Where We've Been, Where We Are

Roll Call 2 additions with Dennis Mackrel, Ben Perowsky, Gene Lake

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Everything comes from something, but what he and his crew started was new nonetheless: drummer Baby Dodds with Marty Marsala (trumpet), Bunty Pendleton (pianist with back to camera), Albert Nicholas (clarinet), NY, 1947. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

In New Orleans, at the end of the 19th century, when no one was looking, the drumset was born. It didn’t come from nowhere: throughout the 1800s, various tinkerers and musicians in North America and Europe made bass drum pedals, but these were pretty much isolated, once-in-a-blue-moon events; none of the pedals were mass produced, and, most tellingly, none were connected to an emerging new music.

But in New Orleans, just as various tendencies in repertoire, performance practice, and dance were slowly coalescing into what we now hear as jazz, the bass drum pedal—and therefore the drumset— seems to have caught on. The drumset and jazz have been together since the cradle.

Drummers born in the 1880s and 1890s were among the first to promulgate the drumset, though very few played jazz on it. Sonny Greer (born around 1895), Tubby Hall (1895), Baby Dodds (1898), Zutty Singleton (1898), and Paul Barbarin (1899) were undoubtedly the most advanced players of their day, drummers who still sound swinging over 120 years after their birth.

But they were the exception, not the norm. For most of the first quarter of the 20th century, if you played drumset, you most likely played in a theater, for silent movies or live shows— minstrel, vaudeville, burlesque, and other dance-oriented shows. Thanks to Vernon and Irene Castle, and their drummer, Buddie¹ Gilmore (born in 1880) a few drummers were playing syncopated dance music, a la James Reese Europe’s Clef Club Orchestra— good music and important, but not quite jazz, not yet.

Then, Louis Armstrong joined King Oliver at the Lincoln Gardens in Chicago in 1922, and pretty soon, jazz, as we’ve come to know it, was happening. The music spread, and drummers never looked at a drumset the same way again. What had been an artfully assembled hodgepodge, mostly used to kick a chorus line or catch a pratfall, was suddenly an invitation to expression and exploration, to individuality and creativity. With the drumset, using their hands and feet² on metal, wood, and skin, drummers could now express their identity— their musical personality, their hopes, dreams, wishes; their souls, in other words— as never before.

According to Baby Dodds’s memoir, with King Oliver and Louis Armstrong in Chicago, Dodds was creating his own part, acknowledging the composition but playing “my own style of drums”, as Dodds put it— communicating with the band, the dancers, and the listeners, giving the music the push and rhythmic identity he felt it needed. This is jazz drumming, and this was a new thing in the world.

It was two drummers born in the 1910s who showed the world at large what could be done with a drumset in jazz, what leading a band from the drums was all about: Chick Webb (1905) and Gene Krupa (1909). With charisma and musicianship, Webb packed ballrooms and thrilled dancers, swinging his own band and creating the archetype of the star drummer, the form which Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, and so many others inhabited. When Benny Goodman brought the nation into the Swing Era at Los Angeles’s Palomar Ballroom in August 1935, Krupa was consciously building off Webb’s innovations. Gene was forever indebted to Chick, saying his name at every opportunity and was even a pallbearer at Webb’s funeral in 1939.

But things were moving quickly. The drummers born from about 1910 to roughly 1915— O’Neil Spencer (1909), Sid Catlett (1910), Jo Jones (1911), and Kenny Clarke (1914), and others— updated and refined Webb’s ideas to create the earliest version of the vocabulary we use today— brush playing; ding-ding-a-ding on the ride cymbal; quarter notes on the bass drum; 2 and 4 handclap on the hi hat; clave fragments and backbeats on the snare; melodies and tap rhythms in the solos.

But it didn’t stop. Some of the cohort born in the 1920s— Max Roach (1924), Roy Haynes (1925), William “Benny” Benjamin (1925), and Elvin Jones (1927), played that vocabulary in a recognizably modern style, while folks born in the Thirties— Paul Motian (1931), Al Jackson Jr (1935), Billy Higgins (1936), and Pete LaRoca (1938)— were already commenting on and refining the vocabulary of the Twenties-born drummers, and this has been the process ever since.

