What I Say
Six months in, the show so far....
As of today, this Substack, which I call Chronicles, is six months old. I am stunned…
The whole experience of writing and sharing has been great— I can’t thank you enough for your support; this wouldn’t be possible without you. I’m so appreciative of your attention and interest.
So, to celebrate, I’ll re-affirm the core values and ideas, and provide a chronological through-line, connecting all the music, all the drummers we’ve covered, with links to those posts.
For Monty Python die-hards, this is The Show So Far….
The core ideas— why I listen, play, and write:
Music is a powerful, transformative force in human society. Developed with communal wisdom, imbued with cultural knowledge, forever renewed and always changing, music has the power to affect consciousness, create community, and alter lives. When looking for proof of this notion, I look no further than the mirror.
The drum and drummers, defined broadly, are a unique and potent source of transformative musical energy. The drum is special, with its own standards of excellence and a long history, and a special ability to reach listeners. Evidence? Go to a gig, wait for the drummer to get a solo or solo-like moment; notice the crowd’s response: I can virtually guarantee that the crowd will spontaneously become very engaged during the drum solo. The communal percussion tradition of West Africa, specifically Congo and Senegambia, the classical tradition of virtuoso drumming in North India, the Native American trance-based spiritual practices, inconceivable—in fact, impossible— without the drum; all these traditions point to the specialness of the drum.
In the late 19th century, Black Americans invented the bass drum pedal, and in that moment, gave birth to a new instrument, the drumset. Soon, a practice of playing the drumset, a combination of Old World dowel-on-membrane manipulation with New World syncretism and African-derived polyrhythms, began to spread. Drummers, working alongside other musicians, helped give rise to new forms of social dance, which in turn beget new styles of music, starting with ragtime, syncopated dance music, and eventually swing, bebop, rhythm and blues, and on and on and on. Once the music of Black America began to disperse, audiences across the world embraced it, and have held it close ever since. 1
Jazz is special; a globally-loved music, deeply popular, uniquely adaptable, an ongoing, never-ending musical story of bottomless depth and significance. The most innovative drummers, historically, have been jazz drummers2. Jazz drummers are special and do diverse things, so I write about them. I want to share what I learn and bring you to the music, highlighting the importance of the drummers. My focus is always directed by what I like, what I get a kick out of; this music is, above all else, great music that is a lot of fun to listen to!
Sidenote: The great saxophonist Sam Newsome saved me 6 to 12 months of flawed thinking on a bus from Albuquerque to Santa Fe a few months ago. Sam of course was an associate of Ralph Peterson Jr., about whom I wrote one essay (he deserves several); and I explained to him that I felt Peterson’s work and recorded legacy did not receive the attention it deserves. All Mr. Newsome said was “Those records are doing what they’re supposed to do.” He was completely correct. Those records— and my memories of seeing Mr. Peterson play— got me on Substack, writing about Ralph.
That’s the music doing what it’s supposed to do; that is a glimpse at how powerful music is. I became a writer because I had to write about the music— it’s only a mild stretch to suggest that writing about the music is what the music told me to do!
Ok that’s the backstory. Let’s take it from the top; I’ve included links to any posts you might have missed.
As the drumset gradually took a standard shape, by the 1910’s and 1920’s some drummers began to develop national and international reputations— this is when drummers like Warren "Baby" Dodds, Zutty Singleton, also Paul Barbarin, Tubby Hall, Tommy Benford, and others, are first noticed as jazz drummers3. Social dance, jazz, the music business, and the drumset were developing in tandem throughout the 1910s and 20s; by roughly 1935, Chick Webb, a drummer and bandleader based in New York, was developing a national reputation and eventually became the first great influence, affecting all who heard him.
A show business portrait of a smiling Chick Webb was painted on Webb’s bass drum; Webb’s drumset and photograph were in drum catalogs and music periodicals— he was a star. Not an orchestral drummer, nor a rudimental exhibitionist, nor an educator, theater, or vaudeville drummer, but a Black jazz drummer, a modern drummer: the drummer with the latest gear, the newest, hippest style, playing the music everyone wants to hear.
This is why Chick Webb was the name the whole pantheon mentioned first; this is why we still play "Stompin' At The Savoy"4. Chick Webb is behind the whole magilla. Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong were constructing the universe; Chick Webb was handling infrastructure, creating the lane by which Swing was delivered to the ears of humanity.
Roy Haynes, with us today, began his career playing with pianist Luis Russell at the Savoy Ballroom, Chick Webb’s primary venue. Roy Haynes connects the moment of jazz’s creation to 2023, through his long life of peak innovation, playing as brilliantly with Luis Russell as he did with contemporary giants Chick Corea and Pat Metheny. This post has some links to some lesser-known Haynes tracks: recordings with Russell, Harry Belafonte, and Alice Coltrane, and others.
