Roy Haynes Revisited

This article was first published on All About Jazz in January 1999.

Roy Haynes is one of the few living legends remaining in jazz. He has been awarded the Danish Jazzpar prize, Grammys, and numerous other awards and polls. Haynes is the most versatile drummer in jazz history, do in most part to his playing with Lester Young, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Horace Tapscott, Miles Davis, Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Stan Getz, Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, and that is only what I can remember off the top of my head. Oddly, Haynes has recorded very little as a leader in respect to the longevity of his career. I had an opportunity to speak with Haynes during the "Blizzard of '99" and he spoke about his views on recording, his remembrances of his playing partners, and his new album Praise on Dreyfus Jazz, candidly, and in his own words.

All About Jazz: Growing up in Boston, what led you to play jazz music?

Roy Haynes: That's a hard question, but it's not. First of all, it was such a long time ago, there weren't too many choices. I grew up in Boston, as you said, and Boston in those days was very Irish and if I didn't play jazz, I would have either played Irish music or Jewish music. I lived across the street from a synagogue. In the end I thought that it was probably the only thing. I had an older brother that was into music. In fact, he studied a while. He studied theory at the conservatory.

I heard everything on the radio. I heard everything from Bing Crosby to Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington to Guy Lombardo. I always had the feeling to want to play drums. In the old days, a lot of guys were just natural players of whatever they did. They just picked up an instrument and that was my case. I never got that question before.

I usually get a lot of "How did you happen to play drums?" My mother was very religious and I started buying records when I was a teenager, and she didn't really like me to play them on Sunday. Sunday was very special, very for her. Jazz was there. What else would I play? In those days, we didn't have rock and all of that stuff, so what else would it have been? I studied violin and played some of the classical music and all. It was good music. I listened to a lot of it. Jazz, to me, is just a word. It's just a musical expression of our lives.

AAJ: Describe your relationship with the following individuals. Let's start with Lester Young.

RH: Lester Young was one of the most original persons that I have ever met in my life. The way he talked, you know he was the one that nicknamed Billie Holiday, "Lady 'Day." He nicknamed Harry "Sweets" Edison, "Sweets." He had a name for everybody and a name for everything.

AAJ: Did he have a nickname for you?

RH: He called me "The Royal of Haynes." I was part of his royal family. He was "Prez." He was the "President." Billie Holiday was "The Lady." And I was "The Royal of Haynes." He didn't say that often, but periodically he would say that. I joined him in October of 1947 at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. It was the same place I joined Luis Russell's band. The bandleader had sent for me to come from Boston to New York in 1945. And I'll never forget, I played with Lester for two years straight. We didn't make much money, but it was a very memorable, happy occasion. And the music was great and he thought I was a very swinging drummer, which he said to me after I played one or two tunes with him. I will never forget that whole period.

AAJ: Charlie Parker.

RH: He was up and down. He was great to work for. I never had any problems with him, but we didn't work steady, like with Lester Young, it was almost steady for that whole period of the two years. With Charlie Parker, whom I started with when I left Lester Young in 1949, and it was great. Charlie was an extraordinary genius, a special person.

AAJ: Stan Getz.

RH: Stan was in love with my playing, even to the end. I remember I spoke to his son and his son gave me his number.

AAJ: Stan's son Steve.

RH: Right. It was Steve who gave me Stan's number in California and I called him up. You see, he was dying then. He answered the phone, but first he had a tape on (answer machine) and after he found out that it was me, he talked to me. And then he called me back again within a week or so and wanted to get some gigs. He told me what he would pay me and I said, "Man, the guys in my band make more!" Stan wanted guys in my band, but he was very tight with the money. He was great, but as far as being a person, he didn't compare to Lester Young or Charlie Parker. I'm not even talking about his music. I'm talking about his person. But we'll leave that alone.

AAJ: Sarah Vaughan.

