[Dixielandjazz] For The Drummers on the list

[Stephen G Barbone]

Caveat: May not be OKOM. However John Petters and the other drummers  
on the list may find this interesting. Roy Haynes the drummer profiled  
here, is 85 and still swinging. I first saw/heard Haynes with  
Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane at the Five Spot in NYC, circa 1957  
give or take a year. It was an unforgettable experience.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

At Lincoln Center, Using Both Sound and Silence

NY TIMES - SETP 25 - By BEN RATLIFF


One of the most accurate ways to understand jazz these days is through  
Roy Haynes’s cymbal beat. On Saturday night at Rose Theater, for about  
three-quarters of his stage time, he tilted his head toward his ride  
cymbal and drove a changing stream of swing through it, using every  
other sound — from the snare drum, kick drum and the rest of his kit —  
as circulating accents around that primary force. It was mesmerizing,  
affirmative, flexible and incredibly artful. It made internal sense.

“An Evening With Roy Haynes” opened Jazz at Lincoln Center’s new  
season, and marked a birthday: Mr. Haynes turned 85 last March, which  
doesn’t make much sense at all. He played in the first half with his  
working quartet, the Roy Haynes Fountain of Youth Band, and in the  
second half with a heavy ad-hoc group: Wynton Marsalis on trumpet,  
Kenny Garrett on alto saxophone, Danilo Pérez on piano and Dave  
Holland on bass. Mr. Haynes makes ordinary gigs feel special — it can  
seem as if he never learned how to be glib — but here, in the second  
half especially, he was especially fine. He got all the way in.

He filled the dimensions of the theater, making you hear his bass drum  
accents in the back rows. But he never numbed you by doing everything  
loudly all the time. The first important bebop drummers, of which he  
was one, used silences and moderation and self-imposed restrictions to  
make their sneaked upbeats pop more vividly.

Instead of making his sound a static thing, Mr. Haynes was flickering:  
working for the benefit of the music as well as the benefit of the  
show, even when laying back or making no sound at all. Several times  
he got up from his stool, prowled around the kit, shaking his  
shoulders and legs, and clicked his sticks together, or whacked a  
floor tom, or hit the edge of the cymbal at the start of a new chorus.  
Once he made the band sink into a period of silence and reanimated it  
with something like a kick-drum heartbeat. Once he got up in Mr.  
Garrett’s face and twirled a stick. Once, absorbing the feeling of a  
tune at his own speed after the rest of the band had started it, Mr.  
Haynes waggled the stick in his right hand, playing the air for a  
minute, like a draughtsman preparing to sketch. And then he leaned  
into his ride cymbal and started again.

The Fountain of Youth Band — it has gone through several iterations  
over the last decade — now has the saxophonist Jaleel Shaw as well as  
the bassist David Wong and its mainstay pianist, Martin Bejerano.  
Without a strong arrangement, it can get Coltrane-y in a hurry, which  
is not a philosophical or a historical problem: Mr. Haynes was a  
regular substitute in Coltrane’s quartet in the mid-60s, and he  
learned lessons from Coltrane just as Elvin Jones, that band’s regular  
drummer, had learned lessons from him. It sounded strong, particularly  
in the band’s diabolical version of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” tied  
together by a roughed-up, highly changeable six-eight pattern, which  
Mr. Haynes ultimately took with him to center-stage and rapped it out  
with a palm on a microphone.

“Wow,” said Mr. Haynes, reacting to the total audience response. “And  
they said you didn’t have rhythm.”

The other group was ready from the start, charged and loose. In Sonny  
Rollins’ “Grand Street,” Mr. Marsalis and Mr. Garrett got into a  
strident back-and-forth, narrowing down until their improvisations  
mashed together. In Thelonious Monk’s “Monk’s Dream,” Mr. Marsalis  
fought back hard and gesturally against Mr. Haynes, but Mr. Pérez  
teased him, drawling and leaving gaps in the sound. (Here, and for the  
rest of the set, Mr. Marsalis leaned in close to the piano, keeping  
his head about a foot away from Mr. Pérez’s, invading his space and  
staring, following closely, laughing at the sly parts: something  
interesting was going on there.)

In “Stardust,” Mr. Marsalis brought off his best stuff: a solo of  
great dynamic range, of orderly melodic and rhythmic space. In “Bright  
Mississippi,” with the horns laying out, Mr. Haynes stayed focused on  
the clenched high-hat cymbal — a la his idol, the Basie-band drummer  
Jo Jones — and mixed up Cuban clave with swing rhythm in a performance  
that was all conviction: nothing clinical about it. And through Bud  
Powell’s “Bouncing With Bud” — Mr. Haynes played on the original  
recording, in 1949 — Mr. Holland, with a big tone and a gathering  
insistence around drone notes, played like an earth mover, wincing and  
stomping his foot in the home stretch.

“You’re making me feel like this is my last time,” said Mr. Haynes, at  
the finish, almost scolding the audience for its standing ovation.  
“Damn!”