Art Blakey was a protege of Webb; in this essay commemorating Wayne Shorter’s passing, I pick out a few choice collaborations between Shorter and Blakey, making the case for how Blakey’s art was advanced by Shorter’s genius, and how the Jazz Messengers were a perfect platform for Shorter to launch his career. Like the Haynes piece, I link to some choice tracks. There is much, much more to cover with Art Blakey.
By the mid--1960s, another feeling was in the air. The Civil Rights Movement, anti-war protests, and other social upheavals profoundly reshaped musicians’ attitudes and goals, leaving no assumption unchallenged; new possibilities for the music were everywhere simultaneously.
However, these new ideas had deep roots. Pete LaRoca demonstrated that drummers didn’t need steady tempo to make music, recording an out-of-time drum solo with Jackie McLean on “Minor Apprehension” in 1959. La Roca, a rugged individualist who connects Latin music to modern jazz and beyond, was building on suggestions by swing and bebop drummers about how to expand; Shelly Manne, on the West Coast, artfully suggested a few of these ideas on “Un Poco Loco” just a few years earlier.
A few years later, Paul Motian began developing a solution to the problem of playing with a group with no steady tempo; on Carla Bley’s “King Korn” from Paul Bley’s Turning Point session in March 1964, we hear the earliest example of Motian playing his characteristic rubato. This was soon a main arrow in Motian’s quiver, sitting next to bebop mastery, broken time, and an openness to any style of music; see Mose Allison’s Wild Man On The Loose to hear how quickly Motian had consolidated his many modes with an underlying avant-garde approach.
A visionary who saw the jazz drummer as a complete musician and contemporary composer, Joe Chambers created a blended space where avant-garde jazz met contemporary composition, informed by a blues-oriented Black American aesthetic. Chambers (and Co.) directly anticipated and foreshadowed the AACM and BAG movements of the 1970s, and continues to make important music today. His body of work from 1964 to 1969, mostly on Blue Note, is astonishing to comprehend.
Joe Chambers was often working with bassist Richard Davis; Davis, of course, was Mel Lewis’s partner in the original Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra. This piece explores the Davis-Lewis connection, hinting at how the Thad and Mel fit in with the overall picture of 60s jazz. There’s links to 10 great Mel/Richard tracks; check them out, let me know what you think.
Phillip Wilson was a consummate professional who heard the whole range of American music as a unified field, allowing him to play improvised music with Lester Bowie and blues-rock with Paul Butterfield without modifying his underlying voice or perspective, merely adjusting his vocabulary. Perhaps no other jazz drummer inhabited such diverse music so naturally. Phillip Wilson connects the Art Ensemble to the Woodstock Generation, David Sanborn to Olu Dara and Roscoe Mitchell.
Alongside Phillip Wilson, Freddie Waits almost creates a secret history of 20th century music, connecting wildly disparate traditions and showing the unified property of American culture. It is Freddie Waits playing on the first hit single by Stevie Wonder (“Fingertips pt. 2”), on classic records with Andrew Hill and McCoy Tyner, the final studio recording by Lee Morgan, and in a NYC TV studio with Al Green, all while active as an educator. Waits’s contribution is secure; his recorded legacy is there for us to hear.
In 1970, Joe Chambers and Freddie Waits joined a percussion ensemble led by Max Roach, the man who defined modernism with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in 1942. The group, M’Boom, had an explicitly sociopolitical perspective— drummers were now in charge of their musical lives, and Black jazz drummers would assert their right to the whole percussion tradition. M’Boom was a major force in bringing about the contemporary Age of the Drum; two of their albums are streaming and should be heard, while breathtaking concert footage on YouTube amply attests to their achievement. More research must be done on M’Boom.
Wynton Marsalis is perhaps the emblematic jazz musician of the 1980s. As Wynton well knew, however, the revival of interest in older jazz styles began in the late 70s, and crested through the 80s. In 1980, Tony Williams, who arguably invented ‘jazz-rock’ in 1969, was quietly moving away from fusion. Play Or Die, his only leader date between The Joy Of Flying and Foreign Intrigue, was reissued in 2022 and shows the 1970s bleeding into the ‘80s straight-ahead revival, and the best vocal that Williams ever recorded.
Meanwhile, Victor Lewis was one of many drummers who kept the bebop tradition connected to contemporary developments in the 1970s and 1980s; his work as a leader in the 1990’s suggests further possibilities, where he finds a common ground between hard bop and contemporary R&B, with an awareness of the avant-garde lurking around the edges.