RH: Playing with Sarah was great. I often compare playing with Sarah Vaughan to playing with Charlie Parker. I've played with Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan. To me, they were the greatest jazz singers, three of the greatest jazz singers that ever lived. And I say, playing with Billie Holiday was like playing with Lester Young. Playing with Sarah Vaughan was like playing with Charlie Parker, like I just said. Playing with Ella Fitzgerald was like playing with Count Basie's band.

AAJ: What adjustments, if any, did you have to make playing with those vocalists in comparison to the instrumentalists you played with?

RH: I made many, of course, because their instrument is naturally their voice. That's the first difference, so you have to think in terms of volume, and feeling, and that whole thing. You have to be more sensitive. What you're going to play and how you're going to play it, especially being female singers, not that that really makes a difference, a singer's a singer. A great singer's a great singer. And there weren't too many singers that could touch them as far as I was concerned.

AAJ: And John Coltrane.

RH: I say that playing with John Coltrane was like a beautiful nightmare. I said that some time before and people stop me now and ask me what I meant by that.

AAJ: What did you mean by that? It seems like a contradiction in terms.

RH: You see, a lot of people like the idea of hearing something like that. My niece, my oldest niece, who now lives in Atlanta, said, "Uncle Roy, how can a nightmare be beautiful?" When you have to explain that to somebody, a nightmare is a very spiritual, strange thing, to me. So playing with John Coltrane, in that group at the time, I never played with him steady. I just filled in several times for Elvin (Elvin Jones). It was very spiritual. It was like going to, I went to a Pentecostal church and that's what that reminded me of. When John was getting down, he was getting down with the music like that. He was into it. Nothing could stop him.

AAJ: You have been the mold that most modern drummers emulate, yet, the recognition has just been coming to you recently. Do you feel that you were overlooked or is it the drums as an instrument that is taken for granted?

RH: I wouldn't want to try to figure out why I was overlooked. Maybe one of the things is that a lot of writers, critics, and historians, I don't know if they were really into what I was doing, and I think the recognition has started coming lately because musicians started screaming, such as John Coltrane. He had said something. One time when I was playing with John Coltrane in Chicago, a writer named Michael D. "something," who is not living now, made a statement to me that I didn't appreciate. He said, "I didn't know you could play like that." I told him he should have asked Elvin. And then he got very, he was trying to find out more about me, so he called up John Coltrane and asked John Coltrane things about me, between me and Elvin. And John told me that the guy called. They (the writers, critics, etc.) can be very sneaky.

From the old days, they broke up the family, the black families. Lots of times they'll, when I say they now, I'm talking about the people who think they are running the world or running the music, or whatever. A lot of them are still not around. There are new people around. They try to start wars between us, meaning myself and Elvin, and that wasn't going to happen. I noticed even another writer had written something and he pushing him (Elvin Jones) with questions about Roy Haynes, trying to make him say something, so when they called up John, now it's been in notes (liner notes) for CD's. One of the guys from Impulse had put out a reissue that I was on, all the tracks that I was on, some time ago called To The Beat Of A Different Drum or something like that, and they used what Coltrane had said for the notes. So, I don't think a lot of people knew what I was doing or maybe they didn't think it was important, the people that are running it, trying to run the music. That's one of my feelings. I didn't try to analyze it. I just kept going and playing with all the people that I was playing with and having my own band and just kept playing my ass off.

Even now, every time I get behind the drums, it is my most serious time of the day for me. It's a serious thing in life, to play music and to be as sincere and real as possible. I don't worry about what didn't happen or what happened. I was playing with the greatest people in the world. I was one of the greatest drummers ever, from day one and to hell with that. I mean, I go back to thinking, like, people say, "Oh, you're underrated." I hate the word. My wife used to say it and just hate to hear that. People say it as if it's something to brag about. At least I lived long enough to be able to get some of the credit I deserve. I made a statement one time when I was receiving an award in Anaheim. I said, "I recently read in an in-flight magazine on a plane, 'In business you don't get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate.'" I always knew how to handle myself. They didn't know what I was doing. It took people like Pat Metheny to say Roy is a motherfucker. OK, Stan Getz in his way. Charlie Parker in his way.

