Elvin Jones's Paideumic Drumming

He died a week ago today in New York, aged 76, but Elvin Jones' paideumic drums and cymbals will beat and ring forever in the minds of jazz fans around the world. His polytonal rhythms interwoven with the spiraling scales of John Coltrane tenor and soprano saxophones in the vortex that was the John Coltrane Quartet of the 1960s. McCoy Tyner's piano and Jimmy Garrison's double bass (and Steve Davis's before Jimmy) kept these two Mephistophelean giants corralled with fundamental pulsing time. "Four-in-one" I over heard drummer Dick Berk say one evening at the Half Note Cafe in New York's west Village -- the Quartet was on fire and live on the radio back then in 1965. "Sheets of sound" wrote one critic; "anti-jazz" another. Yet the lyric quality of Trane's melodic-harmonic searches were tempered by Jones's ride cymbal and crashes, his independent left-handed snare triplets, his simultaneously triplet patterns involving his two toms and bass drum, and a hi-hat cymbals chocked and loose as only Elvin could play them. Sweating profusely yet smiling, Elvin drove John into the music. Jazz is work.

I first heard Elvin with the John Coltrane Quartet on the recording My Favorite Things sometime in 1961 in Paris. It was coming from a record player in a place called Storyville in the Rue la Huchette across the street from a boite de nuit famously known as Le Chat Qui Peche. Jackie McLean, Freddie Redd, and Art Taylor were playing there. The modal sound alongside hard bop. But the haunting, pied-piperesque sound of Coltrane's soprano, of Elvin's off-center rhythmic patterns, of Tyner's pulsing chords, and Garrison's underpinning rhythm -- this was something new! Later on at the Olympia Theater in Paris I heard this Quartet and afterward got their autographs on my copy of My Favorite Things -- got all but the drummer's. Elvin had split early (I imagine) to go over to the Blue Note to listen to one of his heroes, Kenny Clarke, the inventor of modern jazz drumming.

When I went to New York in the fall of 1963 and spent time with my friend Roscoe who lived then with his step father in Harlem (138th and Lenox), I heard the Quartet again at Birdland. The music was hot like fire except for 'Alabama' an musical allusion and tribute to the four children killed by the Birmingham church bombing. The times were a changin'. In July 1967 I heard the news -- John Coltrane died from a liver ailment, just 41 years. And a year or so later, Jimmy Garrison too had left the scene. Another era had ended in jazz comparable to that which ended when Charlie Parker died in March 1955, but I had lived to experience first-hand this one with the John Coltrane Quartet setting the pace.

Great times for jazz -- 1955-1965. Miles, Monk, Bill Evans (and Gil),'Trane, Mingus, Dolphy, Ornette, Max, Zoot, Chet, Bud, Klook, Duke, Count, Bean, Ella, Sarah -- I missed hearing Brownie, Bird, Billie and Prez "live" but so many jazz giants were still on the scene. It was a privilege to hear these artists play.

Thank goodness that we still have McCoy Tyner and Elvin's older brother, Hank Jones, to keep us alert to the music that is jazz, one of the important elixers of life. But I will always miss the energy of Elvin. God bless you, man.