Drums

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares75 Views

    Roy Haynes, a Giant of Jazz Drumming, Is Dead at 99

    by

    An irrepressible force who remained relevant over the course of a seven-decade career, he had a hand in every major development in modern jazz.Roy Haynes, among the greatest and most influential drummers in the history of jazz, died on Tuesday in Nassau County, N.Y., on the South Shore of Long Island. He was 99.His death, after a brief illness, was confirmed by his daughter, Leslie Haynes-Gilmore. She declined to specify where in the county he died.Mr. Haynes was an irrepressible force who proudly remained both relevant and stylish over a career spanning seven decades, having had a hand in every major development in modern jazz, beginning in the bebop era. Remarkably, he did so without significant alterations to his style, which was characterized by a bracing clarity — Snap Crackle was the nickname bestowed on him in the 1950s — along with locomotive energy and a slippery but emphatic flow.Few musicians ever worked with so broad an array of jazz legends. Mr. Haynes recorded with the quintessential swing-era tenor saxophonist Lester Young as well as the contemporary guitarist Pat Metheny. He was briefly but prominently associated with the singer Sarah Vaughan, and with some of bebop’s chief pioneers, notably the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and the pianists Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk.And he appeared on dozens of albums, including many regarded as classics, among them Eric Dolphy’s “Outward Bound” (1960), Oliver Nelson’s “The Blues and the Abstract Truth” (1961), Stan Getz’s “Focus” (1962) and Chick Corea’s “Now He Sings, Now He Sobs” (1968).As a band leader, Mr. Haynes made a handful of highly regarded albums, like “We Three,” a 1958 trio session with the pianist Phineas Newborn Jr. and the bassist Paul Chambers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Albert Heath, Jazz Drum Virtuoso, Is Dead at 88

      by

      He accompanied stars like John Coltrane and worked frequently with his brothers. “I’ve always thought I was a master,” he once said. Few disagreed.Albert Heath, a virtuoso jazz drummer who collaborated with luminaries like John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Nina Simone and Herbie Hancock; performed and recorded with his older brothers, Percy and Jimmy; and for a few years played alongside Percy in one of the great jazz ensembles, the Modern Jazz Quartet, died on Wednesday in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 88.The cause of his death, it a hospital, was leukemia, his stepson Curt Flood Jr. said.Mr. Heath, who was known as Tootie, was primarily a bebop and hard bop drummer but was adept in a range of styles. In 2020, the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master, an honor that his brothers had received earlier.He accepted the news with a mixture of humility and self-confidence.“I am honored that they acknowledged me,” he told The Santa Fe New Mexican, “but it doesn’t mean anything because I’ve always thought I was a master.”From left, Albert, Jimmy and Percy Heath in an undated photo. They began working together as the Heath Brothers in 1975.Alan NahigianMr. Heath’s career had its origins with his family in Philadelphia, where his father played clarinet in an Elks marching band, his mother sang in a church choir and his brother Jimmy, a saxophonist, brought members of his big band — including his fellow saxophonist John Coltrane — to the Heaths’ house.“They’d have section rehearsals in our parents’ house because it wasn’t big enough to have the whole band in there, 18 pieces or so,” Mr. Heath said in an interview with the website All About Jazz in 2015. “So the trumpets would come one day, the reeds the next. The drummers and the bassists would be there a third day.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Jimmy Van Eaton, Purveyor of the Sun Records Beat, Dies at 86

      by

      His drumming lent spontaneity and imagination to the unfettered sound of seminal rock ’n’ roll records by Jerry Lee Lewis and others.Jimmy Van Eaton, who played drums on epoch-defining hits, including Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” and lent spontaneity and imagination to the unfettered sound of the influential Memphis label Sun Records, died on Feb. 9 at his home in Tuscumbia, Ala. He was 86.His daughter Terri Van Eaton Downing said the cause was complications of kidney disease.Mr. Van Eaton’s impeccably deployed accents and fills were heard not just on Mr. Lewis’s recordings but also on popular singles by Charlie Rich (“Lonely Weekends”), Johnny Cash (“Guess Things Happen That Way”) and others. He toured with Roy Orbison and Conway Twitty and, as the de facto house drummer at Sun, played on “Raunchy,” the bluesy instrumental by the saxophonist Bill Justis that reached the Top 10 in 1957.Mr. Van Eaton in an undated photo. What he played with Jerry Lee Lewis, he said, was “a shuffle with a backbeat” and not a straight 4/4 beat.Country Music Hall of Fame and MuseumMr. Van Eaton, who was sometimes billed as J.M., was a full-time musician only briefly, from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, and performed sporadically after that before settling into a career as a financial adviser. His influence, though, was abiding and deep — especially his momentous work with Mr. Lewis, which had an impact comparable to that of other groundbreaking rock ’n’ roll drummers like Earl Palmer and Hal Blaine.“A lot of people try to copy” the sound of those Jerry Lee Lewis records, Mr. Van Eaton was quoted as saying in “Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll,” by Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins. But, he added, they can’t do it because what he played was “a shuffle with a backbeat” and not a straight 4/4 beat.“I never could play that straight country shuffle,” Mr. Van Eaton continued. “Maybe for eight or 16 bars, but after that I start falling off the stool. I’ve got to concentrate, and when you concentrate, you lose the feeling.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Max Roach

