[Dixielandjazz] Paul Motian - Modern Jazz Drummer With A Connection to The Past

[Steve barbone]

CAVEAT - long article about a modern jazz drummer.

BUT - Note the records he wants to listen to with Ratliff. Half of them
feature BABY DODDS. So much for the modernists not respecting tradition.

€ 'Maryland' by Baby Dobbs
€ 'Tom Tom Workout' by Baby Dobbs
€ 'Carolina Moon' by Theolonious Monk
€ 'Delilah' by Clifford Brown and Max Roach

Note also in the article how Motian connects Max Roach to Dodds' style.

If you are a drummer, you will want to read this. Paul Motian? One of the
MONSTER DRUMMERS of jazz.

Cheers,
Steve
    

Listening to CD's With

Paul Motian: Rhythm Melodist

NY TIMES By BEN RATLIFF - January 20, 2006

THE drummer Paul Motian doesn't get on airplanes anymore. Once, in the
mid-90's, he took a three-week tour with 35 flights. By 2003 he was booking
himself with three different bands all over Europe and Japan. He decided he
was sick of traveling.

It's not just long distances. "I don't even go to New Jersey or Brooklyn
anymore, man," he said defiantly one recent rainy midday, looking west
toward the Hudson River from the window of his Central Park West apartment.
He is 74, and has lived in the same spot for nearly 37 years, most of that
time alone. 

Now, Mr. Motian wants only to hear his own drum sound clearly. He has found
that at the Village Vanguard, where he will play next week, he can.

It is an unusual sound. It does not limit any part of the drum set to a
particular role. Mr. Motian has two ride cymbals, one of which he has been
using since the 1950's; he gets a rich, dark, nuanced sound from it. He uses
no padding or muffling in his 20-inch bass drum, and with it he can get a
remarkable, deep, loud, loose noise, almost a splat - a reminder that a bass
drum is an instrument of emphasis, not just timekeeping. And for
timekeeping, he plays whatever moves into his imagination. Four beats could
be marked by a few snare-drum hits, a few clenches of the high-hat and a
couple of combinations; in the next bar, he might play small military rolls
and one lone cymbal. He has a careful style, but he is free within it.

He works mostly with three of his own groups: his trio with the guitarist
Bill Frisell and the saxophonist Joe Lovano, which has grown steadily more
influential over 21 years; Trio 2000 + 1, with the bassist Larry Grenadier
and the saxophonist Chris Potter, the plus-one being the enigmatic Japanese
pianist Masabumi Kikuchi (or lately, the singer Rebecca Martin); and the
group formerly known as the Electric Bebop Band, now called the Paul Motian
Band, with the odd structure of three guitarists, two tenor saxophonists,
bass and drums. That is the group that will play next week at the Vanguard;
simultaneously, it will be releasing a new album, "Garden of Eden," on ECM.

Small and bald, with excellent posture - he runs a few miles in Central Park
nearly every day - Mr. Motian practices rapid, streetwise self-deprecation,
cussing constantly. That, and a nail-gun laugh, give him the demeanor of an
old-school hipster. I have heard him call a room full of people, at one
time, "man." (As in "Hey, thanks for coming, man!")

But he can't be reduced that easily. History has shaken him out as one of
the greatest drummers in all of jazz - a select group that would include,
say, Max Roach and Roy Haynes. These days, Mr. Motian's playing seems to get
beyond styles particularly associated with any era of jazz. Spare and never
facile, as natural as breathing, Mr. Motian's constant flow of improvisation
can seem to get beyond thinking in general. At the moments of the highest
abstraction in his playing, there is the greatest sensitivity, and always
the implication of a pulse. Jazz, mostly, is about testing the integrity of
a song's frame. Mr. Motian appears to feel that if you truly respect the
frame, you can put anything inside it.

