Thursday, March 10, 2011

Joe Boyd And His Book White Bicycles Making Music In The 1960's And Something About Bud Powell And Buttercup Powell



Click to enlarge the photo. That is Joe Boyd in the photo above wearing the hat. Really good book about the folk,pop,jazz, music scene of the 1960s. Joe Boyd was on the scene both  here in the USA and also in the UK and Europe and desbribes it well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Boyd
And the link below is to Joe Boyd's website.
http://www.joeboyd.co.uk/
    We happened in late June 2007 to be in Paris and were walking by the bookstore Shakespeare and Company and saw and heard Joe Boyd reading from this book which had first come out in 2006.
   It was a subject that interested me so we stopped to listen. Turned out he was in Paris as a young man in the summer of 1964 just I had been.
It started to rain so he had to move inside the bookstore. I followed the crowd in and spoke with him briefly as they were getting set up inside. I told him I had met Buttercup Powell and her little boy. The little boy appears in the photograph of Bud Powell album THE SCENE CHANGES on Blue Note. The child is standing by Bud at the piano.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scene_Changes:_The_Amazing_Bud_Powell_(Vol._5)
Read more about Buttercup Powell and Bud Powell and the little boy and the summer of 1964 in Paris here:
http://joeb-tallyho.blogspot.com/2010/07/hotel-la-louisiane-paris-france-summer.html
  Joe Boyd asked me if I had been to Buttercup Powell's soul food restaurant in Paris in 1964 and I told him I had not. I found out from reading the article from Feb.1965 EBONY magazine that Buttercup did not start her restaurant until September 1964 and I was back in the USA by that time.
 She was cooking fried chicken for the American Jazz musicians living in Paris in 1964. Here is an article about Buttercup Powell in a Feb. 1965 EBONY magazine. Amazing to see this article from that time period. And wonderful pictures of her and her son and Rue de Seine and The Hotel La Louisiane.
http://books.google.com/books?id=JeEDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=buttercup+powell&source=bl&ots=w7PFJ3pE_5&sig=XTvMDVOqc6KJGNwmZU8-s4RblYo&hl=en&ei=TUV6TZ-BIcq-0QHy4JzQAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAjgK#v=onepage&q=buttercup%20powell&f=false
   Joe was in town last night to appear at The Birchmere. Here is an article from The Washington Post about him and what he is doing now.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/08/AR2011030804581.html
   Joe Boyd's book about music in the 1960's is another good memoir of that era. Two other books that bring that era back to life are Robert Stone's memoir PRIME GREEN and Bob Dylan's memoir CHRONICLES.
http://www.amazon.com/Chronicles-1-Bob-Dylan/dp/0743228154