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This week Kate Molleson explores the life and work of a jazz giant in his centenary year: the amazing Bud Powell, in the company of Powell’s biographer Peter Pullman. Focusing on Bud Powell as a performer, prioritising his own compositions but also appreciating the art of improvisation as spontaneous composition.

Bud Powell was born in 1924 and grew up in Harlem, against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance. He was a gifted pianist from a young age and became a pioneer of bebop. But he was a troubled soul and the great paradox of Bud Powell is how there could be such joy and expression in his music while his life was so painful.

Today Kate Molleson and Peter Pullman follow Bud Powell to Paris where he and his partner Altevia Edwards moved in 1959. We can catch a glimpse of him in this period in films. One of them a vibrant performance with Charles Mingus; another an objectifying art film made by Danish fans; a third came decades later, with the fictionalised movie Round Midnight, in which the Powell character was played by his old friend Dexter Gordon. Powell had gone to Paris in search of a fresh start and regular work. For a time he found both with a steady gig at the Blue Note Café in Paris and as part of a trio that went under the name the Three Bosses. Any steadiness in his life was, however, doomed to be temporary.

Peter Pullman's deeply researched biography of Bud Powell is called Wail: the Life of Bud Powell.

To listen on most smart speakers, just say: "Ask Â鶹Éç Sounds to play Composer of the Week."

Music featured:
Buttercup (from Bud Powell’s Moods)
Round Midnight (from Bud Powell: Live at the Blue Note Café Paris 1961)
How High the Moon / Ornithology (from Live in Lausanne 1962)
Broadway (from Our Man in Paris)
I’ll Remember April (from Mingus at Antibes)
I Can’t Get Started (from Bud Powell in Paris)
Blues for Bouffemont (from Blues for Bouffemont)