Roy Haynes, pioneering modern jazz drummer, has died at 99

Roy Haynes, the pioneering jazz drummer who performed with legends like Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Sarah Vaughan, died Tuesday at the age of 99.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Leslie Haynes-Gilmore, to WRTI’s Nate Chinen.

To listen to any part of Roy Haynes‘ drumming individually is to confront something important about jazz and what it can contain. The light 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: Each of these is worth following on its own.

But who does that? Better to hear all the parts functioning together as a complex, swinging organism. And Haynes played in such a way that all his startling musical details conjoined with human qualities: grace, humor, excitement, cool, confidence, vitality. He got up toward the front of the stage and tap-danced during his gigs, sometimes as an integral part of a drum solo. If you weren’t conditioned to pay close attention to the drummer in a group, he could be the one to make you start. No matter the group, he wasn’t just part of the rhythm section. He was — as per Sarah Vaughan‘s introduction on her 1954 track “Shulie a Bop,” in alternation with his snare-drum hits — [crack!] Roy. [rat-tat-tat!] Haynes.

Haynes absorbed new styles in the jazz tradition. Yet it was often the older elements of his style, originating in the 1940s and ’50s — the strut and bounce and swing and dance in his beat — which kept him current, even in recent times. “I’m only happy when I’m moving forward,” as he explained it to the writer Burt Korall. “Some musicians play the same songs the same way every night. That’s impossible for me. My fundamental style may not really be different. But there have been so many things added.”

Born March 13, 1925, Haynes grew up within a remarkable family in the culturally integrated Boston neighborhood of Roxbury; he described his block as a mixture of French Canadian, Jewish, Irish and Black families from the South. His parents, Gustavus and Edna Haynes, both came from Barbados, and his father worked for the Standard Oil company. (Both sang, and Gustavus played the organ in church.)

Roy studied violin for a year, knew percussion would be his focus. He became a voracious learner — although apart from an early lesson from a Roxbury drummer named Herbie Wright and a short stint at Boston Conservatory, he mostly learned on his own by watching and practicing and performing, which he was doing so often by his middle teenage years that he dropped out of Roxbury Memorial High School. He gravitated toward the best: He learned much about playing the high hat from the drummer who was perhaps his greatest hero, the Count Basie drummer Jo Jones, whom he first met as a teenager by talking his way backstage at a Basie gig at the RKO Boston Theatre, claiming to be Jones’ 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 this is where his artistic story really begins, for a couple of reasons. One is because he could never be a regional outlier, in talent or temperament. And the other is because Haynes came to New York at a point of rhythmic revolution, near the beginning of the forward and artfully fractured style known as bebop. Other drummers may have had more of a hand in its creation — particularly Kenny Clarke and Max Roach. But Haynes was among those who pushed bebop drumming forward and refined it.

Whatever else there is to say about Haynes as an individual talent and a bandleader, it must also be understood that he worked with an astonishing number and range of important figures in jazz; those figures form both one musician’s curriculum vitae and a large part of an entire cultural tradition. Here is a partial list of them, roughly in the order of when Haynes played with them, starting in 1946: Louis Armstrong; Lester Young (1947 to ’49); Bud Powell; Miles Davis; Parker (on and off from 1949 to 1953, including on the opening night of the legendary 52nd Street club Birdland); Stan Getz; Ella Fitzgerald; Sarah Vaughan (1953-’58); Sonny Rollins; Billie Holiday (during some of the last performances of her life, in 1959); Thelonious Monk (1957-’58); Phineas Newborn Jr.; John Coltrane; Andrew Hill; Chick Corea; Archie Shepp; Gary Burton; Alice Coltrane; Stanley Cowell; Pat Metheny; Danilo Pérez.

What about Duke Ellington? Ellington offered Haynes a job in 1952, while Haynes was working with Parker. He turned it down respectfully, sensing that his style would be too disruptive for the older musicians in the band.

Haynes was involved in crucial recorded moments in jazz. His single-day session with Bud Powell — on Aug. 8, 1949 — resulted in the permanent standards “Bouncing with Bud,” “Wail” and “Dance of the Infidels.” His recordings with Sarah Vaughan, including In the Land of Hi-Fi, Swingin’ Easy, and At Mr. Kelly’s, are basic to the canon of jazz vocals. (Haynes had the utmost respect for Vaughan; he called her a “pure genius.”) He can be heard with Thelonious Monk on Thelonious in Action and Misterioso, both recorded live at New York’s Five Spot Cafe in 1958, during one of Monk’s greatest periods. He is on Getz’s Focus, Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth, and Ray Charles‘ Genius + Soul = Jazz, three marvels of jazz arrangement released in 1961, and on Coltrane’s trenchant Impressions and Newport ’63. He played on two of the more influential records of the 1960s period that came out soon after the death of Coltrane, Gary Burton’s “Duster” and Chick Corea’s “Now He Sings, Now He Sobs.” And he was on Sonny Rollins’ Grammy-nominated live record “Road Shows, Vol. 2,” in a group including Rollins and Ornette Coleman, a one-time occurrence in 2010.

Haynes’ discography as bandleader stretches from 1954 to 2011. It includes the post-bop classic We Three, with the pianist Phineas Newborn Jr. and bassist Paul Chambers; Out of the Afternoon, from 1962, one of the great documents on the edge of the straight-ahead jazz tradition and the early-’60s vanguardist “new thing”; Hip Ensemble, a funk-gospel-semi-free-jazz record from 1971 with his band of that name; and Fountain of Youth, recorded in 2003 (when he was 79) with his late-period band by that name, blasting through tunes associated with the bandleaders he played with across his long career, all the way back to Monk.

Apart from his musicianship, surely part of Haynes’ success can be attributed to the fact that he led a disciplined and drug-free life. And some might have been because he cut a magnetic and imposing figure, in sharp clothes and sharp automobiles. (A 1960 article by George Frazier in Esquire magazine listed him as one of the best-dressed men of that year, alongside Dean Acheson, Clark Gable and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.; it noted his preference for custom-made suits from The Andover Shop, in Cambridge, Mass. Later, his interests would run to satin jackets, gaucho pants with side-buttons, and cowboy hats.)

Haynes could play with extreme speed, volume, rhythmic dislocation or delicacy, but extremes were beside the point within his integrated sound. John Coltrane, with whom he worked off and on in the early 1960s — including the albums Impressions and Newport ’63 — described Haynes’ sonic presence with his band as “a spreading, a permeating.” Charles Mingus once told Haynes about his style: “you don’t always play the beat, you suggest the beat.” If he played in your rhythm section, you weren’t only receiving reliable support and foundation; you were collaborating with one of the most pronounced, alert and quicksilver styles in jazz.

“Whoever I was playing with,” he said, “I think they probably wanted me for what I was trying to do.”

WRTI editorial director Nate Chinen contributed to this story.

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