      by

      The drummer helped pioneer bebop in the 1940s and delivered a message of resistance and liberation from the 1960s on. Listen to 13 selections from musicians, writers and critics.For the past year, The New York Times has been asking musicians, writers and scholars to share the music they’d play for a friend to get them into jazz. Now we’re focusing on Max Roach, who, alongside the drummers Kenny Clarke and Art Blakey, helped pioneer bebop in the 1940s.A Brooklyn native, Roach started playing drums at age 10, and was eventually influenced by the personality that Clarke brought to the instrument. He graduated from high school in 1942 and became the house drummer for Clark Monroe’s Uptown House in Harlem, then played with Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Pettiford, Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker. By the time he played with Miles Davis in the late ’40s, Roach had shifted his style to a more propulsive rhythm that emphasized the ride cymbal.But while history has credited him with de-emphasizing the bass drum in bebop, Roach himself debunked such thinking. “We played the bass drum, but the engineers would cover it up because it would cause distortion due to the technology at the time,” he once said in “The Drummer’s Time,” a book about jazz drumming. “There were never any mics near our feet; they would have one mic above the drum set, and that was all.”In 1960, Roach turned his attention to racial and political issues, releasing the album “We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite” as a response to injustices in the United States. Featuring the activist and singer Abbey Lincoln (to whom Roach was married for eight years), the LP used equal amounts of rage and silence to convey the angst of Black Americans. “He was not trying to be slick and have a message,” his son Raoul said in the 2021 documentary “Summer of Soul.” Instead, “that is the message. It’s our time. Do it now. We want liberation.”Roach carried that declaration through the rest of his career. Long considered a cornerstone in the world of jazz, his rapid-fire rhythms have influenced scores of like-minded percussionists to explore themes and textures. Below, we asked 13 musicians, writers and critics to share their favorite Max Roach songs. Enjoy listening to their choices, check out the playlist at the bottom of the article and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Nate Smith, drummer and bandleaderMax Roach, “Driva’ Man (Live)”The momentum in Roach’s playing here is captivating: He’s chasing the time, but not pushing it. He hardly deviates from the skeletal pattern he’s playing, even during Clifford Jordan’s mournful solo. The crispness with which the band converges on the downbeat of every bar evokes the sound of James Brown, signifying the undeniable power and impact of a unified Black band. Further, the crackle of the snare (along with Abbey Lincoln’s tambourine) realizes the terrifying snap of the “driva man’s” whip, used to shock and startle the slave into silence and submission.The last minute and twelve seconds of the video are the most compelling, as Roach, unaccompanied, meditatively plays the same 5/4 pattern over and over. A few bars in, he introduces a slightly more complex ride cymbal pattern, using the drumstick’s shank on the crown of the cymbal. Roach dials up the intensity of the drum solo masterfully, choosing dynamics over density, allowing the cadence he’s playing to reveal more and more about itself. A player of Roach’s facility and imagination must deploy a great deal of restraint in order not to play. This, to me, is the most important lesson — what he chooses to leave out is what draws the listener in. When he hits the last note on the cymbal, he leans in as the crash fades to silence, ending a six-minute master class in the power of musical intention.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Patricia (Twink) Little, drummer, producer and songwriterMax Roach, “Ghost Dance”This song takes me on so many different journeys because there are so many different movements within the piece. It feels a lot like life’s highs and lows giving you 12 minutes of emotions, ranging from happiness, melancholy, chill, groovy and peaceful. There’s even an element that feels almost warlike. The way Max uses his toms while accompanying the horn player from about 6:50-9:00 reminds me of African drums. The toms are tuned to perfection and Max’s rhythmic pattern — along with the melodic pattern of the horns — just puts me in a trance.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Chelsey Green, violinist and bandleaderMax Roach, “Abstrutions”Max Roach made yet another indelible mark with his “Members, Don’t Git Weary” album. Released in 1968, the album is an aural representation of avant-garde jazz at its core while serving as musical commentary to the social and political conflicts of the time.The opening track, “Abstrutions,” subtly invites the listener to explore Roach’s innovative approach to rhythm, form, timbre and improvisation. “Abstrutions” arguably challenges the traditional idea of the blues form, extending the final four-bar phrase with a captivating unison horn call met with a powerful drumroll to carry us back to the top. With support from Roach’s increasingly robust playing, the horn lines intensify as they answer the pianist Stanley Cowell’s commanding improvisation. Roach’s rhythmic agility is felt as the phrase restarts with a seemingly displaced downbeat that keeps listeners on their toes. “Abstrutions” has the full essence of avant-garde jazz but feels inherently soulful and funky at the same time. Roach’s intentional play on tension and release speaks to his distinctive compositional style and meaningful inclusion of the sentiment of protest and activism.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Joseph Patel, producer of ‘Summer of Soul’Max Roach, “Drums Unlimited”I discovered and fell in love with jazz while in college. For almost four years, I spent my Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights in the listening room of the campus radio station — KDVS 90.3 FM in Davis, Calif. — diving deep into its immaculate record collection. My understanding of the jazz genre came from this place, from playing records, finding something I liked, looking at the personnel and then burrowing through that artist’s discography (this was pre-internet, mind you) in the stacks of vinyl. From this study, I could put my finger on the records, musicians and lineups at the forefront of change in the genre — and at every step of the way, there was Max Roach. “Drums Unlimited” was the first time I heard compositions for the drum and only the drum. Roach seemed to regularly dislodge convention, for decades, but here, on the title track, he is nothing short of a master of the craft — musically, socially, culturally. There he is, with mesmerizing rhythm and beat; a circular thrust that feels like the beginning of revolution. He gives musical voice to what he would later, forcefully, verbally articulate in the Black struggle for liberation. When we were making “Summer of Soul,” Roach’s set at the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969 (with his then-wife, Abbey Lincoln) began with a similar drum solo (sorry, it didn’t make the final film!), and all I could think about was this track — a persistent genius, armed with will and intellect, in his element, reaching desperately for freedom.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Nicole Sweeney, radio hostMax Roach, “Freedom Day”Often, the drum is a song’s heartbeat. It brings it life and guides it along until the last note. On “Freedom Day,” Max’s drum playing represents a heart dealing with the emotions of becoming a free human being. You feel the anticipation, the anxiety, the strength, and even the uncertainty. Abbey Lincoln’s vocals, while not perfectly in line with the melody, are still perfectly placed as she represents the honesty of not being sure what is to come, and the power that comes with knowing you are ready to face it.Max himself said, “we don’t really understand what it is to be free,” yet you hear him feeling free enough to let out a range of emotions in each lick and snare, which allows other musicians like the trumpeter Booker Little to follow suit. The “We Insist!” album was an especially important one, in that after its release, Max vowed to never play music that was not socially relevant. I would be remiss to not also mention the album cover, which is a staged lunch counter sit-in mirrored from the 1960 Greensboro Four sit-in, which took place months before the recording of this album.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Brandi Waller-Pace, musician, educator and scholar-activistClifford Brown and Max Roach, “Joy Spring”Few drummers have reached the level of innovation and influence Max Roach did throughout his long and prolific career. During the bebop era he, along with Kenny Clarke, transformed the way drummers approached their sets. This approach was part of the foundation of sounds my ears embraced when I first found jazz. “Joy Spring,” recorded with the legendary and tragically short-lived Clifford Brown and Max Roach Quintet, is a jazz classic and a personal favorite. From the moment the drum hits start, I feel a buoyancy that carries me throughout the tune. Roach’s brushes lay down a steady swing that’s punctuated by deep in-the-pocket hits — he manages to maintain a delicate balance between high energy and smoothness. He gets an attack from those brushes as he flows and accentuates the variations within the melody, the agile soloing filled with his signature triplet motifs. His drumming sings to me as much as Clifford’s trumpet or Harold Land’s sax. I can’t listen to this recording without a smile forming on my face. I’m transported to the days when so much of this music was new. “Joy Spring” remains fresh in my ears at every listening.