Roy Haynes, performing on the North Sea Jazz Pageant in The Hague, Netherlands, in 2002.
Peter Van Breukelen/Redferns
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Roy Haynes, performing on the North Sea Jazz Pageant in The Hague, Netherlands, in 2002.
Peter Van Breukelen/Redferns
Roy Haynes, the pioneering jazz drummer who carried out with legends like Charlie Parker, Lester Younger and Sarah Vaughan, died Tuesday on the age of 99.
His demise was confirmed by his daughter, Leslie Haynes-Gilmore, to WRTI’s Nate Chinen.
To take heed to any a part of Roy Haynes’ drumming individually is to confront one thing essential about jazz and what it could possibly comprise. The sunshine and shifting ride-cymbal patterns, the uneven bass-drum accents, the crisply organized breaks or context-smashing disruptions on snare, the clarifying semaphore of the high-hat: every of those is price following by itself.
However who does that? Higher to listen to all of the components functioning collectively as a fancy, swinging organism. And Haynes performed in such a means that every one his startling musical particulars conjoined with human qualities: grace, humor, pleasure, cool, confidence, vitality. He acquired up towards the entrance of the stage and tap-danced throughout his gigs, typically as an integral a part of a drum solo. For those who weren’t conditioned to pay shut consideration to the drummer in a bunch, he may very well be the one to make you begin. Regardless of the group, he wasn’t simply a part of the rhythm part. He was — as per Sarah Vaughan’s introduction on her 1954 monitor “Shulie A Bop,” in alternation together with his snare-drum hits — [crack!] Roy. [rat-tat-tat!] Haynes.
Haynes absorbed new kinds within the jazz custom. But it was typically the older components of his type, originating within the Nineteen Forties and ’50s — the strut and bounce and swing and dance in his beat — which stored him present, even in latest occasions. “I am solely comfortable after I’m shifting ahead,” as he defined it to the author Burt Korall. “Some musicians play the identical songs the identical means each night time. That is unimaginable for me. My basic type could not likely be totally different. However there have been so many issues added.”
Roy Haynes accepts his Lifetime Achievement award in the course of the Grammys’ Particular Benefit Awards Ceremony, held Feb. 12, 2011 in Los Angeles, California.
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Born March 13, 1925, Haynes grew up inside a exceptional household within the culturally built-in Boston neighborhood of Roxbury; he described his block as a mix of French-Canadian, Jewish, Irish, and black households from the South. His mother and father, Gustavus and Edna Haynes, each got here from Barbados, and his father labored for the Normal Oil firm. (Each sang, and Gustavus performed the organ in church.)
Roy studied violin for a 12 months, knew percussion could be his focus. He grew to become a voracious learner—though aside from an early lesson from a Roxbury drummer named Herbie Wright and a brief stint at Boston Conservatory he principally realized on his personal by watching and practising and performing, which he was doing so typically by his center teenage years that he dropped out of Roxbury Memorial Excessive College. He gravitated towards one of the best: he realized a lot about taking part in the high-hat from the drummer who was maybe his biggest hero, the Depend Basie drummer Jo Jones, whom he first met as a young person by speaking his means backstage at a Basie gig on the RKO Boston Theatre, claiming to be Jones’s son.
His earliest jobs included stints with the Boston-based musicians Mabel Robinson Simms, Peter Brown and Sabby Lewis, then was summoned to New York in 1945 by the bandleader Luis Russell. And that is the place his creative story actually begins, for a few causes. One is as a result of he may by no means be a regional outlier, in expertise or temperament. And the opposite is as a result of Haynes got here to New York at a degree of rhythmic revolution, close to the start of the ahead and artfully fractured type referred to as bebop. Different drummers could have had extra of a hand in its creation—notably Kenny Clarke and Max Roach. However Haynes was amongst those that pushed bebop drumming ahead and refined it.
No matter else there’s to say about Haynes as a person expertise and a bandleader, it should even be understood that he labored with an astonishing quantity and vary of essential figures in jazz; these figures kind each one musician’s curriculum vitae and a big a part of a whole cultural custom. Here’s a partial record of them, roughly within the order of when Haynes performed with them, beginning in 1946: Louis Armstrong; Lester Younger (1947 to ’49); Bud Powell; Miles Davis; Parker (on-and-off from 1949 to 1953, together with on the opening night time of the legendary 52nd Avenue membership Birdland); Stan Getz; Ella Fitzgerald; Sarah Vaughan (1953-58); Sonny Rollins; Billie Vacation (throughout among the final performances of her life, in 1959); Thelonious Monk (1957-58); Phineas New child, Jr.; John Coltrane; Andrew Hill; Chick Corea; Archie Shepp; Gary Burton; Alice Coltrane; Stanley Cowell; Pat Metheny; Danilo Perez.
