SKF NOTE: I often find reading articles and interviews in old music magazines pleasurable and instructive. This 44-year old piece by Conrad Silvert on the Old and New Dreams band, and its individual members, is a case in point.

I’ve posted here just that part of Silvert’s piece focused on drummer Ed Blackwell. Blackwell has long been a favorite drummer of mine since I first heard him on the John Coltrane-Don Cherry “Avant Garde” album. My initial impression was that Blackwell took Max Roach’s melodic drumming one or more steps further.

When I interviewed Blackwell at Wesleyan University for the November 1981 Modern Drummer, it was, for me, a disappointing exchange. Blackwell and I didn’t click for reasons I don’t know, but I could feel it, and it was a let down because I thought so highly of his musicianship-and I still do.

Thank you, Conrad Silvert, for this Blackwell profile. I don’t think we can ever have too many.

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Ed Blackwell doesn’t just play the drums. He coaxes some special stuff from a trap set that has nothing to do with the material world. And Blackwell’s is the stuff of legend. Whenever Professor Longhair or Dr. John or the Neville Brothers have sung about, that’s what Blackwell has. No matter how far “outside” Old and New Dreams may venture, Blackwell sits there, imperturbable, totally relaxed, cooking up those deceptively simple patterns that keep the music locked right down to earth.

New Orleans arguably has produced the most soulful…American music of this century, and Blackwell is one of the great exponents of that tradition. Now he lives in Middletown, Connecticut and teachers drums to five students per semester at Wesleyan University. But he lived in New Orleans until he was almost 30, and you can hear it in every note he plays. The New Orleans sound is a spicy mixture of Caribbean, African and European ingredients. Blackwell reinforced the African elements of his playing when he toured the African continent with Randy Weston; when he played an extended solo at Town Hall on “Togo” (which he wrote, basing it on a Ghanese traditional folk melody), the man conjured up a whole battery of hand drummers.

Blackwell seems to erase the distance between his hands and the surfaces of the drums. “Blackwell,” says Don Cherry, “has always made his own sticks, his own mallets, his own practice pads. And he always practices on the pads, so you never hear him crash or bang. His drums are pure swing. He plays independently with all four limbs and still going forward in one direction. He made an important impression on Ornette when they were in Los Angeles together, and Billy Higgins’ hearing Blackwell helped him play with the band later on.”

Blackwell, a soft spoken, exceedingly gentle man, doesn’t seem overwhelmed by his own abilities. Before he left New Orleans, he was part of the American Jazz Quintet. “They were all bright musicians,” he says, “and all admirers of Ornette. They all wrote original materials, and they all had that New Orleans touch-you can’t escape it if you’re raised there. It’s inbred. That’s why you see so many rhythm and blues players coming to New Orleans just to record with New Orleans drummers. They’re looking for that particular pulse and that New Orleans parade, that marching beat. I never actually played drums at the funerals, but I was around the parades, part of the audience called the “second line” that followed the parade, and I was always there, clapping and dancing. It was a happy feeling all the way.

Blackwell went to Los Angeles in 1951 and met Ornette [Coleman] the next year. “Ornette and I lived together from ’53 to ’55. We didn’t get much work because very few people put up with Ornette’s way of playing at that time. We’d play for ten dollars a night, four dollars a night…different prices.”

Considering Blackwell’s talent, history and reputation, it is phenomenal that he just finished making his first album as a leader, “Don’t Quit!” for Sweet Earth, a new company in New Hampshire. Blackwell’s band consisted of Charles Brackeen, reeds; Mark Helias, bass, and Achmed Abdullah, piano. (Helias also has recorded with Redman).

Blackwell enjoys teaching and occasionally giggling with his own group, but his time with Old and New Dreams plainly gives him his greatest satisfaction. “After leaving this band, the love I feel from them, from the music, lasts the whole years. I feel so full.”

Source: “Old and New Dreams,” by Conrad Silvert, Down Beat June 1980