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Elena Bergeron, Times editorCharles Mingus and Max Roach, “Percussion Discussion”I had, for a little while, been fascinated by the gossip around the recording of “Money Jungle.” The album from the trio of Roach, Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington was a generational bridge between a swinging idol and progenitors of bop, but Mingus is said to have stormed out of the session in 1962 because of something Roach played, or said, and had to be cajoled to return by Ellington himself.What could go that badly between Mingus and Roach? The pair had by then held down so many bandstands as parts of extraordinary groupings, and had even joined to launch a record company together a decade before the session with Ellington. Listening to “Money Jungle” didn’t clear it up. Mingus opens by scratching out a harsh-sounding challenge; Ellington parries with hard phrasing to jerk the steering wheel the other way. Roach rides it out in the back seat as the song exhausts itself to a stop.I still don’t have an answer for the walkout, but I care less about the speculation because of “Percussion Discussion.” Mingus and Roach did versions of their own push-pull live during the “Mingus at the Bohemia” sets in 1955 and after — sometimes alongside the pianist Bud Powell or with a horn involved, other times as a duet. The version released on 1965’s “The Charles Mingus Quintet Plus Max Roach” (under the title “Drums”) finishes with Mingus sweeping an operatic bow before Roach thumps out a tip of the cap like a matador honored by his provocateur.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Kokayi, M.C., vocalist and producerMax Roach, “Garvey’s Ghost”On “Garvey’s Ghost,” we hear nearly eight minutes of sacred shouts and vibrations, as Roach leads us further into his lexicon of musical language. It’s what I imagine Roach thinking about when writing the work; it’s his concept of sounds that would emanate from the decks of ships on the Black Star Line, a return to the motherland, a going home. It’s Max dropping pins throughout the African diaspora guiding the listener, it’s the call and response of Abbey Lincoln’s haunting vocal standing proxy as the voice of the ancestors, it’s the foundational Bembé drum chant that moves us from West Africa in origin to Cuba thanks to the additions of “Patato” and “Totico” (Carlos Valdés and Eugenio Arango, respectively). It’s Booker Little and Clifford Jordan as street bishops on their soapboxes shouting down Babylon through an aggressive series of solos, it’s Art Davis’s bass sending up kettle prayers, with Max batting cleanup, exhibiting mastery within the spaces of his solo that leads us back to the chorus. “Garvey’s Ghost” is Max’s lead single for the soundtrack of this imagined trans-Atlantic voyage. I would suggest that you add this to your playlist, and get yourself a ticket, so to speak.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Tanya Rahme, jazz radio hostMax Roach, “The Profit”Revolutionary of bebop, guru of time keeping, an O.G. of cool jazz.Max Roach held so many titles, but it was his 1962 recording of “The Profit,” the second track on the B-side of the album “It’s Time,” that paved the way for a young me to fall in love with a sound that would surpass any previous definition I had known for the genre of “jazz.”The seven-minute track encapsulates the very essence of the 1960s Black movement, exploding with skill and expression from start ’til end. I eventually understood this to be one form of the many conversations Max had regarding his stance on civil rights, and the politics surrounding Black American history.The solos by the trumpeter Richard Williams, the tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan and the bassist Art Davis add such rich texture to Roach’s continuous ride cymbal technique. But what is most compelling was his perfected undertone beat — soft yet unmistakably strong and constant — while delivering a killer drum solo throughout.Enter Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s vocal choir, erupting into what sounds like a song of profound protest from the very intro; a deeply moving spiritual chant depicting the ’60s and all its intensities. Through Roach’s “The Profit” began my devotion to the astral jazz of that era and beyond.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Martin Johnson, writerMax Roach, “Effi”So much of Max Roach’s extraordinary discography is canonical and progressive that it’s easy to overlook his work for Atlantic Records from 1964 to 1971. Yet, this phase bristles with fury and offers the cool melodicism of his classic earlier recordings with Clifford Brown. No recording bridges these objectives better than his 1968 masterwork, “Members, Don’t Git Weary.” The title tells you that, landmark legislation notwithstanding, there was still much work to be done toward liberation and equality — but the music here shines a light on the paradise for the victors. “Effi,” an elegant six-minute paragon by the pianist Stanley Cowell, one of six greats in the band, is the highlight. The saxophonist Gary Bartz and the trumpeter Charles Tolliver take pointed solos, but Roach drives the sound, rumbling with volcanic force beneath and beside them. There’s beauty, power and catharsis all in one. Roach was not tired, not weary at all, and his music was an energy potion.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆aja monet, surrealist blues poet and activistMax Roach, “Tears for Johannesburg”Amiri Baraka sitting shotgun as the Jersey tunnel lights slide through the car window. We were on our way to a poetry reading. In the back seat I bathed in classic and legendary Baraka banter. Max Roach was the star of the ride. I learned about Roach in the firsthand sway and swag of Baraka’s enthused tone. “We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite” was the album of discussion. I didn’t know what I was listening to until many years later. And as I revisit this album, “Tears for Johannesburg” never fails to amaze. Shhhh. The cymbals slowly weep into Abbey Lincoln’s moan, and the cross stick signals the build. It’s the orchestra of solidarity for me. What I love most about the song is the wordless conversation. Jazz disrupts traditional song structure as a protest against established conventions, and this song declares the sentiment. Max Roach’s heart beats at the time signature of 5/4. The bass keeps the pulse and the horns haunt. The song begs the ear to listen and take heed of our mourning as well as our resistance. The political message crescendos in the rim of Roach’s drum. We feel for the struggle of our comrades in Johannesburg because Roach makes sure of it. There is no need for words.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆John Murph, writer and D.J.Max Roach, “The Dream/It’s Time”I discovered Max Roach’s 1981 LP, “Chattahoochee Red,” in the early ’90s just from casual crate-digging and being semi-autodidactic in learning jazz history to buttress my music journalism career. I was immediately taken by the opening cut “The Dream/It’s Time,” a blistering modern bop composition on which Roach interjected snippets from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Roach’s rhythmic ingenuity, King’s heroic voice, and later the impassioned solos from the trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, the tenor saxophonist Odean Pope and the bassist Calvin Hill made me a die-hard Roach fan, even though at the time I knew more of his eminence as a bebop pioneer and influential drummer than I did of his actual discography.I’ve always said that crate digging is the unsung hero in music education. After repeated listening to “The Dream/It’s Time,” my continued investigation into Roach’s music led me to the 1962 incarnation of “It’s Time” that fused strident hard bop with doleful choral singing conducted by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson. Nevertheless, it’s “The Dream/It’s Time” that became my favorite Roach composition. It was always in heavy rotation during my radio shows on Washington, D.C.’s Pacifica station, WPFW-FM, during the mid-to-late ’90s. And it resurfaced again, this year, in some of my vinyl-only D.J. sets as we mark the 60th anniversary of King’s 1963 March on Washington.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Sam Pollard, film directorClifford Brown and Max Roach, “Parisian Thoroughfare”I remember being around 16 years old and my friend Glenn Laurie would play the Art Blakey Quintet at Birdland, and back then I was confounded at what those musicians were playing. It took a while but finally my ears opened, and I could hear what these great musicians were doing on their instruments. That began my immersion into the world of jazz and learning and listening to everyone from Thelonious Monk to the one of the greatest drummers of this idiom called jazz, Max Roach.It would be a few years later that I would be introduced to a seminal 1954 Max Roach recording with the impressive and ever inventive trumpeter Clifford Brown. It was a phenomenal album with the tenor saxophonist Harold Land, bassist George Morrow and pianist Richie Powell supporting Brown and Roach. The one tune that particularly stands out is their rendition of Bud Powell’s “Parisian Thoroughfare” that starts with the band replicating the traffic jam of a Parisian street before taking off with the compelling melody of triplets performed by Brown and Harold Land. It is an infectious melody in the key of G major. Brown makes every note swing with joy and sass accompanied by Max’s elegant rhythmic support. Max’s solo, where it is all Max beautifully modulated and direct, is what people are talking about when they say Max is such a musical drummer. And then it finally goes back to the cacophony of Paris streets and then a reprise of the wonderful melody.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆ More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Jim Gordon, Top Rock Drummer With a Troubled Life, Dies at 77

