Fred, it just might be time to stumble down to the old Barnes & Nobles and update your record collection a bit.

Nothing against Max Roach's genius, nothing at all. He's responsible in some measure for today's remarkable kit diddlers. But his influence stops in about 1959, when Philly Joe Jones, Elvin Jones and Roy Haynes take over the legacy.

Then there's Jack DeJohnette, who is his own category.

I saw Max play with a quartet in 1986 in Appleton, Wisconsin. You couldn't hear anything but the drums because Max couldn't hear the drums because he was practically deaf. Good times.

It's common knowledge amongst drummers that Max had a tendency to rush and drag the tempo, which his apologists call "pushing" or "pulling" the beat. Nope. Jones, Jones and Haynes pushed and pulled. Max just rushed and dragged.

So, no. Today's drummers, today's relevant drummers, whom you don't mention, are more indebted to that trio up there in the 2nd paragraph than they are to Roach. And who are these "today's drummers" of which I speak and you don't?

Jorge Rossi, who used to play with Brad Mehldau's trio.
Bill Stewart, who used to play with Larry Goldings' trio.
Greg Hutchinson, who used to play with Christian McBride.
Brian Blade, who used to play with Josh Redman's quartet.
Leon Parker, who used to play with Jackie Terrasson's trio.

Jorge's sense of time and his transparent fluidity with Brad's crazy obsession with very odd time signatures and even crazier over the bar line phrasing that make the fucked up time signatures even more fucked up verges on the heroic, if not manic.

Bill, who's just crazy, gives nothing up when it comes to swing and time. He's not a metronome, but if he were, his personality would at least be understandable.

Greg is old school hard swing.

Brian's one of the few jazz drummers who can make you think you're listening to Yes or King Crimson.

Leon, also crazy, uses only a kick drum, a snare and a crash cymbal. He also strokes the end of a stick across the snare head while singing into, leading one to believe that the bass player minored in whale song. Neat trick. He does it on the live version of that trio's "Thing's Ain't What They Used To Be".

Max Roach was a great drummer. But he's not the greatest jazz drummer of all time. To achieve that you have to do a little more than come up with gimmicks to try to keep up with others who are the greatest of all time (Parker, Miles, et al). It's no secret Oscar Peterson and, to an even greater extent, Ray Brown preferred the bop stylings of Buddy Rich than those of Max Roach. And that right there says more about Roach's place in the jazz cannon than a 7-minute hi-hat solo ever could. Seriously.

You're knowledgeable!

I love Elvin, DeJohnette and Stewart; but Tony Williams with Miles, and a little later with Herbie really me knock me out!

How do you feel about Tony?

I think he was loose with tempo too, and I've heard it described as "elasticity", which is an "acceptible" apology; but I think it also was youthful exhuberance, and it infected Davis' whole group at the time. Irresistable!

I read one of the biographies of Miles Davis, and I remember him saying how much he liked Tony Williams' playing. I think it's interesting how musicians who are sophisticated in their ideas of rhythm don't see each beat of the music as an indivisible instant. Rather, each beat has a certain width. I've heard James Brown trying to get his backup musicians to play at the front of the beat, or at the back of the beat. Along the same lines, Miles said he liked Tony Williams because he always played "up on the beat," which I took to mean that he pushed the tempo a bit.

There's another passage about this sort of micro-division of beats that I just read that kind of cracked me up. It was from a biography of Bill Evans, dealing with the later part of his career when he played with Philly Joe Jones (who was notorious for rushing the tempo). Here's a bit of it describing a European tour they did:

Lee Konitz [saxophonist] joined them for most of the trip, but, as [previous bassist] Mike Moore had been, he was troubled by Philly Joe Jones’s inclination to push up the tempo. He explained: “Bill also had the tendency to play up on the top of the beat and I have a tendency to try to play in the middle of the beat and sometimes behind. So when people do that I feel like I have to run to keep up because that’s not my comfortable feeling. So I was listening to [bassist] Marc Johnson all the time—he was trying to hold it together. It was embarrassing; I was so uncomfortable that in Nice I felt I was having a heart attack after one set. I actually had to go to a hospital in an ambulance.

This is apparently serious stuff. It seems that a bad drummer could actually kill a person.

... I immedietely thought of Chick Webb.

I know he's of a different era, but the first time I ever saw him on film, I was so blown away it took me two weeks to recover.