About half of one of his sets tends to be original compositions. An amateur
pianist since the middle of his tenure as the drummer in Keith Jarrett's
quartet during the late 1960's and 70's, he has written dozens of excellent
melodies, flowing and terse. (The other half consists of tunes by jazz
composers he admires, Thelonious Monk or Bud Powell or Charles Mingus, or
popular standards.) He doesn't overcompose, likes hearing his music
liberally interpreted, and lets his band members do what they want.

Mr. Motian is not advancing any great theories about his style. One day
during a recording session a few years ago, Hank Jones, the wise old
pianist, took him aside. "I know your secret," he whispered. Mr. Motian told
this story with a baffled shrug. "I wish I knew what he meant," he said.
"Wow!" 

Asked to listen to some recordings and talk about them, he came up with a
fantastically judicious list. He kept claiming not to have an aptitude for
thinking about music analytically. Then it was clear that he knew exactly
what to talk about: he just wanted it to drift up on its own, without his
having to point it out.

Mr. Motian grew up in Providence, R.I., hearing big bands at the
Metropolitan Theater in downtown Providence and at Rhodes on the Pawtuxet, a
dance space just outside the city. He entered the Navy in 1950 during the
Korean War, as a better option than being drafted into the Army. It first
enabled him to attend the Navy School of Music in Washington, which he
attended briefly and remembers as "a farce."

He sailed around the Mediterranean for two and a half years in the admiral's
band of the Seventh Fleet, and then was stationed in Brooklyn in the fall of
1953. Discharged a year later, he moved to Ninth Street in the East Village.
His share of the rent was $12.50 a month. He collected unemployment, ate
potato knishes and played at jam sessions.

€ 'Maryland' by Baby Dobbs
€ 'Tom Tom Workout' by Baby Dobbs
€ 'Carolina Moon' by Theolonious Monk
€ 'Delilah' by Clifford Brown and Max Roach

The first piece Mr. Motian wanted to hear connected to the days of playing
marches in the Navy. It is from Baby Dodds's "Talking and Drum Solos," a
documentary record made for Folkways in 1946 by the jazz historian Fred
Ramsey. Baby Dodds was the great New Orleans drummer of the 1920's and 30's
who worked with Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Johnny Dodds, his
brother; he became celebrated a second time in New York during the 1940's
Dixieland revival. The 10-inch record, on which Dodds discusses his history
and technique, is a little primer on different rhythms for different drums.
Cueing up the record on his turntable, Mr. Motian started with Dodds's solo
version of the traditional New Orleans march tune "Maryland."

His point, in singling out "Maryland," was not about surface flash,
technique or speed. It was much simpler. While playing a march rhythm on the
snare drum all the way through, Dodds delineates the verse from the bridge
by pumping a bass drum on the bridge but not on the verses. That's all. "I
guess my point is that it makes a difference," he said. "He's in a different
part of the song."

What about that cymbal sound, I asked, the one tap at the end of each
section. Why is it so soft? Was Dodds, who worked during the earliest days
of jazz recording, just respecting the sensitivity of the microphones? "No,
I don't think so," Mr. Motian replied. "You know, the drummers in those days
- I don't think they bashed the cymbals like they do now. It's delicate.
It's a cymbal, man. It's not a jackhammer."

He took the needle off the record. "The first drum set I had was made during
World War II. It didn't even have metal. It had wooden rims. My drum sound
was closer to that than it is to my sound now. I wasn't that aware of sound.
Not like I am now."

In 1955 Mr. Motian met the pianist Bill Evans. A few years later Evans
formed his own trio, with Mr. Motian and eventually Scott LaFaro on bass,
which destabilized the pyramid structure of the normal piano trio,
increasing the mobility of the bassist and drummer around the leader. Mr.
Motian loved it, especially when LaFaro was in the group, and it was steady
work: his diaries from 1962 show that he played 251/2 weeks with Evans that
year. Among their recordings was a genuine 20th-century landmark, "Sunday at
the Village Vanguard."