      by

      He was an elite studio musician who played with A-list artists and helped write the Eric Clapton hit “Layla.” But his life was shattered by mental illness and a murder conviction.Jim Gordon, a talented but troubled drummer who was ubiquitous in the recording studios of the 1960s and ’70s and who, as a member of Eric Clapton’s band Derek and the Dominos, helped write the romantic ballad “Layla” — but who suffered from schizophrenia and spent nearly 40 years in prison, convicted of murdering his mother — died on Monday in a prison medical facility in Vacaville, Calif. He was 77.His death was announced by Robert Merlis, a publicist for Joel Selvin, the author of a forthcoming biography of Mr. Gordon. Mr. Selvin said he did not know the cause.“When people say that Jim Gordon is the greatest rock ’n’ roll drummer who ever lived,” Mr. Clapton wrote in “Clapton: The Autobiography” (2007), “I think it’s true, beyond anybody.”Tall and muscular, with a head full of curly hair, Mr. Gordon first attracted attention in 1963 on an English tour with the Everly Brothers. Over the next 15 years, he worked on studio recordings with A-list artists, including John Lennon (“Imagine”), George Harrison (“All Things Must Pass”), the Beach Boys (“Pet Sounds”), Harry Nilsson (“Nilsson Schmilsson”), Carly Simon (“No Secrets”) and Steely Dan (“Pretzel Logic”).As part of the informal group of elite Los Angeles studio musicians that came to be known as the Wrecking Crew, Mr. Gordon could book several sessions a day around the city. .He backed Joe Cocker on his “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” tour and performed with Alice Cooper and Frank Zappa, who nicknamed him Skippy for his All-American demeanor and his all-American looks. And for several months in 1971 he was a member of the British rock band Traffic.“He had a surgical, scientific skill on the drums,” Mr. Selvin said by phone, “and he had an extraordinary gift of intuition. Every time he played on a record, he brought something special to it.”After Mr. Gordon did a stint with the white soul band Delaney & Bonnie, with whom Mr. Clapton also recorded and toured, Mr. Gordon became a member of Derek and the Dominos, the band Mr. Clapton formed in 1970, along with the singer and keyboardist Bobby Whitlock and the bassist Carl Radle. The band released  only one studio album, “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs,” featuring Duane Allman on second guitar, in 1970.“Layla,” released as a single, rose to No. 51 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart the next year.    The credit for writing “Layla” went to Mr. Clapton and Mr. Gordon, but its instrumental second movement, called the “Piano Exit,” was composed by Mr. Gordon and the singer Rita Coolidge, his girlfriend at the time. As she recalled in her autobiography, “Delta Lady” (2016, with Michael Walker), Mr. Gordon created a melody, to which she responded with a countermelody “that answered and resolved the tension of Jim’s chords and built to a dramatic crescendo.”Mr. Gordon and Ms. Coolidge made a cassette demo of what they intended to be a separate song and gave it to Mr. Clapton. Ms. Coolidge did not know what became of it until she heard “Layla” on the radio and learned that she had received no credit.  She was infuriated.“What they’d clearly done,” she wrote, “ was take the song Jim and I had written, jettisoned the lyrics, and tacked it on to the end of Eric’s song.”When Mr. Clapton released the album “Unplugged” in 1992, his acoustic version of “Layla” peaked at No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. When “Layla” received the Grammy Award for best rock song the next year, Mr. Clapton and Mr. Gordon shared the award as songwriters, but Ms. Coolidge’s role received no acknowledgment.Derek and the Dominos around the time they recorded their one and only album, in 1970. From left: Eric Clapton, Bobby Whitlock, Mr. Gordon and Carl Radle.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesJames Beck Gordon was born on July 14, 1945, in Elizabeth, N.J., and grew up in Sherman Oaks, Calif. His father, John, was an accountant. His mother, Osa Marie (Beck) Gordon, was a pediatric nurse.As a boy, Jim made a set of drums from garbage cans and played them until his parents bought him a drum kit. He started performing professionally as a teenager. In 1963, he was playing with Frankie Knight and the Jesters when Joey Paige, the bassist for the Everly Brothers, scouted him at a club on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. Soon Jim, at just 17, was off to England with the Everly Brothers for a tour that also included Little Richard and Bo Diddley.At some point during the next 15 years, Mr. Gordon started hearing voices — most menacingly and hauntingly, that of his mother — and displaying erratic behavior. He interrupted a recording session by telling his fellow musicians, “You’re the devil”; he punched Ms. Coolidge in the eye with such force that she was lifted off the floor and slammed into a wall.The sound of his mother’s insistent voice in his head tormented him, causing him pain and leaving his unable to play his drums, according to an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1994. He was treated at hospitals. Work dried up, but he was able to get by on the royalties from “Layla.”“The symptoms were getting so powerful, starting about 1975 and 1976,” said Mr. Selvin, a former pop music critic for The San Francisco Chronicle. “It was an extraordinary battle. Command hallucinations are the most extreme in all of mental illness.”Mr. Gordon was also taking drugs. “I guess I was an alcoholic,” he told Rolling Stone in 1985. “Before, I was drinking every night, but I wasn’t getting up in the morning for a drink; I would put a needle in my arm. When I stopped taking the heroin, I began to drink all day.”On the night of June 3, 1983, he attacked his mother at her home in North Hollywood, first banging her head with a hammer and  then stabbing her with a knife. “When I remember the crime, it’s like a dream,” he told The Inquirer. “I can remember going through what happened in that space and time, and it seems kind of detached, like I was going through it on some other plane. It didn’t seem real.”He told Rolling Stone that he had felt that he was “being guided like a zombie.”He was found guilty of second-degree murder. Despite having been diagnosed as an acute paranoid schizophrenic, he did not qualify for an insanity defense based on California law at the time. He was sentenced in 1984 to 16 years to life and later denied parole several times.“This is not a murder case,” Scott Furstman, Mr. Gordon’s lawyer, told The Los Angeles Times after the verdict. “This case is a tragedy.”Mr. Gordon is survived by his daughter, Amy, and his brother, John Jr. His marriages to Jill Barabe and Renee Armand ended in divorce. More

    • 150 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Hamish Kilgour, Whose New Zealand Cult Band Had Reach, Dies at 65

