Earl Rudolph "Bud" Powell was born September 27, 1924, in Harlem, New York (his birth certificate erroneously lists 1922), the son of stride pianist William Powell and grandson of a flamenco guitarist. He began piano lessons at five, learned church organ as an altar boy, and by his teens was absorbing the harmonic ideas of Fats Waller and Art Tatum, whom he considered his idol. On 52nd Street and at Minton's Playhouse he fell under the wing of Thelonious Monk, who introduced him to the after-hours bebop scene and later dedicated the composition "In Walked Bud" to him. In 1943 Powell joined trumpeter Cootie Williams's swing orchestra, where he pushed the band toward the new music, at one point persuading Williams to record Monk's "'Round Midnight," its first appearance on record; by the time he left Williams's band around 1944 he was serving as its musical director and arranger.

Powell's career was shadowed from young adulthood by a January 1945 beating by railroad and city police in Philadelphia, after a drunken altercation following a gig with Williams's band. The head injuries left him with severe recurring headaches and began a cycle of institutionalization: he was committed to Bellevue Hospital and then Creedmoor State Hospital, the first of several extended psychiatric stays that recurred for the rest of his life, more than one including electroconvulsive therapy. He kept recording regardless: in January 1947 he cut his first date as a leader, the trio session issued as Bud Powell Trio on Roost with Curley Russell and Max Roach, and that May Charlie Parker chose him as pianist for a Savoy Records quintet session with Miles Davis, Tommy Potter, and Roach, the only studio recording the two men made together under Parker's own name. A bar fight later that year sent him back to Creedmoor for eleven months.

His most productive and influential period followed. An August 8, 1949, Blue Note session with Fats Navarro, Sonny Rollins, Tommy Potter, and Roy Haynes, combined with a May 1, 1951, trio date with Curley Russell and Max Roach, became The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 1, introducing the originals "Dance of the Infidels," "Bouncing with Bud," "Un Poco Loco," and "Parisian Thoroughfare." A second Blue Note trio session on August 14, 1953, with George Duvivier and Art Taylor, yielded Vol. 2 and the brooding "Glass Enclosure," written, by most accounts, out of frustration at being confined to guardian Oscar Goodstein's apartment. On May 15, 1953, Powell joined Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker (billed as "Charlie Chan" for contractual reasons), Charles Mingus, and Max Roach for the Massey Hall concert in Toronto, which Mingus's own Debut Records issued as Jazz at Massey Hall, still cited as one of the great live jazz recordings; a trio segment by Powell, Mingus, and Roach was issued separately as Jazz at Massey Hall, Vol. 2. New York State declared Powell mentally incompetent that same February, placing him under Goodstein's guardianship for years to come.

Powell kept recording steadily through the mid-1950s for Norgran, Clef, and Verve (Piano Interpretations by Bud Powell, recorded April 1955) and for RCA Victor (Swingin' with Bud, cut February 1957 with Duvivier and Taylor), while returning to Blue Note for Vol. 3: Bud! (1957, with Paul Chambers and trombonist Curtis Fuller), Vol. 4: Time Waits (1958), and Vol. 5: The Scene Changes (1958). A January 1956 farewell engagement at Boston's Storyville club, on his last night there, brought him a lasting friendship with a young Japanese pianist, Toshiko Akiyoshi, who had already named him alongside Tatum as the pianist she most wanted to hear. His brother and fellow pianist Richie Powell was killed alongside trumpeter Clifford Brown in a June 1956 car accident, a loss that hit Powell hard and coincided with the end of his Verve contract that September.

In the spring of 1959 Powell relocated to Paris, settling at the Hotel La Louisiane and quickly finding steady club work. With bassist Pierre Michelot and drummer Kenny Clarke he formed the "Three Bosses" trio, house band at the Blue Note club in Paris, and worked across Europe: a December 1959 concert with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers became Paris Jam Session; a 1960 tour with Oscar Pettiford and Clarke took in the Essen Jazz Festival, later issued as The Essen Jazz Festival Concert; and July 1960 brought a filmed appearance with Charles Mingus's band at Antibes. In December 1961, Cannonball Adderley, then producing for Columbia, brought Powell, Michelot, and Clarke into a Paris studio for two sessions two days apart: A Tribute to Cannonball (with tenor saxophonist Don Byas, not issued until 1979) and A Portrait of Thelonious (four Monk compositions among its eight tracks, not released until 1965). In February 1963, with financial backing arranged by Frank Sinatra and production by Duke Ellington, he recorded the trio album Bud Powell in Paris for Reprise. Tuberculosis forced a long recuperation at the Bouffémont sanatorium outside Paris in 1963; pianist and future biographer Francis Paudras, who had befriended Powell years earlier, helped nurse him back to health.

Paudras brought Powell back to New York in August 1964 for a widely noted engagement at Birdland, but his health deteriorated again that fall and, after briefly going missing, he chose to remain in New York with Frances Barnes, mother of his daughter Celia, rather than return to Paris. A handful of further sessions followed, most unreleased in his lifetime; only Ups 'n Downs, recorded in 1964-65, reached listeners, and only after his death. Bud Powell passed away from tuberculosis, malnutrition, and the effects of alcoholism on July 31, 1966, in New York, at age 41. Bands led by Barry Harris, with musicians including Lee Morgan and Billy Higgins, marched through Harlem behind his funeral procession that August.

Powell translated Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie's horn-based bebop vocabulary onto the piano, developing a spare, hard-driving left hand that voiced bare root-and-seventh or root-and-tenth shapes to leave room for right-hand lines running with the speed, chromaticism, and rhythmic asymmetry of a saxophone; critic Bill Cunliffe called him simply the first pianist to make Parker's language work at the keyboard. He carried Thelonious Monk's harmonic daring into the jazz mainstream even as his own catalog drifted further from Monk's angularity, and hospitalization-era pieces like "Glass Enclosure" show a more fragmented, interior side of his writing that later critics traced to Monk's influence and to his years of confinement. Herbie Hancock called him "the foundation out of which stemmed the whole edifice of modern jazz piano," and Bill Evans named him, unequivocally, his single greatest influence; the list of pianists who absorbed his vocabulary directly runs from Wynton Kelly, Horace Silver, and McCoy Tyner through Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett. Toshiko Akiyoshi is a direct case in point: she taught herself Powell's vocabulary by ear off records in postwar Japan, years before she ever heard him in person, and it became the foundation of her own bebop piano style and her ticket into Tokyo's best working bands; the two later became genuine friends after meeting at his January 1956 Storyville engagement, and she contributed liner notes to the compilation The Complete Bud Powell on Verve and visited him during his final illness in 1965.