What Miles particularly liked about him was he was like a drum machine who could listen and follow whatever tempo Miles set. He was okay but for god's sake lots of drummers could do that. Williams became comvinced he was some kind of drum god. I saw him in the mid-seventies and he was just a bunch of dumb noise. Lots of musicians prefer a drummer who does not think. Buddy Rich is perfect for them because he lacks the equipment for thought -- his bop stylings, oooh yah. ***** No mention of Ed Blackwell from all you geniuses -- and why is that?

Switters, The point of the article I read was to let me know that Max Roach died. An eulogy of sorts. Just a way to respectfully see off an influential musician. Not a debate. Not a challenge. So why did you do it? Despite your “Nothing against max Roach’s genius..”, it was obvious by your reply that you have a lot against it. Did you really think your reply was the place to grace us with your knowledge of other, and in your view, more beneficial drummers to the title of jazz’s greatest drummer? What did this have to do with the passing of Max Roach? Hate to be standing next to you at a real funeral, my friend. Kenjd.

bucketbeats.com

Everybody was just a bunch of noise in the mid-1970s, or they were boring. Williams was at his peak at the same time Miles...and Wayne Shorter were at their peak, i.e., at the time that Miles Smiles and Sorcerer were recorded. I guess we're talking 1966 and 1967.

Any mention of great Jazz drummers which doesn't mention Sid Catlett is incomplete: he could play with Louis Armstrong AND Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Buddy Rich was an amazing technician, but not a very sensitive drummer, and Ed Thigpen worked better with Oscar than Rich ever would have. Roach combined both chops and sensitivity. I think the five acknowledged masters of Postwar drumming have been Roach, Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones, Elvin Jones, and Tony Williams, and this is because we associate them with great bands: Charlie Parker/Clifford Brown/Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk/Jazz Messengers, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis, respectively. Great drumming in vacuo doesn't mean much.

Any mention of 'great Jazz drummers' which omits Sid Catlett is incomplete, as he was the only drummer capable of playing with Louis Armstrong AND Dizzy Gillespie/Charlie Parker. Buddy Rich was an amazing technician, but not a very sensitive drummer; I think Oscar did better with Ed Thigpen.

There are really only five premier drummers in the postwar era, which helped to make the best combos:

1. Max Roach: Parker, Brown, Rollins

2. Art Blakey: Monk, Jazz Messengers

3. Philly Joe Jones: Miles Davis

4. Elvin Jones: Coltrane

5. Tony Williams: Miles Davis

As Max Roach was present at the seminal Charlie Parker dates of 1945, which saw masterpieces like Koko, and continued right up to 1956 with Rollins' Saxophone Collossus, he has probably been on more great Jazz dates than any other drummer. A drummer cannot merit that much attention outside of the musicians he propels, which is why we have to consider the whole product.

This all started with Max Roach and let it end there -- he was a great musician and it was cheap and petty to play little Mister Know It All games about how some total nonentity like Buddy Rich was better. I will keep on putting Ed Blackwell's name up there, along with Cyrille as a representative Cecil Taylor drummer. Some people think Art Blakey is what jazz was all about and Ornette is not, and how on earth does one communicate with such people? I don't want to pick a fight, because this is a wake and not the right occasion. But really, people, open your ears. It's past time.

I know, I know, he's supposed to be great and a great virtuoso, etc. He just doesn't seem to have much relation to the other great personalities of Jazz. He's a world unto himself. Now, Ornette is a slightly different story, and both Ed Blackwell and Ornette's first drummer, Billy Higgins, have played with Jazzmen in the more traditional (tonal) mainstream. They are both fine drummers. So is Mingus' drummer, Dannie Richmond, who didn't start out being a drummer, but was trained by Mingus to do what he wanted. None of these three had the track record of Roach or Blakey, but they are quite serviceable, and indicate that the rhythm section will be cookin'.

Cecil Taylor has played with most of the jazz artists i most admire from the last forty years. Ornette is a slightly different story no matter what story you happen to be telling, but He and Taylor are the two musicians (along with a musical installation artist named Rolf Julius) who absolutely changed my life the first time I heard them. The first time I heard _Unit Structures_ it changed everything about how i heard music -- ALL music. I got to hear him live a month later and everything resolved itself. BTW, I know people whose lives were changed by hearing Doc Watson, or even Led Zep. It's not that big a deal. It's just, I can't understand why some musicians, like Taylor, or the AACM guys, get this odd reputation of being hard to hear.

