions, writing out each section, including introductions. In fact, the overall sound of this group greatly resembles that of one of the most famous hard-bop groups, the Clifford Brown-Max Roach quintet of 1956. Fats Navarro of course played in the Powell group, and a trumpeter who had been strongly influenced by him, Clifford Brows, was in Brown-Roach. Significantly, Sonny Rollins lent his gritty timbre and characteristic attack to both ensembles. Ironically, Bud Powell’s brother Richie (who did not have a style like Bud’s) was the pianist in the Brown-Roach quintet. “Bouncing with Bud” is a straightforward 32-bar AABA Powell composition, Rollins and Navarro split a chorus. Sonny does his most consistent work on the master take; Fats begins each take with a quote of “Lover, Come Back To Me.” A fleet Powell introduction leads to Bud’s ABCA’. “Wail” with a chord progression similar to “I Got Rhythm.” Navarro plays well on the alternate take, but everything comes together for Fats on the slightly slower master take, and he comes close to creating the “perfect melody” of his own that he was striving for. Listen for his quotation of “I Hear Music.” A trumpet-tenor introduction based on a whole-tone scale leads to “Dance Of The Infidels,” a Powell blues whose melody is basically 12+2 bars in form, with solos using the usual 12-bar form. Navarro’s solo on the master take is more poised and focused. “52nd Street Theme” is an original composition by Powell’s mentor, Thelonious Monk. Sonny, Fats and Bud all solo strongly, aided greatly by a grove laid down by Tommy Potter and the amazing Roy Haynes.

Down Beat 10 February 1950 Volume 17 Issue 3

Both sides are distinguished mainly by the presence of a Mr. Fats Navarro, who gets off some quite distinctive trumpet. Pianist Bud Powell joins him with a chorus on Wail that is becoming. Drummer Roy Haynes deserves a bow likewise for his work on the entire side. (Blue Note 1567.)

Down Beat 24 March 1949 Volume 17 Issue 6

Fats Navarro, though he runs away with himself, plays several good sections on trumpet during Dance, as does Powell on piano. (Blue Note 1568.)