So now they see that I'm still playing and that a lot of younger people want to play with me, successful people, both financially and musically, like Chick Corea and all, so now they take attention. The first big award I got was the Jazzpar prize, which was in another country. And that did a lot for me. They started looking at me. Roy Haynes is still playing. He's making records. He's got a Grammy for this and that. A lot of people jump on the bandwagon. I was never bitter.

AAJ: Any advice to younger musicians.

RH: What I may suggest may not fit them, but I would say stay focused. Stay focused to what you're doing and to the music. When we say musician, that could be anybody, and I am a jazz player. I can't give advice to someone who is playing funk, funk drummers, but in jazz, you really have to listen. Everyone has to listen to each other. The louder music, even when you play jazz loud, it's not supposed to stay at one volume, regardless of what instrument.

AAJ: How would you describe your music and your playing?

RH: A lady said to me recently in Chicago, when I had finished performing, she thought that I had all the seasons. And I had never heard that expression. That's the way she described my playing and my music. The four seasons. She was an older lady and she came back on the last night and I called her in because she wanted to say something and I had never met her before. I thought that was one of the greatest compliments that I could get. A writer couldn't say something that great. Let me ask you, I'm to be on a panel in Anaheim (International Association of Jazz Educators Convention) and I don't know the difference, maybe you could describe it, between a critic, a journalist, and a historian.

AAJ: I think all three can have aspects of all three and to be a critic, a journalist, or a historian, at least a credible one, one should have qualities of all three. The critic expresses his or her opinion as an essential part of his or her article or review. The journalist should do their utmost to present all sides of the story, from the musician's point of view, from the public's perspective, and so on. The historian should just stick to the facts.

RH: Once I was on a panel at one of the colleges I described a writer as a critic and he stopped me and said, "Roy, I'm not a critic. I'm a historian (laughing)." He put me in my place. I don't really like the word (critic). And I'm to be, they want me to be, what am I going to say about these guys? I could name names and talk about things that have happened to different people, especially myself, and describe it that way, but I don't know, I guess I can because I'm going to be seventy-four in March and I've played with all the people, so I think I should be able to. I don't like to be like a critic. I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. Jesus Christ. I'd rather not say anything. I'll say when they ask, "Let me pass on that." Because I have seen musicians practice, and they play, and they're sincere about what they're doing, and they get ripped up by critics. And I've seen some people who, I don't know what the hell they're playing, and the critics brag about them. I think I'll have a little taste when I'm on that panel and really just let it hang out. I'm going to tell them what I feel. I don't even know the difference between the three. Somebody told me a couple of days ago, "A critic has to go to school to study some shit. Is that right?"

AAJ: I don't hang out at a critics/writers coffee shop and talk shop all day, but I know of fine writers whom are musicians by trade and did not go to some form of a "writer's school." But maybe they should.

RH: I don't know. They had a guy do the notes to my latest album Praise, I don't know if he took the notes, anyhow he came to the record date. It wasn't the guy that did the notes. He's a DJ here in New York. I thought when I saw him walk in, "My records going to get good play on the radio." And everybody was bragging. The musicians were all excited. The guy reviewed it for DownBeat (November 1998 issue with Haynes on the cover along with Elvin Jones, Louie Bellson, and Max Roach, reviewed by Ted Panken). I didn't even know that he was a reviewer. He gave it four stars. And another gentleman, he has his record four and a half stars (referring to Idris Muhammad's release Right Now on Cannonball Records) which made me stop and think. Then he said something near the end. He said, "This record would have gotten five stars if." What did he say? If some of the tunes weren't this or weren't that (Panken says," Several routine tracks block Praise from 5-star nirvana, but there's hardly a beat where Haynes doesn't reach for something he hasn't heard before.). When I saw him at my last gig, I just brought it up, and he didn't really want to talk about it then. Sometimes I think, I don't know, I think they want to be bigger than the musicians, some of them. Have they played with Charlie Parker? That's the kind of stuff I'm going to talk about on the panel.

AAJ: Speaking of >Praise, let's talk about your new album on Dreyfus Jazz.