Other implications of what Williams, Waits, Chambers, Wilson, and Motian begat came to light when Joey Baron moved to NYC from LA, where he had been playing with Carmen McRae. In NYC, Baron immersed himself in the burgeoning downtown scene, collaborating with John Zorn, Tim Berne, and Bill Frisell. As Phillip Wilson and Freddie Waits had shown that American music could be seen as a unified tradition, a practice of one music with various strands, Joey Baron could now inhabit all strands, almost at one time. Surf rock, experimental improvisation, Al Jackson backbeats, and the deepest swing were simply different rooms in a house; Joey has a key to every room.
As Berne, Zorn, et al were blending disparate genres, Ralph Peterson showed that the hard bop paradigm was perfectly suited to express contemporary ideas. By subtly incorporating elements of fusion drumming into an acoustic setting, Peterson, along with Jeff “Tain” Watts, Marvin “Smitty” Smith, and others, showed the limitless possibilities of small group jazz. Peterson’s 1987 and 1988 recordings, which heavily feature Geri Allen and Don Byron, predict many of the common sounds in jazz today, yet are not on any streaming service. I take a look at how he arrived at his signature style, and briefly glance at his work in the 2000s.
In the early 90s, Jim Black took it all in— Tony and Elvin, lots of Tain and Ralph Peterson, plus a deep study of Paul Motian and Joey Baron. Black and his comrades created a social and musical scene in NYC which had a personal impact; their shows were the first truly open spaces I ever physically inhabited. Jim left a mark on the NYC scene big enough for me to live in; Mark Guiliana, one of our greatest living drummers, had his life literally changed by Jim’s excellence.
And there is so much more to do. Here are some of the projects I’m working on:
Gerald Cleaver is one of our most important drummers, with a huge discography and expansive musical vision; an overview of his life and work would help me understand and enjoy his contribution.
Terri Lynne Carrington blew me away when I first heard her as a teenager; a similar life and work overview is needed.
Nasheet Waits and Eric McPherson
Philly Joe Jones and Jimmy Cobb: the Pre-Miles Years
Andrew Cyrille
The Drummers of Ahmad Jamal
Stu Martin
Jim Gordon with Frank Zappa, 1972
Cindy Blackman Santana
Billy Cobham and Lenny White: The Afro-Cuban Connection
Ed Blackwell in New Orleans
For Tony Reedus
Finally, there’s playing and traveling, jazz or jazz-adjacent music. Early on, Stew and Heidi Rodewald pushed me past my comfort zone, and the great singer and actor Luqman Brown inspired me to start writing down some ideas. That eventually led to Ethan Iverson and the Mark Morris Dance Group and Mark Morris Music Ensemble; my co-operative band Ember, with a new album coming out in August; the trio with Ethan Iverson and Michael Formanek, doing our release show on Thursday May 11th at the Jazz Gallery; and so many other meaningful musical projects— just this week, I play with the great vibraphonist Behn Gillece at Smalls (I was a part of his killing new album Between The Bars out now on Positone), tomorrow night with bassist Adam Lane at Main Drag Music, and then head Santa Barbara, CA with Mark Morris and The Look Of Love. I love it all, it’s all connected.
When I started this, I had no idea if anyone would want to read it, nor if I would be able to sustain it. Happily, so far so good.
Nothing I do is truly mine; everything I am that is good is a reflection of the good around me; there is beauty, complexity, and the best of humanity around me at all times. I try to reflect it back and make my own contribution when I play and when I write.
None of this is possible on my own, and all of it is possible with my community. If you’re reading these words, you are my community. Hope that’s cool.
Thank you all.
Important contemporary musicologists, including Alex Ross, Ted Gioia, and Ned Sublette have demonstrated definitively that the master European composers, dating back to Bach’s time, were blending what little they knew of African music with their own traditions. African music wisdom came to them from Spain or the Middle East; hence the Sarabande (Sublette definitively derives “Sarabande”, from the Spanish zarabanda, with a Congo word, nsala-banda, which became identified with a kind of song and dance in Spanish Cuba) and the Arabesque.
This is not jazz chauvinism— today, there’s innovation and new approaches to the drumset from across the musical spectrum and far outside the United States. However, from the 1920s until maybe the 1970s, it was jazz drummers, from Chick Webb to Billy Cobham and beyond, who set the pace, showed the world what could be done on a drumset.
Other drummers were well-known vaudeville and theater drummers; based on current biographies of Louis Armstrong, Dodds’ own autobiography, and comments from Philly Joe and Max Roach, it’s certain that Dodds’ and others names were known from the 1920s onward.
For Phil Schaap people, Webb’s prominence is tied to regular Schaap radio programs focussed on Benny Carter and Edgar Sampson, not to mention Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, etc etc, all of whom are tied to Webb and the Savoy Ballroom.
Good point!!! Thanks for reading and giving me some ideas!! I need to learn a lot more about them…thank you Bobby…
A drummer I feel really doesn't get the respect and attention he deserves is Sonny Greer. I'd love to hear your thoughts on his contribution to the art form!