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The story goes on, the story is being played out today. In Roll Call 1, we did drummers with us who were born in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties; in Roll Call 2, I noted drummers born in the Sixties playing today. But I left out a few important names. I’m so bummed that I overlooked these folks, but it’s inevitable³. There’s always more to the story:

Dennis Mackrel must be one of the most valuable people in the music— drummer, composer, educator, and conductor. Conductor! How many drummers have a life in music as a conductor?

Mackrel was, of course, the last drummer hired by Count Basie. In college, we loved him on Bill Charlap’s Souvenir (Criss Cross, 1995), a trio date with Scott Colley, and just a few months ago, Brad Shepik told me that Dennis was the drummer when he toured with Carla Bley’s Escalator Over The Hill in the Nineties. Basie, New York modern, Carla Bley, and large-ensemble conductor: we are lucky to have Dennis with us.

I’m enjoying The Carla Bley Big Band Goes To Church (Watt/ECM, 1996), with Mackrel’s strong and clear choices guiding the listener to the heart of Bley’s magnificent compositions. Carla’s music makes you smile, think, and laugh— her music makes you feel really good. Dennis Mackrel does the same.

I love Lewis Nash for his precise, driving cymbal beat, and his clean, almost meticulous articulation. Of course there’s the great Joe Lovano albums with Lewis, (Quartets, 52nd Street Themes). I really appreciate the team of Nash, vibraphonist Steve Nelson, bassist Peter Washington, and the sorely-missed Mulgrew Miller. They appeared in various combinations on a ton of records and gigs for nearly twenty years, including Steve Nelson’s excellent Sound-Effect (HighNote, 2007). Nelson, Miller, Washington, and Nash’s beat on Ahmad Jamal’s “Night Mist Blues” is just great, relaxed, moving, and adult. There’s a satisfying and specific nod to Freddie Hubbard (“Up Jumped Spring”), and their reading of James Williams’s “Arioso” is detailed and deeply-felt. From the sound of it, Nelson, Miller, Washington, and Nash were a cooperative band in all but name.

I’m also into the Steve Wilson/Lewis Nash duo; a concert in 2000 in Woodstock is a stand-out memory. Their Duologue (MCG, 2014) is streaming and should be heard; “RCJG” pretty neatly summarizes their connection. For the last few years, Lewis has been living in Arizona, so he’s seen out here much less. But I remain hopeful.

Ben Perowsky is an essential contributor to the explosion of creativity on display at Tonic, the Knitting Factory, and related venues in the Nineties and early Two Thousands. Perowsky navigated that scene’s exploration of contrast, transformation, unlikely combinations, and experimental exuberance with his gregarious, full, and natural blend of jazz plus something from backbeats and modern composition, all filtered through his own lens. Ben’s currently heard playing Hadestown on Broadway, and he sounds just wonderful on Community Music 4 (2021) from Steven Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra, with tunes by the Grateful Dead, Eddie Harris, Ellington, Mingus, Bessie Smith, and the Beatles. Jazz goes on and on.

I’ll close with a shoutout to drummer Gene Lake, most known to me for records with Steve Coleman (Tao of Mad Phat, RCA/Novus, 1994) and Henry Threadgill (Too Much Sugar For A Dime, Axiom, 1993). He sounds great on bassist Reggie Washington’s A Lot of Love, Live (2007), a trio date with Ravi Coltrane, recorded in Europe. I’ve never heard Bill Frisell’s “Strange Meeting” quite like this. Lake is with us, let’s hope for more soon.

All these folks and many more deserve much greater attention and recognition than this. They are here— playing tonight, connecting genres, scenes, times, and all of us.

1. According to drum researcher Matt Brennan, he sometimes spelled his name “Buddy” and last name “Gilmour”, “Gilmore”, and “Gilmare”.

2. The drumset is the only percussion instrument in the world that requires the use of hands and feet at something like parity.

3. Thank you Steven Bernstein for your help with this!