Music is a change agent in human life, a force of transformation and enchantment….for societies that don’t have superconductors and spaceships, music is their technology. For example, songs served as ‘cloud storage’ for all early cultures, preserving communal history, traditions, and survival skills. If authorities do not intervene, music tends to expand personal autonomy and human freedom.
-Ted Gioia, Music: A Subversive History (2021)
Over the holidays I was talking to a non-musician friend about my Substack. He seemed interested, so I said something about how I hope to chronicle “the huge contribution made by jazz drummers”. He then very sincerely asked- this is someone I’ve known for years- “What achievement do you mean?”
Great question!
What great achievement do I mean, exactly? As we say goodbye to 2022, this seemed a good time to have an answer.
Even the famous jazz drummers are not really famous. Within jazz, their names are known, but they don’t get much actual recognition. In fact, we often don’t even have a sense of what they did, beyond play on a famous album or two.
More than just sounding great, or influencing the thinking and playing of jazz musicians, maybe reaching outside jazz and influencing pop culture, what did the jazz drummers achieve? What did the music community achieve?
What did the drummers do? What are they doing now?
The shortest answer: they are receiving and sending wisdom.
How do we even start talking about the extent to which our lives have been formed, transformed, reformed, and informed by African American rhythm, by the music of the African diaspora?
Americans speak with idioms from the African American community; our dress, our humor, our way of thinking, all of this is imbued with an African American perspective. It was communicated to the culture through music. Whether it was Internet, radio, record, or live performance, it was Black music that carried the message, and the essence of the music was the drumming.
When Black people were brought to North America as slaves- the practice of which gave such a monstrous shape to our laws and customs, still casting its long, dark shadow today- they didn’t just bring drums, songs, and traditions, they brought ancient knowledge and experience, encoded in the music.
Their drumming contained wisdom.
If you think its New Age or worse to assert that African drumming and songs contain communal wisdom and knowledge, think of the ABC song.
The ABC song is a bite-sized information meme delivered through music, and is 100% effective. Because of that song, every toddler in the English-speaking universe can learn the alphabet quickly and easily, retaining the song and the information for their entire lives. You yourself probably learned the alphabet through the ABC song.
This is a tiny glimpse at the power of music.
Now imagine the potency of thousand year-old, community-generated songs and drumming. If anything, I think we underestimate the power of the drums.
Just picking one example from thousands, think of recently-departed Dino Danelli of the Rascals, one of the most widely heard of the 60’s rock drummers.
As an adolescent and self-described aspiring hoodlum in Jersey City, Danelli by chance one day heard Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa, both playing drums in the Black tradition. Soon, he fell in love with the drums, turned away from gang life, and dedicated himself to music. Danelli was in his teens when he worked with Black bandleaders King Curtis, Lionel Hampton, and Little Willie John, and soon after joined the Rascals, playing drums on all of their hit singles.
Let’s hear it from Dino:
“It [hearing Krupa and Rich] changed my life. If it hadn’t been for that, I definitely would have wound up in jail, because I was hanging out with a lot of older kids who were stealing cars, and they would have led me down the path of drugs, violence, and whatever.” - Dino Danelli, in conversation with Robyn Flans, Modern Drummer, March 1989.
That’s some powerful drumming from Krupa and Rich.
Krupa and Rich, of course, got it from Chick Webb, Jo Jones and Sid Catlett, O’Neil Spencer, and lots of other Black drummers.
I don’t know how sounds are encoded with meaning, or by what mechanism drumming can transmit wisdom. But I know it happens, because when I hear recordings of myself, I hear my thoughts, experiences, information, and view of life in my own playing. (This is why, like every musician I know, I usually don’t want to hear a recording I’ve made after we’re done working on it. It’s like reading your diary. )
If I, an individual human in modern times, am imbuing sounds with my personal experience and meaning, than it certainly was done by the community, at community scale, a thousand or more years ago.
Back to our narrative.
When the first African Americans drummers played in public, in New Orleans, at a place we now call Congo Square, something profound happened.
The first African American drummers were not only keeping their traditions alive, they were keeping themselves alive. In so doing, they sent their wisdom into the world.
The public drumming, singing, and dancing at Congo Square had stopped by about 1840. However, in 1890, in New Orleans, we have the first documented drumset player, Dee Dee Chandler. In the same era, the blues as a specific form came into existence, and a new style of playing the blues, in fact a new way of playing all music, one which incorporated improvisation and African rhythms, sprang into being.
This style of music, a ‘jazz’ style, according to Chicago papers circa 1915, was an international phenomena by 1919, when Sidney Bechet first went abroad. Thanks to Louis Armstrong, jazz was a global phenomena by the 1930s. It seems to have touched and transformed everyone who heard it in some large or small way. They received the wisdom.
All drumset playing can be traced back to the music of New Orleans, Cuba, the Caribbean, Brazil, and, finally, Africa. (For the Americas, it is usually traditions from Congo-Angola and Senegambia.)
Even if a drummer today is playing something from India, China, or Southeast Asia on a drumset, because they are playing it on a drumset, that drummer still owes it all to the Black Americans who invented the drumset and demonstrated its enormous potential.
The drummers, and the listeners, the entire music community- they are sending and receiving wisdom.
This sending and receiving, a clunky descriptor but the best I can do, is the human action which spreads the great wisdom of African music across the world, bringing joy, insight, questions, understanding, connection, the very stuff of life to millions, maybe billions of humans.
As Ted Gioia lays out in his wonderful book Music: A Subversive History, music tends to expand personal autonomy and freedom, even in the face of laws curtailing freedom. In my experience, no music does this more than African diaspora music, and all American music is African diaspora music.
This sending and receiving of wisdom through the music of the African diaspora is the great achievement of the drummers.
This is what I was telling my friend about, this is the theme underlying all my essays. It’s the fundamental magic of what I’m celebrating in Paul Motian, Tony Williams, Phillip Wilson, Pete LaRoca, Frederick Waits, Ralph Peterson, and so many others: the wisdom they embodied, the beautiful, unique way they sent it back into the world, and how far the message went.
So when I’m talking about jazz drummers, or Dino Danelli, or Joey Baron, or my father Vince Sperrazza, or Rick Montalbano, or Josh Dion, or Yogi Horton, or Terri Lynne Carrington- all musicians I hope to write about- this is what I’m talking about.
Everywhere we look, in our society, we see the African American experience, and I think it’s because there’s wisdom in the songs, in the drumming.
We hear what we can, we spread it as we can, we churn it around in our lives, develop our perspective on it, and we share it. This is our job, our mission.
All gratitude and respect, for all the drummers, all the listeners, all the musicians, everyone that helped spread the message. That’s what it’s all about.
Best wishes in 2023!
Vinnie, thanks so much for taking the time to write these great articles! I especially enjoy the "firsts" aspect of a lot of these, highlighting the first out-of-time drum solo was a great read, and I loved seeing the first documented drumset and learning about the musician associated with it. These firsts seem like an obvious thing now that you've pointed them out, but I actually think they're often overlooked in the teaching and lore of jazz history, I had never heard Dee Dee Chandler's name but it seems obvious that we should all know how the jazz drumset came about, and we should clearly know all the firsts because whatever we do as improvising musicians today can't be disconnected from the first people to explore that territory. I'm a pianist, and now feel inspired to seek out the first improvised piano solo, first example of stride, etc... and I hope you'll continue to enlighten us further on the many firsts of the drums!