      by

      He was a powerful drummer and, most notably, a founding member of the Clean, which inspired indie bands like Pavement, Yo La Tengo and Superchunk.Hamish Kilgour, a founding member of the New Zealand band the Clean, who was celebrated among fans of underground music for his propulsive drumming and his countercultural approach to life, has died. He was 65.He was found dead in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Monday, 10 days after being reported missing, the police there said. His death was referred to the coroner’s office.A central figure in the crop of freewheeling New Zealand musicians on the independent label Flying Nun that came to be called the “Dunedin sound,” Mr. Kilgour spent four decades as a musician, singing and playing percussion and later the guitar.He eventually played with more than 100 bands, including the Great Unwashed, the Sundae Painters and Monsterland, and lived for almost 30 years in New York, where he formed the band the Mad Scene.He also had a secondary passion for painting: He produced hundreds if not thousands of frank, idiosyncratic pictures, many of which were repurposed as album cover art.A deceptively powerful drummer, Mr. Kilgour might start a song in ramshackle fashion, then build to a thunderous conclusion. He had early on been inspired by Moe Tucker’s single snare on live recordings by the Velvet Underground. “I thought, that’s kind of magical and that’s possible — I could do that,” he said in 2012. Ms. Tucker’s minimalist, driving style and her enthusiasm for the power of the tambourine, later colored his own playing.Not every drummer, however talented, is immediately recognizable, said Mac McCaughan, the owner of the label Merge Records, which last year reissued the Clean’s first two releases. “But with Hamish — he had a voice on the drums,” he said in an interview. “He had his own style and his own character.”In 1981, Roger Shepherd, a local record store manager who was in the process of founding Flying Nun Records, saw the Clean perform at the Gladstone Hotel in Christchurch. “They were pretty obviously the best band in the world,” Mr. Shepherd recalled.Almost before the set had finished, he asked them to record with him. The first recording session produced “Tally Ho!,” a frenetic, surf-rock-adjacent single — made for 50 New Zealand dollars — that scraped into the Top 20 in New Zealand, buoyed by its popularity on student radio stations.Flying Nun’s fortunes had been transformed. The subsequent EP “Boodle Boodle Boodle,” recorded that year on a similar budget, spent 26 weeks on the New Zealand charts. American indie bands, including Pavement, Yo La Tengo and Superchunk, would cite it as an inspiration.For listeners outside New Zealand, the musicians on the Flying Nun label had a kind of legendary status, said the American filmmaker Michael Galinsky, who became a friend of Mr. Kilgour’s.“It just opened up all these worlds,” he said of “Tuatara,” a 1988 Flying Nun compilation on which Mr. Kilgour appeared. “It’s so far away — you don’t see pictures of these people, there’s no writing about them, there’s no internet. So they’re mythic, and incredible.”Inspired by the Enemy, a punk group started by friends of theirs, members of the Clean had begun rehearsing together in 1978 — Mr. Kilgour taught himself the drums, while his brother, David, played guitar and Peter Gutteridge played bass. (Mr. Gutteridge was later replaced by Robert Scott.)After its first flash of success, the members of the band made an early decision to split up just four years into their career. But as the Clean’s influence on do-it-yourself underground rock became more apparent, they reunited in 1988. Over the next 30 years, interrupted by long spells apart, the Clean continued to perform in the United States and elsewhere around the world, releasing several albums.As a member of the Mad Scene, Mr. Kilgour recorded multiple albums and EPs, as well as two solo albums, “All of It and Nothing” and “Finkelstein,” and made myriad other guest appearances on other artists’ records.Hamish Robert Kilgour was born in Christchurch on March 17, 1957, the older of two sons of MacGregor and Helen Stewart (Auld) Kilgour. He was reared mostly in Cheviot and Ranfurly, small communities in New Zealand’s rural South Island. In 1972, the family moved to the coastal city of Dunedin, also in the South Island, where Mr. Kilgour’s father took a job as a pub manager while his mother ran the establishment’s kitchen. Hamish received a bachelor’s degree in English and history from the University of Otago in Dunedin in 1977.After his father was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where he died in 1982, his mother worked as a nurse to support the family. She later supported her sons’ band, helping to fund both a van and a P.A. system as they performed around the country with the Clean.Mr. Kilgour moved to New York in the late 1980s after the breakup of his first marriage, to Jenny Halliday. There he met Lisa Siegel, who would become his second wife and a bandmate when they formed the Mad Scene. The couple had a son, Taran.But life in New York, where he worked as an art handler, house painter and carpenter in between music gigs, was at times precarious, especially after he and Ms. Siegel broke up in 2013.He moved back to New Zealand during the coronavirus pandemic and played music there whenever he could, while eking out an existence that strained his mental and physical health, people close to him said.He is survived by his brother and bandmate, David, and his son.For his contemporaries in New Zealand, Mr. Kilgour was a testament to the notion that being from a far-off country of a few million people with no established rock tradition did not preclude people from making great music.“Just because it comes from here, and not London or New York, it doesn’t mean that it’s not valid,” said Mr. Shepherd of Flying Nun. “That was a startling thing that we kind of knew was true anyway, but that hadn’t been articulated for us.”Richard Langston, a music journalist and longtime friend, said Mr. Kilgour had “changed the way you could record indie rock.”“He was that important,” he added, “and he lived a crazy, brave, solo life.” More

    • 163 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Anton Fier, Drummer Who Left Stamp on a Downtown Scene, Dies at 66

      by

      He worked with everyone from the Feelies to Herbie Hancock to Laurie Anderson, as well as leading the indie-rock supergroup the Golden Palominos. But there was a troubled side.Even at his musical peak in the 1980s, Anton Fier, a drummer, producer and bandleader who brought power and precision to his work with acts as diverse as the Feelies, Herbie Hancock, Laurie Anderson and his own star-studded ensemble, the Golden Palominos, seemed to glimpse a dark end for himself.The film and music critic Glenn Kenny, in an email, remembered running into Mr. Fier in the mid-1980s at the Hoboken, N.J., nightclub Maxwell’s, then a cauldron of indie rock, and querying him about alarming details on the sleeve of the Palominos’ album “Visions of Excess.”The rear cover featured a photograph of Mr. Fier, visibly drunk, quaffing a cocktail at a rock club. With it was an acknowledgment that read, “For Jim Gordon and Bonzo,” a reference to the Derek and the Dominos drummer who murdered his own mother during a psychotic episode, and to John Bonham, the Led Zeppelin drummer who died at 32 after consuming some 40 shots of vodka.Mr. Fier seemed to be hinting at his own grisly demise. “I don’t care,” Mr. Kenny recalled him saying. “I’m not going to live to be 35.”With anyone else, the episode might fit a familiar narrative — the self-destructive rocker in a death spiral. But throughout his life, friends said, Mr. Fier always resisted easy categorization.He was a punk-rock provocateur who could extemporize, seemingly for hours, about free-jazz pioneers and Ghanaian percussion luminaries; an artist with big ambitions and a web of platinum connections, but also a loner who shunned interviews and self-promotion; a prickly contrarian who seemed to revel in confrontation, but who was also known among friends for a kind, generous spirit.