Why is Cecil hard to hear for many people? That's a pretty easy one to answer.

1. He generally works outside the bounds of tonality. Atonal music is always going to be a minority taste. Look at Classical. Schoenberg, Webern, Varese, and many of the early 20th century composers are rarely sought out--despite their having something interesting to express and an unusual way of expressing it. People seem to like melody and harmony and get upset when their music doesn't provide it in a predictable way.

2. Cecil is even harder to hear than Ornette, because Ornette's work, particularly in the early years, was short enough. Ramblin, Face of the Bass, Lonely Woman, Free, Una Muy Bonita, etc. are all under ten minutes. Ramblin is built on a chord structure even simpler than the Blues. Cecil's numbers can stretch to 30 minutes, and the intensity of the playing is draining--in the same way, but more so than late Coltrane numbers. At least late Coltrane generally follows Ornette in that when he gets into his heated solos, the piano drops out or plays reiterated chord changes. Cecil is much less predictable. Much more complex. As complex as say, the Bartok Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, but at least with a Classical work, you have structure. Cecil's structures are less apparent. The music boils over in seething rage and goes crazy; Taylor's dynamics are beyond any other Jazz player I am familiar with. This kind of puts him outside the main Jazz tradition.

Cecil Taylor has had an effect on other players. Two come immediately to mind: Andrew Hill in the 60s and Don Pullen in the 70s and 80s. But even they alternate tonality with atonality. It's a good question whether Jazz can sustain atonal structures--despite AACM, Braxton, Taylor, and others. It ends up sounding experimental.

My first snippy response is that Jazz can sustain atonal structures and the proof of this is that it HAS done so for a generation, leaving folks who say it can't in the same situation as those who say a bumblebee can't fly. And (here's the snippy part) Jazz, like all art forms, either grows or dies. So when it falls into the hands of pallbearers like Wynton Marsalis, it dies, and when it's played by Braxton, Taylor, et al, it lives. *****Also, I dunno about that "seething rage" thing. To me, that has an uncomfortable tang of racial stereotyping -- and mind you, I'm not blaming you or anyone for that. Taylor had, for a long while, a distinctly pissy attitude with a lot of his critics. He had personal issues, but more than that he was sick of college kids throwing Stockhausen at him as if that meant he was stealing, which he was not. And YES, his stage work was terrifying -- most humans can't sustain that kind of intensity at all, much less for hours at a time. But intensity and rage are not the same thing, yes? Keiji Haino plays at that level for extended sets, and nobody talks about his rage, seething or otherwise. I realize Haino's also a minority taste, and most americans like their listning easy, but if we're talking about art here, let's be serious.

"Rage" was perhaps unfortunate, though "violent" would be an accurate description of some (most?) of Taylor climaxes...which can go on for quite a while. Certainly we can credit him for being unpredictable, but my main point was that he is outside the main Jazz tradition in a way that Ornette is not. And consistently atonal Jazz players are few and far between, and usually have to get grants to make a living. I am not opposed to their "art", but I don't think it lives in the same way that, say, John Coltrane's adventurous stuff of the 60s still does for a sizable number of afficianados. I agree with you about Wynton Marsalis doing a pallbearer act, though here again, "curator" would be more accurate. Both sides (the revolutionary left--Taylor, AACM--and the academic right (Marsalis) have intellectualized the music beyond what it was designed for. The middle ground of David Murray and Henry Threadgill still seems to me the most representatively Jazzy of recent decades. They can be academic, as with Air's recreation of Jelly Roll and Joplin tunes, or outside--though not nearly to the extent of Taylor, or even Ornette.

You say that the creative wing of Jazz has moved atonal for the last generation, and you might have said since Ornette's and Cecil's pioneering work of the late 50s, but it would be unprecedented that a significant artistic movement would have garnered such little prestige in the ensuing 40 or 50 years. Schoenberg was famous, if poor, just a few years after going atonal, and Bartok, who represented the sensible middle, was anxious to hear Pierrot Lunaire, and obtained the score less than 10 years after it was composed. Even Webern became famous immediately after his death, and was the major influence on composers by 1950, five years later. Is the left wing of Jazz barking up the wrong tree?