New series, some thumbnail sketches of drummers who matter to me— to us, I’ll be that bold— and why.
The title of this list is of Lenny White’s coinage, as far as I know— the seven jazz greats everyone has to know about, the major formation of jazz drumming, these guys are Mount Rushmore, musically. Even without Lenny’s list, it was always clear to me as a student that these were the major guys.
I’ll keep it as brief as I can, and give five records by each of them, which is absurdly few. But as a student we had absurdly few records,— not everything was available, and/or that’s all we could afford. And that’s all you can absorb, sometimes.
Kenny Clarke
The original bop guy. A swing era drummer who we can safely credit with giving us the modern form of the instrument, using the ride cymbal, comping on the snare drum, punctuations with the bass drum. It’s never just one guy, but we can view him that way.
It’s easy to not catch that, because on the records I heard he was a very cool time player, especially as Max Roach and Art Blakey were so overtly inventive. I learned about Clarke through his Modern Drummer interview by Ed Thigpen, who made sure that everyone knew how much we owed to his influence.
Miles Davis – Walkin’, Bags’ Groove
Thelonious Monk – Plays Duke Ellington
Kenny Clarke – Bohemia After Dark
Charlie Christian – The Immortal Charlie Christian
Max Roach
It seems more and more clear that Max Roach was the formative guy of bebop. If you read interviews with every well known drummer of the 50s through the early 60s at least, they all listened to Max’s playing on the Charlie Parker records as their major thing for learning to play jazz. You really hear Minton’s in his playing— coming out of the endless hours of blowing. And that bebop kind of applied intellect, that we hear with all of that generation of players. It’s a particular feel of creativity I can’t really define. And he played some insanely fast tempos.
Five records:
“The Quintet” – Jazz At Massey Hall
Clifford Brown/Max Roach – Live At Basin St., Clifford Brown & Max Roach
Sonny Rollins – Freedom Suite, Plus 4
Art Blakey
Early in my playing life Art Blakey was the jazz drummer I was thinking about. Hard groover, but also was experimenting with more intellectual ideas, again in that bebop mode. He’s a very close fit with Thelonious Monk, in my mind, minus Monk’s overt quirkiness. His shuffle groove is real distinctive of course, and the heavy 2 and 4 on the hihat, along with his Latin feels— in 4, and in a triplet feel. Hard driving energy, with these occasional mathematically thought out ideas.
Five records:
Thelonious Monk – Trio, Monk’s Music,
Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers – The Big Beat, A Night In Tunisia
Cannonball Adderley – Somethin’ Else
Roy Haynes
Very modern and dynamic— very flash energy. He spent much of the 50s on the road with Sarah Vaughn, which had him out of the loop for getting a lot of big records of the time. There were two major phases of his playing: the snap crackle phase, we could call it, that was very much about bebop, and the 60s and after phase, where he plays very big and very modern. He’s sort of a pre-Tony Williams character, in that he seems to be reinventing the uses of the parts of the instrument.
Five records:
Roy Haynes – Out Of The Afternoon
McCoy Tyner – Reaching Fourth
Oliver Nelson – Blues And The Abstract Truth
Chick Corea – Trio Music
Pat Metheny – Question & Answer
Philly Joe Jones
Paragon of high bebop, putting everything that happened in the previous 15 years of that music, in one polished package. There could be some raggedy aspects with Blakey and Roach, where we feel this is new vocabulary, in the process of being worked out; with Joe everything is finished, completely solid, and well presented on the recordings. There’s an R&B aspect to his playing that puts him on a deeper feeling groove— that’s present with Blakey, too. Compare with Max Roach, who floats a little bit, and with Kenny Clarke’s general air of coolness.
Five records:
Miles Davis – The New Quintet, Round About Midnight, Milestones
Bill Evans – Everybody Digs Bill Evans
Hank Mobley – Hank
Elvin Jones
The first true four limbed drummer, he was tremendously inventive creating a vocabulary with all the parts interacting. Formed his own concept of swing that’s different from what we hear before. Those are fairly trivial details, compared to the overall, which was very profound. His energy and emotional power were tremendous, there was something much heavier happening there than just one jazz musician playing some drums. In the John Coltrane Quartet, he was participating in some of the most powerful music of the 20th century in any music, world wide. For a number of years there was no one else, in my mind— this was the one way to play.
Five records:
John Coltrane – Live At The Village Vanguard, Coltrane, Impressions
Elvin Jones – The Ultimate
McCoy Tyner – The Real McCoy
Tony Williams
“God of the ride cymbal” one of my teachers called him. As Max Roach was for the 50s generation of players, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams were for everyone who came after them. Elvin Jones is about threes, both in the subdivisions and in the phrasing of the beats, Tony introduces a rock pulse, a straight four that reads like straight 8th notes. He sounded radically new, using the parts of the instrument differently than in the past. All vestiges of the old double drumming concept are gone, and any attachment to swing era playing.
There were also at least a couple of phases to his playing— the 60s, and everything after that. Or little drums / big drums. The earlier phase is what drummers usually talk about. The later phase is very muscular, more conservative in his jazz playing. A lot of single stroke rolls and flam rudiments on the drums. His fusion playing was a cul de sac, historically—nobody else took up that way of playing, following Steve Gadd instead.
Five records:
Miles Davis – Four & More, Miles Smiles, Nefertiti, Water Babies
Charles Lloyd – Of Course Of Course
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