“Anton was kind of like a Tootsie Pop, with a hard exterior and a soft core,” the singer-songwriter Lianne Smith, a close friend who worked with him, said in a phone interview.Little wonder, then, that his death on Sept. 14 at 66 — confirmed by a cremation notice from a service in Basel, Switzerland — left as many questions as answers. The cause was rumored to be voluntary assisted dying, the location said to be in Switzerland, and suicide itself did not seem out of the question. Plagued by money troubles and waning career prospects, he had openly discussed the topic among friends in recent years. But where? When? How?He had certainly fallen on hard times. Dogged by money woes, lacking musical inspiration and, after injuring his wrists, hindered in playing drums to his own high standards, he had lost his only outlet. “He had a lot of pressures and a lot of anxieties,” Ms. Smith said. “But when he played music, he was a complete human being.”Mr. Fier in 1987. “Anton was kind of like a Tootsie Pop,” a friend and fellow musician said, “with a hard exterior and a soft core.”Rick McGinnisAnton John Fier III was born on June 20, 1956, in Cleveland, to Anton J. Fier Jr., an electrician and former Marine, and Ruthe Marie Fier. His parents split up when he was young, and Mr. Fier, who was known as Tony in his school days, endured a difficult relationship with his stepfather, a polka musician, he later told friends.Turning to music, he worked in a record store as a teenager and eventually drummed his way into the Cleveland proto-punk scene, recording with a version of the Styrenes and playing on the seminal 1978 EP “Datapanik in the Year Zero” by Pere Ubu, the conceptual band that calls its genre “avant garage.”Soon after, Mr. Fier followed his musical dreams to New York, where he brokered his encyclopedic knowledge of music into a job at the SoHo Music Gallery, a record store catering to the downtown music cognoscenti. There, he seemed more interested in chatting about records than selling them.Mr. Kenny recalled, “I remember walking in one day and these two cats” — Mr. Fier and the experimental saxophonist John Zorn, a fellow clerk — “were sitting up front talking about Charlie Parker, treating browsers like they were minor inconveniences.”Mr. Fier did more than talk about music. A gifted and ferocious drummer, he got his big break in 1978 when he answered an ad in The Village Voice placed by the Feelies, a cerebral indie group from New Jersey that The Voice had recently called the best underground band in New York. The group was looking for a drummer.“We asked the people who called what they thought of Moe Tucker,” Glenn Mercer, the band’s guitarist and vocalist, said, referring to the Velvet Underground’s drummer. “We were thinking in terms of very simple, primitive drumming. I think he was the only one that even knew who she was.”With a bookish air and a subversive sensibility, Mr. Fier fit the ethos of the band. His explosive drumming helped fuel the group’s first album, “Crazy Rhythms,” which the critic Robert Christgau later described as “exciting in a disturbingly abstract way, or maybe disturbing in an excitingly abstract way.”But Mr. Fier’s personality proved explosive as well, making his tenure with the band a short one. As the Feelies pulled up to a gig at one club, where the line was around the block, he gushed about how thrilled he was to be in the band. After a raucous set that had the packed house cheering, his mood inexplicably turned.“When the show was over, he was like, ‘You guys are so controlling, I can’t believe it,” Mr. Mercer recalled Mr. Fier saying. “Just like that, a 180.”Mr. Fier with the Golden Palominos in 2012.Christopher Gregory for The New York TimesEven so, Mr. Fier’s career continued to flourish. He joined the Lounge Lizards, John Lurie’s avant-jazz combo, for their first album, released in 1981, before Mr. Lurie rose to fame as an archetype of New York cool with his roles in Jim Jarmusch’s indie films “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Down by Law.”His career rose to new heights in the mid-1980s: He toured with the jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock following Mr. Hancock’s 1984 pop-funk crossover hit “Rockit,” and played on Laurie Anderson’s acclaimed 1984 album, “Mister Heartbreak.”By that point his musical ambitions could not be contained behind the drum kit, so Mr. Fier formed the Golden Palominos, an ever-evolving indie-rock supergroup that attracted a parade of guest stars, including Michael Stipe, John Lydon and Richard Thompson, through the rest of the 1980s and into the ’90s.“The band revolved around anyone Anton liked at the time,” Syd Straw, the iconoclastic singer-songwriter who got her start with the group, said by phone. “He had pretty bizarre social skills, but he was a magnet for brainy musicians. I think that he was, at heart, an amazing casting director.”In whatever musical role, Mr. Fier was exacting. “He never ‘settled,’’’ Chris Stamey, a founder of the indie band the dB’s who performed with the Palominos, recalled in an email. “And this could be unsettling at times. But we all wanted to see that blissful smile when something finally met his high standards.”Through the 2000s and early 2010s, Mr. Fier began to focus more on producing, working on albums by Ms. Smith, Julia Brown and the guitarist Jim Campilongo, although he did continue to perform with a highly regarded combo headed by the singer, guitarist and bassist Tony Scherr, a former Lounge Lizard.He also quit alcohol, a habit that had grown prodigious, particularly since the hard-partying Hancock tour, Mr. Stamey said.Hounded by creditors, however, Mr. Fier drifted further and further off the grid, avoiding even banks. He seemed to conclude, in eerily analytical fashion, that life was no longer worth living. Ms. Smith said he told her that he wanted to “fly to Thailand, have a wonderful vacation, take a lot of drugs and walk into the ocean.”The pandemic seemed only to deepen his despair. Without work or family (his only marriage, in 1976, lasted less than a year), he began researching his options. Last fall, Mr. Stamey recalled, Mr. Fier told him that he had been burned when he paid $900 over the internet for a veterinary tranquilizer, which he had decided “was the most peaceful way to go.”A few months ago, Mr. Fier texted his friend J.P. Olsen, a filmmaker and musician who had recently moved to Indiana, asking him for his new address. Mr. Fier had some boxes he wanted to send him. On Sept. 21, word began circulating that he was dead, apparently from an assisted suicide in Switzerland. Four days later, Mr. Olsen received the boxes, which were filled with piles of Mr. Fier’s clothes.And on Oct. 1, Nicky Skopelitis, a Palominos guitarist and the executor of Mr. Fier’s estate, received the cremation notice, dated Sept. 14, along with Mr. Fier’s remains.Questions about his last days linger. But in a way, friends said, that seems fitting for a man who was only too comfortable with loose ends.Two years ago, Mr. Stamey urged Mr. Fier to write a memoir, to pull him out of his funk. Mr. Fier’s response, Mr. Stamey recalled, was curt: “He said that he wanted to be the only one who didn’t write a book.” More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Sandy Nelson, Drummer Who Turned His Rhythms Into Hits, Dies at 83

