In 1981, when Max Weinberg and I interviewed Charlie Watts in his New York City hotel room, Charlie seemed sad and, as a drummer, unfulfilled. He said anyone who said his drumming was great had no ears. Greatness, Charlie told us, resided at drumming levels above him.
Sometimes, he said, when he was onstage playing with the Stones he would close his eyes and dream he was playing at Birdland with Charlie Parker.
Years later it was great to hear about, and listen to, Charlie’s records with his own big jazz band. A dream fulfilled.
Reading a pop music newspaper on my junior high school bus is when I first saw photos of Charlie and the Rolling Stones. I’ve listen to his classic drumming on “Paint It Black,” “Honky Tonk Women,” and countless other records my whole life.
Sorry, Charlie. If great drumming is memorable drumming – you were a great drummer.
Yesterday and today, looking over the many posts from musicians sharing their impressions of Charlie Watts, it’s good to see Charlie so often smiling, the 1981 sadness I encountered long gone.
SKF NOTE: Somewhere 1980-1983, when I was on staff at Modern Drummer, I received a call from author Burt Korall. Mr. Korall was among the writers I absorbed in Down Beat magazine and jazz album liner notes.
Getting phone calls at MD from “my teachers,” which happened only now and then, was always an exciting surprise.
Mr. Korall was calling, he said, to gather my opinion for a jazz drumming history book he was writing. Who did I think history would consider the great jazz drummers of the 1980s? That was the gist of Korall’s question.
There was no easy definition for jazz drumming in the early 1980s. Was it the jazz fusion of Weather Report and Return to Forever? Was it Creed Taylor’s successful CTI label music? Or was it the more all-inclusive-but-always-looking-ahead music of, say, Jack DeJohnette’s bands on ECM records?
Finally, I told Burt Korall I thought history would consider Jack DeJohnette a great jazz drummer of the 1980s. Other great jazz drummers of the 1980s were still unknown, I said. Had Korall asked me his question a year or so earlier, I would have still included DeJohnette, and there would have been obvious other drummers to include. Like Steve Gadd.
But when Burt Korall asked me his question, most of Steve Gadd’s playing had shifted to CTI and pop records like Rickie Lee Jones’s “Chuck E’s in Love.” Gadd’s drumming was phenomenal – but would history think of it as jazz drumming? I didn’t think so.
Of course, DeJohnette had been playing great jazz drums since the 1960s. But at the time, it was my impression that Jack’s playing on his “Directions” and “Gateway” ECM band recordings would stand the test of time and be viewed by historians as among the great jazz drumming of the 1980s – even though the albums were released in the mid- to late-1970s.
If I could turn back time would I change my answer to Burt Korall’s question? No.
SKF NOTE: Here’s a Tony Williams story told by bassist Ron Carter in the liner notes to the newly released album, Roy Hargrove-Mulgrew Miller: In Harmony, by Resonance Records. It’s a splendid album of high level trumpet and piano music by two exceptional players. Straight, no chaser.
“Mulgrew (Miller) was with Tony Williams’s band for a while. I knew that band very well and I made records with them. Mulgrew and I would exchange Tony Williams stories.
“One of his great stories about Tony Williams was that every now and then when Tony would get to the microphone and announce, he would look over the band and say, ‘mop’ (M-O-P).
“When Tony said that, the band knew that Tony knew he had played some exceptional music that night.”
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SKF NOTE: Thank you to Verve records for making available Burnin’ Beat, a 1962 studio date wih Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa. After finding this album as a vinyl cut-out in the 1970s – it had a significant impact on my drumming.
Listening again in 2021, some of my initial awe seems misplaced. Some of my initial awe. Not, by any means, all of it. This track, Evolution, remains a true gem. I would go so far as to call essential listening for drummers.
For my money, although Krupa and Rich have their drums, especially their snare drums, tuned very different — I love the sound of both drum sets. Beautiful open sounding. Are we hearing calf heads? Plastic heads? A combination of both? I don’t know.
Buddy’s snare is so crisp and tight. Sounds like he borrowed Roy Haynes’s snare!
Lots of swinging, great drumming here. Still a keeper.
Scott K Fish 
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