That period, the late 50's and early 60's, was the busiest of his life. Mr.
Motian played often with other bandleaders too - Stan Getz, Lee Konitz,
Lennie Tristano, Martial Solal, Zoot Sims, Eddie Costa, Johnny Griffin. For
one week in Boston, in 1960, he got to play with Thelonious Monk. (Elvin
Jones was supposed to be the drummer, but he went missing.)

Mr. Motian chose Monk's version of "Carolina Moon," an old waltz commonly
understood as cornpone. Monk rethought it when he recorded it in 1952. He
plays the end of the waltz melody as a short piano introduction, and then
bass and drums crash in, playing a speedy four-four. In the middle of the
tune the drummer, Max Roach, slows down to midtempo four-four, but the
soloists, Lou Donaldson, Kenny Dorham and Lucky Thompson, continue to play
in three. Listening to it, Mr. Motian turned on like a lamp. He didn't have
much to say; instead, he clapped and counted all the way through, laughing.

Monk was an easy boss. He paid Mr. Motian $200 for the week, good wages, and
didn't demand much. One night he asked Mr. Motian to sing him his cymbal
beat. He did, and Monk thought about it and sang a corrected version back to
him, with a tiny bit more emphasis on the last stroke of the triplet.
Skip to next paragraph

Max Roach used to live a few blocks away from Mr. Motian on Central Park
West, and has long been one of his idols. (Mr. Roach is seven years older.)
When Mr. Motian finally joined the New York jazz scene, in 1955, Mr. Roach,
who was the great drummer of bebop's first wave, was already taking that
music into a new territory with the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet.

Mr. Motian saw the band play a lot. "I went to hear them once," Mr. Motian
said of that group, "and I think Sonny Rollins was on tenor. I was with this
bass player I used to play with a lot, Al Cotton, and he said: 'Look at Max.
Watch: when he's playing he uses his whole body. He's exercising when he's
playing. He's moving around. He's not just sitting there. It's not just in
the wrist, in the hands. It's the whole body.' It was the mid-50's when I
got turned on to that: the drums and me should be one thing, you know. It's
part of me. From head to fingernails to the end of my toes, man. The drums,
it's all me."

He wanted to hear the Victor Young movie theme "Delilah," a midtempo
minor-key ballad, from the Brown-Roach band's first album, recorded in 1954.
It has incredible clarity: the definition of each section makes it shine
like a hit pop song. "It's so organized, man," Mr. Motian said. "Arranged so
beautiful. Simple, but great."

There's a Max Roach solo in the middle, for an entire chorus. Just as Baby
Dodds did - and just as Sid Catlett did on another tune Mr. Motian played
for me that day, an out-of-print recording of "I Found a New Baby" - the
drummer indicates the structure of the composition in his solo, changing his
patterns to mark its divisions. I suggested that a thread was emerging here,
kind of an unusual one. He smiled a little bit, and raised one eyebrow, and
kept talking about Max Roach. "He plays different sections of a song, he
points it out to you. No confusion at all. You know what I mean?"

Kenny Clarke and Mr. Roach were the first great drummers of bebop, lining
out the pulse on the ride cymbal rather than the bass drum; suddenly jazz
drumming became higher-pitched, and more flexible. Mr. Motian idolized
Clarke, too, and got to know him in Paris in the 1980's, a few years before
Clarke died. Clarke played with a Miles Davis group for the 1957 soundtrack
to the Louis Malle film noir "Ascenseur Pour l'Échafaud," and Mr. Motian is
partial to the album. We listened to "Motel," a fast trio improvisation with
trumpet, bass and drums, based on the chords of "Sweet Georgia Brown."
Clarke plays with brushes on a snare drum, varying his patterns within the
same rhythm all the way through. There's not one cymbal crash, no bass drum,
but Clarke is dazzling. For a musician who likes to boil things down, it is
justification.

"Just to get so much music and so much feeling and so much swing from the
minimum amount of drums, man: that's incredible," Mr. Motian said. "There's
so much music there, just on a snare drum. It's like a symphony to me."