      by

      His “Teen Beat” hit No. 4 in 1959, and more than 30 albums followed.Sandy Nelson, one of the few musicians in pop history to score Top 10 hits as a featured drummer, something he did early in a career that included more than 30 albums, died on Feb. 14 at a hospice center in Las Vegas. He was 83.His son, Joshua Nelson Straume, said the cause was complications of a stroke that Mr. Nelson had in 2017.Mr. Nelson was a session drummer in Los Angeles when, in 1959, he recorded “Teen Beat,” a propulsive instrumental whose dominating drum part was inspired by something he had heard at a strip club he visited with fellow musicians.“While they were looking at these pretty girls in G-strings, guess what I was doing?” he told The Las Vegas Weekly in 2015. “I was looking at the drummer in the orchestra pit.”“He was doing kind of a ‘Caravan’ beat,” he added, referring to a jazz standard. “‘Bum ta da da dum’ — small toms, big toms. That’s what gave me the idea for ‘Teen Beat.’”Mr. Nelson had played in the backing band for Art Laboe, a popular Los Angeles disc jockey who also had a small record label, Original Records, and Mr. Nelson took the song to him hoping that he’d press it. Instead, Mr. Laboe tested it on his radio show.“The little rascal, he played the actual acetate from the lathe,” Mr. Nelson recalled, “and he wasn’t going to press it up unless he got a few calls.”Mr. Laboe, he said, got three calls from impressed listeners, and that was enough: Mr. Laboe pressed the record. By October 1959 it had reached No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, a rare achievement for a drum-centered instrumental.Mr. Nelson scored again in 1961 with “Let There Be Drums,” which reached No. 7.Two years later, he was riding his motorcycle on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles when he collided with a school bus and was badly injured. Part of his right leg was amputated. But he returned to drumming, learning to play the bass with his left leg.“In the long run,” he told The Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2017, “I developed a little better technique.”He recorded a string of instrumental albums with session players in the 1960s and ’70s with titles like “Boss Beat” (1965) and “Boogaloo Beat” (1968), many of them filled with covers of hits of the day that showcased his drumming. He was not proud of much of that work.“I think the worst version ever of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ was done by me,” Mr. Nelson told L.A. Weekly in 1985, “and, oddly enough, it was a big seller in the Philippines. I guess they like squeaky saxophones or something.”But among these covers were glimpses of his interest in explorations that foreshadowed electronic ambient music. “Boss Beat,” for instance, in addition to takes on “Louie, Louie” and other hits, included “Drums in a Sea Cave,” in which Mr. Nelson played along to the sound of ocean waves.He was still experimenting late in life. His friend and fellow musician Jack Evan Johnson said that Mr. Nelson was especially proud of “The Veebles,” a whimsical five-track concept album released on cassette in 2016 that had an extraterrestrial sound and theme.“It’s about a race of people from another planet,” he told The Las Vegas Sun in 1996, when the long-gestating project was just beginning to take shape. “They’re gonna take over the Earth and make us do nothing but dance, sing and tell dumb jokes.”Sander Lloyd Nelson was born on Dec. 1, 1938, in Santa Monica, Calif., to Lloyd and Lydia Nelson. His father was a projectionist at Universal Studios.“My parents had these roaring parties with Glenn Miller records,” he told L.A. Weekly, “and the sound of those got to be like dope to me — I had to hear those records.”The drumming particularly interested him, and in high school he started playing.“I felt piano was too complicated and I’d have to take lessons and learn how to read music,” he said. “With drums, I could play instantly.”He said he once played in a band with a teenage guitarist named Phil Spector, who was later a famous and then infamous producer; Mr. Spector brought Mr. Nelson in to play drums on “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” a 1958 hit for Mr. Spector’s band the Teddy Bears.He also played on “Alley Oop,” a 1960 novelty hit for the Hollywood Argyles about a comic strip caveman, though not on drums. As Gary S. Paxton, who recorded the song with a group of studio musicians, told the story to The Chicago Sun-Times in 1997, Mr. Nelson was a last-minute addition.“We already had a drummer,” Mr. Paxton said, “so Nelson played garbage cans and did background screams.”Over the years other musicians have cited Mr. Nelson’s early records as an important influence; one was Steven Tyler, who started out as a drummer before finding fame as Aerosmith’s vocalist. In a 1997 interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune, Mr. Tyler recalled trying to imitate one of Mr. Nelson’s riffs as a child.“I played that until I wore out my little rubber drum pad,” he said. “I wore out the first two Sandy Nelson albums.”Mr. Nelson acknowledged that he had not handled his early success well.“I spent most of the money on women and whiskey, and the rest I just wasted,” he told The Review-Journal. In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Lisa Nelson.Mr. Nelson settled in Boulder City, Nev., in about 1987 and became a colorful local fixture, running a pirate radio station out of his house for about seven years before the FCC shut him down, Mr. Johnson said. And then there was the cave.Mr. Nelson had a lifelong fondness for underground spaces, and in Boulder City he set about digging his own cave in his backyard with a coffee can and pickax. The project took him 12 years.“I got a ‘cave tour’ once,” Mr. Johnson said by email, “and it was quite something, precarious even — dug down at a very steep angle into the hard desert soil, with no kind of support structure whatsoever and just enough room to scoot down into it for a ways until the room opened up at the bottom.”“He had an electric keyboard down there,” he added.Mr. Nelson told The Las Vegas Sun that he enjoyed relaxing in his backyard cave.“It’s a place to cool off,” he said.“I go in without my leg,” he added. “There’s more room.” More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Percussion

