Bud's O.K.

When Bud Powell left Manhattan for Paris in 1958, his friends prayed that the change of locale might somehow exorcise the demons that had plagued him for much of his life. Instead, Powell sank even deeper into his private inferno. After five years abroad he was a shattered, empty-eyed hulk, a stranger to himself and his music. When friends finally placed him in a hospital outside Paris a year ago, he was suffering from tuberculosis, alcoholism, malnutrition and other legacies of hard living. Doctors said that he would not recover for at least three years. But Powell progressed rapidly, was soon transferred to a convalescent sanatorium where he spent long hours at the piano and wrote his first new music in six years.

Up from Limbo. Yet, amazingly, last week Bud Powell, now 39, was back on the U.S. jazz scene, cured of TB and fat as a Burgermeister. The homecoming was staged at Birdland, New York's famed jazz temple, which after a two-month fling at booking rock-'n'-rollers (TIME, May 8) has returned to hosting modern jazzmen. The metamorphosis was complete when Powell forcefully struck the first chords of The Best Thing for You Is Me. His attack was robust and sure, erupting in a series of crashing, dissonant chords, then retreating in flights of delicate melodic figures. His forehead awash with perspiration, head bobbing to the driving beat, he loosed a cascade of lush, intricate, tragically orchestrated chords and weeping melodies in Like Someone in Love, punctuated by his urgent gasps and moans.

Ill or well, Powell has long been the unchallenged master of the jazz ballad. The extraordinary virtuosity and spine-chilling passion that gained him that title years ago were only flickeringly evident at his Birdland opening. But his audience vociferously agreed that he was still a master, his performance a giant step up from limbo.

A State of Grace. Since 1939, when Powell first soared to prominence as a 15-year-old boy wonder, his entire career has been a long, tense battle with drink, drugs and derangement. He sat in at the birth of bop at Minton's Playhouse in New York, toured with Cootie Williams' Orchestra. Then in 1945 he suffered the first of a series of breakdowns that have kept him in and out of mental hospitals ever since. He formed his own trio in 1949 and was soon the dominant pianist in jazz and the idol of a generation of followers. Then he cracked up and spent 1951-53 in a hospital. He rarely played well again.

The architect of Powell's recovery has been Francis Poudras, a 29-year-old commercial artist from Paris, who is Bud's most devoted fan and fulltime guardian angel. Poudras lives with Powell, doles out his food and money, protectively escorts him everywhere to keep him on the straight and narrow. "People say Bud is crazy or lost or silent." says Poudras, "but he is really in a state of grace." Powell still spends most evenings sitting quietly alone, smiling to himself, wrapped in a cocoon of benign silence. Yet to anyone who has seen him since he fled to Europe, he seems to have undergone a miracle cure. On good days now he even chats happily. For the first time in years, his message is hopeful: "Please tell everybody that Bud's O.K., and he's feeling fine and is ready to play."

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