Stop For Bud (1963)

In 1963, a short experimental film was made about Bud Powell. Half a century later, some musings on that Danish film and on Bud himself.

Bud means the wind if you are a Farsi speaker. Thus, for me, the name defines the music. Although he is one of my favorite pianists in jazz—whom I discovered through the Bud Plays Bird LP—he is never as fiery as one would expect from the wind. He is a bipolar giant. When playing I Remember Clifford at the Golden Circle club in Sweden, it seems the music might stop at any second. The melody blurs. The harmonies become foggy. The beat tends to get lost, and then, a moment later, found again. The seemingly dying music continues for nearly nine minutes. Through Clifford Brown's memory, Bud is lamenting himself, his very existence.

That bipolarity could surface in other forms as well. In the struggle between a classical completionist mode—when a piece has a clear beginning, middle, and end—and a sense of incompleteness and constant transfiguration, which makes it hard to detect the real core of the music. From the first category comes the jewel of all Blue Note recordings, The Scene Changes (1958), documented to the degree of perfection. All the songs are originals, executed neatly in the four-to-five-minute range. The second category consists mostly of tunes in slower tempos, as if Bud never quite manages to finish what he has started. This second type of music is closest to the films of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu: static, organic, and free from overstatement and jagged emotions—painfully true and precise. Even in later years, after gaining weight, with his motionless figure and impassive face staring at nowhere, Bud began to resemble Buddha.

While playing fast in jazz is often mistaken for passion, energy, and fierce poetry, Bud's coldness—urbane and somewhat post-electroshock—distances the uptempo from the listener. Rather than inviting us to swing along, it becomes an object of astonishment and petrification. The music, whether fast or slow, despite flawless group work (especially in trio format), throws the listener into a still moment of solitude. It plays as if Bud's mind is moving too fast but he is playing too slowly (My Devotion, 1962), or as if his mind is not working at all and he plays as fast as the wind to hide that fearful stillness (Bean and the Boys, 1963).

Many of these images and ideas are delivered in Stop For Bud, a short film made by Danish poet, filmmaker, and art critic Jørgen Leth. This poetic portrait of Bud Powell—without spending more than a few minutes showing Bud at the piano, and even those few minutes being soundless—succeeds in achieving something largely missing from today’s jazz films: finding the right images (to the extent the filmmaker’s visual vocabulary allows) to accompany the music, a constant translation between music and cinema.

The film, unsurprisingly, reflects the aesthetics of 1960s independent cinema, some drawn from cinéma vérité and others from the avant-garde. It also benefits from the tasteful visual traditions of Scandinavian jazz cinematography.

Danish cinema’s portraits of jazz artists in the 1960s, especially in TV productions, have always been superior to those of other countries regularly featuring jazz on television. The black-and-white, James Wong Howe–like photography of Duke Ellington and his men, or of the Bill Evans Trio, shows the sensitivity, musical knowledge, and mastery of lighting of the Danish crews—qualities largely absent, for instance, in American TV.

The sound accompanying the opening credit is the sound of night: crickets chirping. Then, standing in a completely empty white set, a tilt shot examines Bud Powell from his leather shoes to his sad eyes. Dexter Gordon narrates the film, though his delivery is closer to a eulogy than to narration. He remembers "the amazing Bud Powell" as pianist, composer, and innovator. Sometimes, however, his commentary—no matter how intimate—weakens the visual power of the film.

In contrast to the opening abstract shot, a beautiful image of a dark staircase leading to a bright street portrays Bud’s wandering around the city as a mental journey. People stare at him on the street, but he sees no one, gently marching on in his dark outfit and beret. He is portrayed as a ghost.

Bud’s uptempo pieces become images of urban life, while his ballads transport us to pastoral scenery. Stop For Bud combines both landscapes—parks, piers, streets, shipyards, meadows, junkyards, muddy roads—and even though the technique is not new, it remains effective.

In one scene, Bud wanders around a pier and crosses horizontally laid barrels whose circular forms, placed side by side, become a visual metaphor for his music. Bud even touches one of the barrels, as if gently touching the clavier. Tania Ørum summarizes Jørgen Leth’s visual style as “turning film into a series of tableaux, thus emphasizing the visual over the narrative, and demonstrating the constructivist rather than the illusionistic nature of film.”

At 5'23" there is a shot of Bud strolling along a country road, the gloomy perspective and passing trucks reminiscent of Antonioni’s Il Grido. The music, still romantic and slow-paced, clashes with the image. Ørum argues that this experimentation with the relation between sight and sound is part of Leth’s style, creating tension between what is shown on screen and what is said or heard.

In another scene, Bud walks into a littered area; as he sets foot there, seabirds fly up from the ground. Heaven/Hell seems to be another familiar visual metaphor for jazz life—here, executed effectively.

It is hard not to read the scene of Bud ascending on an escalator—his profile in silhouette—as the film’s most powerful and unforgettable cinematic metaphor. It encapsulates the essence of the music of a tortured soul.

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Reference:

Ørum, Tania. Danish Avant-Garde Filmmakers of the 1960s: Technology, Cross-aesthetics and Politics, 2007, pp. 271–272. In Avant-Garde Film, edited by Alexander Graf and Dietrich Scheunemann.