      by

      Listen to the varied, explosive, resonant sounds of instruments struck, shaken, pounded, scratched.In the past, we’ve chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms and choral music.Now we want to convince those curious friends to love percussion — the resonant sound of instruments struck, shaken, pounded. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Andy Akiho, composer and steel pan virtuosoIt’s an exciting era for percussion innovation and inspiration. Particularly new works with flexible instrumentation, because they really showcase an ensemble’s choices and personality. Sandbox Percussion’s multiple versions of Jason Treuting’s “extremes” are an awesome example of how a great composition can renew itself with each interpretation. It’s interesting to learn how the piece works and what inspired the material — rhythms drawn from the letters of six American cities — but most important, I just love listening to and watching it be performed, and I want to share that experience with you.Jason Treuting’s “extremes”Sandbox Percussion (Jonny Allen, Victor Caccese, Ian Rosenbaum, Terry Sweeney)◆ ◆ ◆Valerie Naranjo, musician and ‘Saturday Night Live’ band member“Gmeng Se Naah Eee” (“What Shall We Do?”) is a concerto movement for gyil (pronounced “jeel”) and orchestra. The gyil is a pentatonic African marimba that utilizes only four notes per octave in any particular work. Its composer poses the question — When trouble strikes, what shall we do? — then answers it: We will press forward with wisdom and determination, until we move from dismay to delight. I find it amazing that the 12 notes the gyil uses in this work can tell the story of wisdom conquering all with such exuberance — lifting my mood and making me dance.Ba-ere Yotere’s “Gmeng Se Naah Eee”Orchestrated by Andrew Beall; performed by Valerie Naranjo◆ ◆ ◆Evelyn Glennie, musicianPercussion is primal, sophisticated, raw, refined, playful, complex; it evokes a web of emotions and ignites vibrations that transform the body into a huge ear. “Thunder Caves” is relentless drumming that unleashes the human hand and technology together. The voice is primal, too, and what I drum I think about through the guttural grunts of my voice. Pronged sticks, drum sticks, flix sticks, skin on skin — all contribute to the sound colors on these conventional instruments. The incessant pounding of the kick bass drum gives this piece unrelenting momentum.“Thunder Caves”Improvised and performed by Evelyn Glennie (RCA)◆ ◆ ◆Antonio Sánchez, drummer and ‘Birdman’ composerThe drums are the engine of pretty much any band, but some engines work in a unique way. The first time I heard this live recording of Duke Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be” with the Keith Jarrett Trio — Jarrett on piano, Jack DeJohnette on drums and Gary Peacock on bass — back in college, I was astounded by how fluid the drums made the music sound. DeJohnette is one of the most original voices to ever play the instrument. Even though the swing factor is undeniably strong in his performance, the unconventional fills and accents keep a very well-known tune, with a very simple form, exciting and unpredictable. You can hear the crowd going crazy behind some of those trademark DeJohnette fills. Pure bliss.“Things Ain’t What They Used to Be”(ECM)◆ ◆ ◆Stewart Copeland, composer and former Police drummerMost concert works for percussion are as much fun as a concussion. But sometimes folks like Steve Reich and John Adams find real beauty in hitting things. In this piece Tan Dun takes it further, bravely writing for waterphones and other wildly rebellious instruments. He builds a rich orchestral envelope to suggest pitches and rhythms for the unpitched, wafting water sounds. Listening on your slick system, or over your headphones in a darkened room, it is guaranteed to inspire a wild adventure movie of your own design. For background while doing stuff, it will inspire lateral thinking and novel solutions. Probably not great for group bonding, marching or sex — and definitely don’t drive on this stuff!Tan Dun’s Concerto for Water PercussionNew York Philharmonic; Kurt Masur, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Sarah Hennies, composer and percussionistThe composer and performer Michael Ranta, born in 1942, is a crucial figure in percussion music, though he is almost totally unknown today, even to musicians. He was extremely prolific in the 1970s as an interpreter of avant-garde composition, as an improviser and as a composer of highly individualistic solo works, which he still produces today. He has spent significant time in Asia, especially China and Japan, and “Yuen Shan,” for live percussion and prerecorded sounds, is based on ancient spiritual principles and was composed over a period of almost 40 years. Ranta’s stalwart commitment to being a percussionist who is also a creative artist has been a source of great inspiration for my own work.Michael Ranta’s “Yin-Chu”From “Yuen Shan”◆ ◆ ◆David Allen, Times writerCarl Nielsen’s irrepressible Fourth Symphony was written in 1916, in the middle of World War I, and it’s a dogfight between light and dark. Where does the percussion fit in? As the orchestra tries to soar into glory in the finale, two timpanists duke it out, stationed at opposite sides of the stage — and, as Nielsen wrote, “maintaining a certain threatening character,” their dueling dissonances and the brutality of their attack almost pulling the music back into martial disaster. But not quite; life triumphs. It’s one of the most remarkable uses of the percussion in the symphonic repertoire, and stunning to witness live.Nielsen’s Fourth SymphonyBerlin Philharmonic; Herbert von Karajan, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Cynthia Yeh, Chicago Symphony principal percussionistThe most obvious traits of percussion in the orchestral realm are sheer power, intensity and terror — both overt, in-your-face terror and a subtler undercurrent of fear. Percussion is often used to create a color, a shimmer, a sparkle or crashing waves. The sounds we can make are limitless because our instruments actually are limitless; percussion is defined as anything one shakes, scrapes or strikes, and this is why I chose Christopher Cerrone’s “Memory Palace.” Almost all the instruments in this piece are D.I.Y.: planks of wood, pieces of pipe, bowls and bottles. It showcases the versatility of percussion — the range of instruments, the creation of rhythm, melody, harmony, character and mood.Christopher Cerrone’s “Memory Palace”Ian David Rosenbaum, percussion (National Sawdust Tracks)◆ ◆ ◆Glenn Kotche, composer and Wilco drummerDynamic and energetic, “Drums of Winter” is at the heart of John Luther Adams’s fascinating early multimedia work “Earth and the Great Weather: A Sonic Geography of the Arctic.” Even without pitched percussion, it contains all of the most exciting elements of percussion music. The tumultuous power and subtle peace of the natural world are expertly encompassed. The piece moves quickly and covers a lot of ground, with the sonic peaks and valleys of rhythmic consonance and dissonance showcasing the tonal potential of the drum quartet. The last 30 seconds are an exhilarating finale bound to open doors and ears to more.John Luther Adams’s “Drums of Winter”Amy Knoles, Robert Black, Robin Lorentz and John Luther Adams, percussion (New World Records)◆ ◆ ◆Anthony Tommasini, Times chief classical music criticThough the piano is a percussion instrument, we agreed we’d look beyond its traditional repertoire for this feature. But John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano are works that truly create a percussion ensemble of exhilarating variety. In these 20 pieces, Cage continued his experiments with prepared pianos — regular pianos with screws, bolts, slabs of rubber, pieces of plastic and other items inserted, according to Cage’s precise specifications, between its strings. By striking the keys, a player produces an array of thuds, chime-like tones, near-pitchless plunks, delicate harplike sounds and more. In the paired Sonatas XIV and XV, “Gemini,” the music sounds like a vaguely Asian dance, with rippling riffs in the bass register, melodic bits in peeling high tones, alluring thumps and intricate rhythmic figures.John Cage’s “Gemini”David Greilsammer, piano (Sony Classical)◆ ◆ ◆Seth Colter Walls, Times classical writerWhen it comes to Duke Ellington’s music from the early 1940s, discussion tends to center on the contributions made by the bassist Jimmy Blanton and the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster — and the skill of the percussionist Sonny Greer is often overlooked. Yet Ellington himself described Greer, his longtime drummer, as the “world’s best percussionist reactor.” “When he heard a ping,” Ellington added in his memoir, “he responded with the most apropos pong.” You can hear that responsiveness throughout the classic “Cotton Tail,” as Greer drives the ensemble sections, adds excitement to an already stirring Webster solo and pongs nimbly underneath Ellington’s piano.Duke Ellington’s “Cotton Tail”(Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Tyshawn Sorey, composer and instrumentalistComposed in 1978 for an eight-member percussion ensemble, Roscoe Mitchell’s “The Maze” is a seminal example of his dialogic/Afrologic relationship to composition. Its unusually notated score favors an egalitarian aesthetic, in which each of the performers has opportunities not only to interpret complex, traditionally notated passages, but also to explore different sonic areas in their individualized assemblages, which feature traditional Western percussion instruments, self-invented equipment and a multitude of found objects. “The Maze” encourages the performers to collaboratively interact with all the traditionally and graphically notated materials in a manner that problematizes separatist notions of “improvisation” and “composition,” cultivating a sonic universe in which such a binary never existed in the first place.Roscoe Mitchell’s “The Maze”(Nessa)◆ ◆ ◆Steven Schick, musicianDuring my first visit to New York City on a crystalline autumn day in 1977, I walked the length of Manhattan to stand outside of the building where Edgard Varèse had lived in SoHo. Along the way, I heard the metal-on-metal cacophony of construction, wailing sirens and snippets of the city’s joyous mix of world music. I realized then that “Ionisation,” composed of those very sounds, was not barren modernism but Varèse’s love letter to his adopted home. Listening 44 years later, the noises of “Ionisation” are still bracing, the rhythms still joyous, and I am buoyed again by this fierce anthem to the present.Varèse’s “Ionisation”Ensemble Intercontemporain; Susanna Malkki, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Jason Treuting, composer and So Percussion memberI first listened to “Genderan” in 1997. It is in the gamelan gong kebyar style and showcases so many of the transfixing qualities of Balinese music — qualities that led me to study with I Nyoman Suadin at the Eastman School of Music, and then to travel to Bali to learn more with him and other musicians. “Genderan” begins with a unison introduction, then hits with intricate hocketing over the gong cycle, showing off bright melodies that wind over the beat in endlessly compelling ways. This music utterly changed my life and my understanding of percussion and its capacities. I hope you love it, too.“Genderan”From “Music for the Gods”; recorded in Ubud, Bali, 1941◆ ◆ ◆Joshua Barone, Times editorIn its rhythms and lyrical gestures, this piece seems to contain elements of Steve Reich and John Adams — maybe even Leonard Bernstein. Yet it predates them all: Colin McPhee wrote “Tabuh-Tabuhan” in 1936, influenced by his years spent studying gamelan music in Bali. He transplanted his research onto the Western classical orchestra, featuring Balinese gongs but also creating what he called a “nuclear gamelan” of two pianos and percussion instruments, and approximating the sounds of hand-beaten drums in the strings. The resulting works helped to pave a new path, later trod by Benjamin Britten and broadened by Lou Harrison, for Western percussion in the 20th century.Colin McPhee’s “Tabuh-Tabuhan”BBC Symphony Orchestra; Leonard Slatkin, conductor (Chandos)◆ ◆ ◆Zachary Woolfe, Times classical music editorIn the prelude to Janacek’s opera “Kat’a Kabanova,” the percussion is as articulate as any singer could be in previewing the drama to come: the timpani, first shadowy, then brutal, beating like a heartbeat, like fate; and the insistent sleigh bells that will later carry away a husband, leaving his wife to temptation, adultery and suicide. Percussion functions under, over and through the orchestra — adding punctuation, italics, boldface.Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova”Vienna Philharmonic; Charles Mackerras, conductor (Decca)◆ ◆ ◆Kate Gentile, drummer and composerThe brilliant, multitudinous improvisation in this excerpt typifies the “ancient to the future” ethos of this revolutionary group. The Art Ensemble of Chicago’s extensive percussion setup is played freely and fully by all four band members on this 1969 recording, made before Famoudou Don Moye joined. Lester Bowie is listed as playing bass drum; Roscoe Mitchell, cymbals, gongs, conga drums, logs, bells, siren, whistles, steel drum, etc.; Joseph Jarman, marimba, vibes, conga drums, bells, whistles, gongs, siren, guitar, etc.; and Malachi Favors, log drum, cythar, percussions, etc. — all that in addition to their primary instruments.“Reese and the Smooth Ones”Art Ensemble of Chicago — A.A.C.M.◆ ◆ ◆Elayne Jones, former San Francisco Opera timpanistThe timpani can be such a loud instrument, and people tend to watch you when you’re playing it. But it really captures the audience when it’s so soft; it kind of gets you. Just before the end of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, it’s only the solo piano and the quiet timpani. Something so big and so heavy, but it comes out so delicate. You capture everyone’s imagination.Beethoven’s Fifth Piano ConcertoAndras Schiff, piano; Staatskapelle Dresden; Bernard Haitink, conductor (Teldec)◆ ◆ ◆ More