"Un Poco Loco" is an Afro-Cuban jazz standard composed by American jazz pianist Bud Powell. It was first recorded for Blue Note Records by Powell, Curly Russell, and Max Roach on May 1, 1951.

Musical characteristics

"Un Poco Loco" is in thirty-two bar form. It uses the lydian scale, incorporating chords overlapping chords to imply a polytonality (D major 7 over C major 7: CEGBDF#AC#) with the improvisation based on an alternating polytonality and an altered dominant chord. Particularly remarkable to jazz musicians is the placement of C# against a C major 7 chord; James Weidman attributed this to bitonality, while Tardo Hammer attributed it to an extension of the circle of fifths.

Legacy

In the late 1980s, literary and cultural critic Harold Bloom included "Un Poco Loco" in his list of the most "sublime" works of twentieth-century American art (from his introduction to Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow).