The Amazing Bud Powell - The Scene Changes, Vol. 5 (1983 Japanese Blue Note Stereo Vinyl LP)

The Amazing Bud Powell - The Scene Changes, Vol. 5 | Vinyl LP - 1983 Japanese Blue Note Stereo Reissue (BNJ-71004, Toshiba-EMI)

Bud Powell more or less invented modern jazz piano. In the 1940s, alongside Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, he worked out how to play bebop at the keyboard, fast right-hand lines over spare left-hand chords, and every pianist who came after owes him something. By 1958 he had been through a great deal, long stretches in psychiatric hospitals, electroshock treatment and heavy medication that had blunted some of his powers. But when he sat down at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack that December with Paul Chambers on bass and Art Taylor on drums, the old lightning was still there. Every tune is his own. "Cleopatra's Dream" leads the way, a dark, catchy minor-key line that became a standard, and the rest are compact and nervy, hooky in a way his earlier writing rarely was. Alfred Lion produced, as he had all Powell's Blue Notes.

The Scene Changes was the last of Powell's classic Blue Note dates. Within months he had moved to Paris, where he spent most of his remaining years. That makes this record something of a farewell to his great American run, and one that finds him, against the odds, still playing with fire.

This is the 1983 Japanese pressing on Blue Note, manufactured by Toshiba-EMI and licensed from Capitol, with an obi and a Japanese insert, wearing Reid Miles's cover design and Francis Wolff's photograph.