SKF NOTE: For a moment last week — a brief moment — I wondered, “Have I exhausted my lifelong study of drummers and drumming?” This was one of my rare “What drummers haven’t I heard?” moments.
I was scanning 1973 Down Beat album reviews. Many of the albums had drummers I had listened to — and liked — many times: Sam Woodyard, George Brown, Ralph Humphrey, Joe LaBarbera, Steve Gadd, Shelly Manne, Donald Dean, and Mousey Alexander.
But among the DB album reviews were drummers whose names or music, as far as I know, I never heard: Arlington Davis, Jr., Esco Cromer, Harry Wilkinson, Billy James, and Jean Louis Viale.
There really is always someone new to hear. It might be a drummer who is new in that he or she is just gaining wider public exposure. And it might be a drummer who — as with the five drummers I just mentioned — was recording over 40 years ago, and for some reason I never even knew their names until last week.
And that, for me, is one the best parts of drummers/drumming. Five new starting points: Here is a sample of the five drummers on the albums DB reviewed in 1973.
SKF NOTE: My interview with Sonny Greer took place at Sonny’s New York City apartment on March 4, 1981, published in an edited version in the November 1981Modern Drummer.
Brooks Kerr, a pianist and Duke Ellington aficionado, was performing with Sonny as piano/drums duo at New York City’s West End Cafe when we met. I was glad to have Brooks taking part in the interview. He knew much more about Sonny Greer as a person and as a musician that I did.
Sonny’s interview transcript is full of Sonny’s verbal character sketches of well-known drummers I think worth preserving. Here is one example:
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Brooks Kerr: Sonny, what was your first remembrance of Buddy Rich?
Sonny Greer: He hung around Chick Webb and all those guys. That’s where he got a lot of his stuff from.
Scott K Fish: Buddy got a lot of his stuff from Jo Jones too.
SG: Well, Jo wasn’t in New York. Jo was out West there in 1936. Jo Jones! That’s my number one man. He’s something else.
SKF: When did you first see Jo Jones play?
SG: I saw him with Basie out in Kansas City somewhere. With the Bennie Moten band. I liked Jo right away. He was the same Jo Jones that you know now. He ain’t never had no hair.
BK: Sonny, the last time Jo Joes was up at the West End, you looked at him and said, “If you’re so rich, why don’t you buy yourself a toupee?”
SG: Yeah. He got mad.
BK: Jo’s nickname for Sonny is “Mr. Empire State Building.”
SG: That’s what he calls me all the time.
One Christmas time he found the oldest pair of shoes that he could find, gift wrapped them and said, “Here’s your Christmas present. Cost me a lot of money.”
They were shoes, man, he must have had them a thousand years. Said, “Here’s your Christmas present.” All wrapped up nice, man. I threw them in the garbage can. He’ll tell you about it. Next time you see him thell him, “Sonny told me about the Christmas present you gave him.”
SKF: As drums progressed through the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s — with people like Jo Jones and then on up — did you [like] what was happening?
SG: Well, Jo Jones played then like he does now. He never changed his way of playing. Not that I know of. And I’ve seen him many times.
SKF NOTE: Here is a favorite universal description of the relationship of living musicians to their lifeless musical instruments.
In James Baldwin‘s story, Sonny’s Blues, Mr. Baldwin’s character, Sonny, is an aspiring jazz pianist. Baldwin’s musician/instrument description is written through the eyes of Sonny’s unamed older brother — a non-musician math teacher:
I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It’s made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there’s only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.
SKF NOTE: Listening to Chameleon by Herbie Hancock‘s Headhunters when the song was first released in 1973 was an experience today’s listeners missed. Cutting edge music in 1973, the best of Chameleon — the music, the sounds, the rhythm — are part of today’s music vocabulary.
The Headhunters’ Chameleon was the first time I heard Harvey Mason playing drums. It’s fair to say the Headhunters album put Harvey Mason on the map.
In 1976, Harvey Mason sat with one of the great jazz writers, Leonard Feather, for one of Feather’s signatureDown Beat Blindfold Tests. Mr. Feather plays album cuts and his guest reacts to the cuts.
Mr. Mason’s response to Louis Bellson‘s 1975 version of Chameleon caught my eye for a few reasons. First, Harvey Mason tells us how Chameleon — a “group effort” — was written. Second, in a case of double irony, Mason singles out Headhunters percussionist Bill Summers — who plays Chameleon’s signature beer bottle into — as an equal partner in the song’s creation. Yet instead of Bill Summers, Harvey Mason in this Blindfold Test credits Bill Simmons.
