[Dixielandjazz] Donald Bailey - West Coast Drummer

[Steve barbone]

Why do old folks still play jazz? Ask Mr. Donald Bailey. In fact, why don't
one or two of the Bay Area Jazz Bands invite him to play with them? He lives
in Richmond and is still ticking. Originally from Philadelphia, his buddies
here, Odean Pope, Sonny Fortune, et al., are still ticking too.

Cheers,
Steve

Music keeps Donald Bailey's outlook upbeat

by Richard Scheinin San Jose Mercury News, February 20, 2006

Donald Bailey lives in lean circumstances in a Richmond bungalow. He has his
drums, his upright piano, his trombone, his guitars, his harmonicas and not
a lot more. At 72, he still looks sharp, though; musicians in his day always
looked sharp. He practices all the time; always did. He performs regularly,
but with pain; there are a couple of bolts in his spine.

"I don't know how I'm able to play," he says, pushing himself out of his
armchair. "Music is like the healer for me. It's the best medicine I can
use."

Must be. Because when Bailey gets behind his drums, he still sets up that
effortless flow, that gritty yet elegant pinging, pitter-pattering pulse
that has lit up bandstands for Jimmy Smith, John Coltrane, Stan Getz and
Carmen McRae, to name a few.

Primarily a drummer, one of jazz's unsung innovators on his instrument,
Bailey has a résumé more than 50 years long. When he performs this week at
the Savanna Jazz club in San Francisco's Mission District, you will hear, if
you go (and you should), a mastery of rhythm that belies his physical pain
and celebrates the music he loves.

Jazz fans know Bailey's sound, even if they don't always remember his name;
he is one of the many important players who, for no good reason, haven't
become all that famous. But that's Bailey floating beneath Smith on the
organist's classic Blue Note albums: "Back at the Chicken Shack," "The
Sermon!" and "Prayer Meetin'." That's Bailey setting time behind pianists
Hampton Hawes and Jimmy Rowles, and as a member of the 3 Sounds, on other
classic dates.

His lack of celebrity doesn't bother Bailey, who grew up in Philadelphia and
moved to the West Coast in the 1960s. Rather, he views his life in jazz as a
privilege. Jazz, for him, is about personal expression and freedom.

It also "represents our lifestyle," he says. "People think Thelonious Monk
was just playing funny chords. But no, it's a reflection of the way black
people live, of injustice; you're fighting a battle to get somewhere, and it
gets put into music. It's just like the blues." A sense of freedom.

Yet through the battle, again, comes freedom and "total joy." Bailey says
those two words and his face lights up.

"When we were coming up," he says, starting to reminisce, "each time we
played, it was like an experience of improvisation. All the musicians wanted
you to do your thing. Even with Carmen McRae and Peggy Lee: They wanted you
to be yourself. They didn't want me imitating Philly Joe Jones or anyone
else.

"Because you haven't said anything until you've established your own voice.
All the musicians told me that I didn't sound like anyone else, and that was
my highest goal to reach."

Donald Orlando Bailey (his nickname is "Duck," as in Donald Duck) comes from
one of those remarkable musical families. His father, Morris Bailey,
supported his wife and children as a janitor, but he was a drummer, too,
performing with Noble Sissle, the bandleader and pioneer of African-American
musical theater.

Donald Bailey's older brother, Morris Jr., is a jazz saxophonist of repute
as well as a record producer, arranger and songwriter whose tunes have been
recorded by Nina Simone, the Spinners, Billy Paul and Harold Melvin & the
Blue Notes. His son is Victor Bailey, formerly the bassist in Weather
Report.

Donald and his siblings (there were seven kids in all) grew up in
Philadelphia's Germantown neighborhood at a time when there were literally
dozens of jazz clubs in the city. A cousin, Albert "Duke" Johnson, lived
around the corner and played bass with Eddie Cole, brother of Nat "King"
Cole. He was a model for Donald, who sliced and diced his parents' furniture
by beating on it with knives and forks, got his first set of drums at about
age 14, "and just practiced all the time," says his brother Morris. "He's a
self-taught musician. He didn't learn from books. He played with records."

The young drummer's musical running mates were, in retrospect, a who's who
of jazz: saxophonists Sonny Fortune and Odean Pope, bassists Jimmy Garrison
and Reggie Workman, trumpeter Ted Curson, and pianists Bobby Timmons and
Hasaan Ibn Ali. The latter was a legendary and almost secret jazz figure
who, like Bailey, was turned on his head by Stravinsky and often is credited
with teaching advanced harmonic ideas to Coltrane. The great saxophonist,
who lived for years in Philadelphia, in turn gave "a few pointers" to
Bailey, he says, at jam sessions.

While still a teenager, newly married and working at a brass factory, Bailey
met Smith, who was from Norristown, Pa., right outside the city. "There was
something about the way I played that he liked," says Bailey. He joined
Smith's band, which became the model for a brand of blues-drenched, soulful
jazz and crisscrossed the country, usually in a bread truck or a hearse,
nice and roomy for the musicians and their equipment, including Smith's
Hammond B-3.

"I can't imagine a better ride than a hearse with musicians in it," says
Bailey, dreamily. "Unimaginable smoothness." He wonders if the feeling of
the ride became a part of the way he plays the drums.

Moving to California after a decade or so with Smith, Bailey took up with
all the best West Coast musicians: Harold Land, Blue Mitchell, Gerald
Wilson, Hawes and Rowles among them. Rowles was a singer's favorite, the
quintessential accompanist, and through him Bailey met McRae, who later
became a steady employer, and Sarah Vaughan, with whom he played now and
then.

By now Bailey was a drummer of choice, filling in for Elvin Jones on at
least one occasion in Coltrane's famous quartet. For a time he lived in
Japan, where he recorded an LP on harmonica (he also plays it in the movie
"Buck and the Preacher" with Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte).

More than 20 years ago, he moved to the East Bay. An elder, he still
performs regularly in San Francisco at the restaurant Bacar, the St. Regis
Hotel and Savanna Jazz. He makes a point of inviting younger and
lesser-known players to the bandstand, because that's how he got his start,
and, besides, "you always can learn something through it. I'm always
thinking, 'What can I get out of this experience?'"

Bailey listens to rap, calls it the "blues of today," and tries to stay on
top of its rhythms. "But the greatest music I've heard is Beethoven and
Stravinsky down into modern jazz," he says. "The combination there, in jazz,
is really beautiful; the European and the black. That's a really big thing
for me. And that's the message I'm sending out."

What message is that?

"Peace."