Bud Powell - Piano Solo on "Body and Soul"
Bud Powell was a jazz genius, arguably the most creative and influential pianist the music has ever known. But like such legendary figures as Charlie Parker, Lester Young, and Billie Holiday , he was a profoundly troubled genius. Those troubles began at the age of 21 with head injuries inflicted in a police beating in 1945, and his life became a litany of arrests, hospital stays, shock treatment, over-medication, and self-medication, until he finally left America for France in 1959. Bud Powell's life story served as the basis for the 1986 Bertrand Tavernier movie Round Midnight, in which Dexter Gordon played the main character. But the role also has elements of the lives of Lester Young and Dexter Gordon himself woven into it.
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