What about Duke Ellington? Ellington supplied Haynes a job in 1952, whereas Haynes was working with Parker. He turned it down respectfully, sensing that his type could be too disruptive for the older musicians within the band.
Haynes was concerned in essential recorded moments in jazz. His single-day session with Bud Powell—August 8, 1949—resulted within the everlasting requirements “Bouncing With Bud,” “Wail,” and “Dance of the Infidels.” His recordings with Sarah Vaughan, together with Within the Land of Hello-Fi, Swingin’ Straightforward, and At Mr. Kelly’s, are fundamental to the canon of jazz vocals. (Haynes had the utmost respect for Vaughan; he known as her a “pure genius.”) He will be heard with Thelonious Monk on Thelonious in Motion and Misterioso, each recorded stay at New York’s 5 Spot Cafe in 1958, throughout one in every of Monk’s biggest intervals. He’s on Getz’s Focus, Oliver Nelson’s Blues and the Summary Reality, and Ray Charles’ Genius + Soul = Jazz, three marvels of jazz association launched in 1961, and on Coltrane’s trenchant Impressions and Newport ’63. He performed on two of the extra influential information of the Nineteen Sixties interval that got here out quickly after the demise of Coltrane, Gary Burton’s “Duster” and Chick Corea’s “Now He Sings, Now He Sobs.” And he was on Sonny Rollins’ Grammy-nominated stay report “Highway Reveals, Vol. 2,” in a bunch together with Rollins and Ornette Coleman, a one-time incidence in 2010.
Roy Haynes performs together with his band, Fountain of Youth, on the Metropolis Parks Basis’s Charlie Parker Jazz Pageant, held on the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park, New York on Aug. 25, 2012.
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Roy Haynes performs together with his band, Fountain of Youth, on the Metropolis Parks Basis’s Charlie Parker Jazz Pageant, held on the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park, New York on Aug. 25, 2012.
Jack Vartoogian/Getty Photos/Getty Photos
Haynes’ discography as bandleader stretches from 1954 to 2011. It contains the post-bop basic We Three, with the pianist Phineas New child, Jr. and bassist Paul Chambers; Out of the Afternoon, from 1962, one of many nice paperwork on the sting of the straight-ahead jazz custom and the early-60s vanguardist “new factor”; Hip Ensemble, a funk-gospel-semi-free-jazz report from 1971 together with his band of that identify; and Fountain of Youth, recorded in 2003 (when he was 79) together with his late-period band by that identify, blasting by tunes related to the bandleaders he performed with throughout his lengthy profession, all the way in which again to Monk.
Other than his musicianship, certainly a part of Haynes’ success will be attributed to the truth that he led a disciplined and drug-free life. And a few may need been as a result of he lower a magnetic and imposing determine, in sharp garments and sharp vehicles. (A 1960 article by George Frazier in Esquire Journal listed him as one of many best-dressed males of that 12 months, alongside Dean Acheson, Clark Gable and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.; it famous his desire for custom-made fits from the Andover Store in Cambridge, MA. Later his pursuits would run to satin jackets, gaucho pants with side-buttons, and cowboy hats.)
Haynes may play with excessive pace, quantity, rhythmic dislocation, or delicacy, however extremes have been irrelevant inside his built-in sound. John Coltrane, with whom he labored on and off within the early Nineteen Sixties—together with the albums “Impressions” and “Newport ’63″— described Haynes’ sonic presence together with his band as “a spreading, a permeating.” Charles Mingus as soon as informed Haynes about his type: “you do not all the time play the beat, you recommend the beat.” If he performed in your rhythm part, you were not solely receiving dependable help and basis; you have been collaborating with probably the most pronounced, alert and quicksilver kinds in jazz.
“Whoever I used to be taking part in with,” he mentioned, “I feel they most likely wished me for what I used to be making an attempt to do.”
WRTI editorial director Nate Chinen contributed to this story.
