Imagine sitting in a New York State psychiatric hospital in the late 1940s, sincerely explaining that you are a successful recording artist who arranges for major orchestras, and watching the doctors write down delusions of grandeur. That was Earl Bud Powell's reality. This episode examines how a Harlem-born child of a stride pianist and grandson of a flamenco guitarist, trained in Bach from age five and mentored by Thelonious Monk at Minton's Playhouse, re-engineered the piano by freeing the left hand and letting the right hand race alongside the horns of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

The conversation then confronts the 1945 beating by railroad police in Philadelphia that left him with chronic headaches, the alcoholism that followed, and the electroconvulsive therapy and heavy tranquilizers administered at Creedmoor and Pilgrim State ...