Getting Bill Summers’s last name wrong could have happened for many reasons: Harvey Mason could have misspoken. Leonard Feather, or Feather’s tape transcriber, could have heard and transcribed the name wrong. The name might have been botched at Down Beat or at the magazine printer’s. It was nice of Harvey Mason to give Bill Summers credit where credit is due.
Leonard Feather plays Louis Bellson’s 1975 version of Chameleon, and Harvey believes he, Mason, is hearing Maynard Ferguson’s 1974 arrangement of Chameleon — which has drummer Dan D’Imperio. Reading this Blindfold Test in 2016, I was expecting Harvey Mason to identify Louis Bellson. I don’t know if my expectations would have been different in 1976.
At any rate, I enjoyed Mason’s response to Bellson’s Chameleon both before and after Mason knows he has just heard Louis Bellson on drums. And for good measure I am including all three Chameleon versions in chronological order in this post.
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LOUIS BELLSON, Chameleon (from Explosion, Pablo). Louis Bellson, drums; Blue Mitchell, trumpet; Bill Holman, arranger.
Harvey Mason: That’s very familiar. I think that was the first cover of that tune. That was interesting, the way that tune came about. When I was playing with Herbie [Hancock] we were rehearsing for the album and trying to get tunes together. It was really a cohesive unit; we really felt good when we played together. We always carried tape recorders and just started playing and editing the things that we played in rehearsals. We came up with a great tune and put it together and it turn out to be … wow! Unbelievable success.
It was a group effort. Unfortunately, Bill Simmons [sic] was left off a lot of the credit, but he contributed as much as anyone else.
On the version we just listened to, the arrangement is good. I’d give it four stars. It was performed very well. I believe it was Maynard. I hope it was anyway. The drummer I don’t know. It was interesting to hear him play the same pattern that I played on the record. Fine. I really enjoyed it.
Leonard Feather: Did you know it was recorded by Louis Bellson?
HM: If it was Louis Bellson, then it was Blue Mitchell on trumpet, not Maynard Ferguson. It was interesting to hear Louis. Beautiful, Louis!
Source: Blindfold Test: Harvey Mason, by Leonard Feather, Down Beat, February 12, 1976
SKF NOTE: Robert Palmer was a writer I could always count on for insightful interviews with musicians. Mr. Palmer knew his subjects, asked great questions, and always — from where I stood — treated his interviews as peer-to-peer musician conversations.
So last week, while revisiting aDown Beatmagazine I’ve had for 40 years, I read — for the first time, I think — Palmer’s interview with New England Conservatory President Gunther Schuller. A musician, writes Palmer, whose biography has “too many honors and accomplishments listed.”
Today, I find in this interview many, many interesting points — especially discussions on how musicians from different countries have unique ways of hearing rhythm. For example, Schuller tells Palmer, “I practically grew up in the New York Philharmonic, and I learned very early that for Mengelberg and Toscanni and all those great conductors of the ’30s, one of their main jobs was taking all these national traits, say within the string section, and try to bring them all into one common denominator. It was a heck of a job.”
Which, in my life experience, is the same “heck of a job” team builders of all stripes experience.
Robert Palmer, at one point, moves the topic to Gunther Schuller’s book, Early Jazz. Palmer says of Schuller’s theory on the African origin of syncopation he, Palmer, wishes Schuller had used more examples in reaching his conclusion. Schuller replies, he used the examples available to him at the time, and even with more examples, Schuller thinks his African/syncopation theory would hold true.
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Gunther Schuller: I think the main point of my chapter was the explanation of what we call syncopation, which, I am convinced, comes out of the polyrhythmic structuring of African ensemble music.
Look, if I face students who are classically trained and I want to get them to play a swinging syncopation, what do I do? I write it down. Of course I can’t write it down exactly. If I write it the way jazz musicians write it, they’ll play it like this. (Schuller sings a choppy, stiff version of a swing riff.)
If I try to write it more or less exactly, it will be terribly complex, sextuplets over quintuplets, all this sort of thing — irrational rhythms — and they still won’t be able to play it.
The obvious answer is that all they have to do is hear it. But, and this is the fantastic thing, they often cannot hear it! My father, who is a German trained musician, cannot play jazz rhythms.
So I asked myself, “Where did that particular type of syncopation, which you do not find in Brahms, in Wagner, where did it come from?”
Source: Gunther Schuller: On the American Musical Melting Pot, by Robert Palmer, Down Beat, February 12, 1976
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