Bud Powell - Get Happy

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Earl Rudolph "Bud" Powell (September 27, 1924 – July 31, 1966) was an American Jazz pianist. Powell has been described as one of "the two most significant pianists of the style of modern jazz that came to be known as bop", the other being his friend and contemporary Thelonious Monk.

Along with Monk, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Powell was a key player in the history of bebop, and his virtuosity as a pianist led many to call him "the Charlie Parker of the piano".

Bud Powell is one of the most important pianists in jazz and one of the most underrated because he spent over a third of his life in mental and medical hospitals. He was beaten by the police when he was twenty and he never fully recovered from that beating and as a result, he suffered pain and had to take drugs to alleviate the pain. ... In spite of that, he created a whole lot of wonderful music. Before Bud Powell, pianists were playing "boom, chuck" in the left hand and a lot of melodic figures in the right hand that tended to be arpeggios ...

Bud Powell was imitating Charlie Parker. So Bud was the first pianist to take Charlie Parker's language and adapt it successfully to the piano. That's why he is the most important pianist in music today because everybody plays like that now.

"Get Happy" is a song composed by Harold Arlen, with lyrics written by Ted Koehler.
It was the first song they wrote together, and was introduced by Ruth Etting in The Nine-Fifteen Revue in 1930.

Influenced by the Get Happy tradition, it is most associated with Judy Garland, who performed it in her last MGM film Summer Stock (1950). An instrumental, hot jazz arrangement of the song, performed by Abe Lyman's Brunswick Recording Orchestra, served as the original theme music for Warner Bros.' Merrie Melodies cartoons in 1932