Remembering Drummer Roy Haynes: Jazz Freaks Line Up to Pay Respects to a Legend

Before you start reading this (too late), check out this drum solo from by Roy Haynes, who died Tuesday at 99. It’s a solo from 1966 when he was playing with Stan Getz. The solo starts at 2:00.

If that’s not enough to blow you way, consider his collaborations over the decades. In the late 1940s, he played with bebop pioneers Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. During the 1950s, he worked with tenor saxophonists Lester Young and Stan Getz, as well as vocalist Sarah Vaughan. In the early 1960s, he joined forces with John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, as well as free jazz pioneers Eric Dolphy and Andrew Hill. By the 1970s, Haynes was exploring fusion with Chick Corea and Pat Metheny. He also performed with Ella Fitzgerald and, in more recent years, with younger artists such as Christian McBride and Marcus Strickland, bridging jazz eras and influencing generations. Such restless evolution was in his DNA.

Here’s NPR’s rundown of his work, courtesy Ben Ratliff and Eric Westervelt:

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 Perez.

“I’m only happy when I’m moving forward,” he told the writer Burt Korall (per NPR). “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.”

In Haynes’ obituary for The New York Times, the great jazz writer Nate Chenin captured his range: “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.”

Here he is soloing with Chick Corea decades later. (Solo starts at 9:26.)

He was a relentless performer who preferred concerts to recording sessions — he hated having to wear headphones — and couldn’t seem to stop himself from playing. “For a while, a few years ago, I was saying that I was semi-retired,” he told Jazz Weekly’s Fred Jung in an undated interview. “I was feeling good. I had dogs out here and I had tropical fish and I started working so much again after that, after a couple of years, that I had to get rid of all that stuff. I’d come home and the fish would be sick and the dogs would be in the kennels. I got rid of all of that and now I am just playing.”

Added Haynes, “I never wanted to be one of the guys that played and played and played. You’re on the road and then you die, but it looks like it may go down the same way. It looks like I may continue to play, play and play. I get so inspired and I guess that is part of my therapy at this point.”

In jazz, age means nothing, he said in 2007 (per The Los Angeles Times). “When we get on the bandstand, we all become one age — the same age. It has nothing to do with how old you are or where you’re from, it’s what you can do musically.”

Guitarist Metheny told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2003 that Haynes “has a way of being inside the musical moment with a depth that is truly rare. He has a listening sensitivity that allows him to not only play beautifully every time out, but to make the musicians around him become the beneficiaries of his musical wisdom.”

Here’s Haynes playing with Coltrane’s quartet at Newport. A legendary recording, it confirms that despite his passing, the drummer will continue to play and play.