RH: When we were doing that, everybody was so inspired. Kenny (Kenny Garrett) and I had never played. David (David Sanchez) had never played at all until then. And Kenny and I, the only thing we did, we did Remembering Bud Powell. I think he did one track on there with Chick Corea. We may have done one of the concerts with Chick, I forget, in place of the other saxophone, who was the tenor player Joshua (Joshua Redman). First of all, I don't usually like studios. I don't like being in studios with the headphones on and you're sitting barricaded the drums, I don't usually like to do it there. I like to do a live date, which I had suggested, and I wanted to get prepared to do it live at Birdland, because that's where my gig was going to be, not that same period but a little later on. They didn't really want to do that. After we did the date, they were all excited. The president, who lives in Paris, so he didn't come in for it, but he had another French guy, I think the guy from Sunnyside [Francois Zalacain], come. There was an attorney there, Alan Bergman, who started Dreyfus here in New York. The way the tracks are on CD is the same order, in the same order that we recorded them, so it was almost live. It turned out to be a great feeling. The record, from what I understand, is selling pretty good. It got some great reviews. It was nice. I wish we had more time to play together, even after the record.

AAJ: Who are you bringing to the West Coast?

RH: Dave Kikoski, same rhythm section (Dwayne Burno on bass), and Ron Blake will be playing saxophones. We had done some work together. I think he went to Europe with us. He did a sting of dates with us. It was a great season, so I decided he had something to say, all these guys, they all have their own groups, so this is going to be my first hit for the winter season. I've been cooling since November.

AAJ: What inspires Roy Haynes after all these years and what inspired Roy Haynes for all these years?

RH: I'm inspired to play drummers, anyhow. I like to wait, like I said, I haven't played a drum until, maybe, yesterday, here at home, since my last gig. I haven't touched a drum, well, I've touched the snare drum, but I finally sat behind the set and played a little. When there's a nice audience, and the band is ready to hit, and I'm relaxed, I'm inspired. I'm ready to play and then it's back and forth. If you play something and the guys in the band get inspired, it gets to the audience, and when the audience gives it back to you, there's inspiration. I'm ready to play. The house is good. It's sort of quiet, except for an explosion or something happens, everybody responds to it, the audience and everybody in the band. It takes things like that to bring out the best in me, I think, which inspires me. Then when I have had a good night musically, I can feel it. I feel like I've been to the gym. I got to the hotel or go home and sleep my butt off and I can tell it was great.

AAJ: Is there anyone that you haven't played with that you would like to play with someday?

RH: There maybe. Well, there must be, right? I don't know. Sometimes you get disappointed. There was somebody you really wanted to play with and then it doesn't happen, because a lot of things that musicians expect drummers to do, I don't always do those things, and it may not work. Somebody has to understand my concept. But, it didn't take long for people like Lester Young and Charlie Parker to understand it, so. I don't know. I'll tell you what, Dave Kikoski, he has been playing with me for a number of years, a long time, and he said he can't wait. He said he wanted to play, even before we went to L. A., but we haven't played yet. Sometimes they come over here. I had a band once, lets see, I had Kevin Eubanks even. He was working in a donut shop and he used to come over here and bring donuts with him.

AAJ: Donuts?

RH: Yes. And Ralph Moore was there too. I can't wait to see these guys when I go to L.A., I hope to see Kevin too. I forgot that this might embarrass Kevin because people get this in L. A.. I hope to see these guys.

AAJ: Any other younger musicians, whose playing you enjoy?

RH: Yes. I like different ones for different things and I'm sure I'll leave out somebody. There are a lot of great drummers. It funny, a drummer like myself will say there are a lot of great drummers and then maybe you talk to somebody else, I don't want to name names, but like Joe Henderson, and he'll say, "What? Him?" So, to us, we see different things in each other, whereas another instrumentalist may not be comfortable with that drummer, or this horn player, or whatever. But there are a lot of really good new musicians out here. But what makes it hard for people like myself is that having played with the people that I've played with, I'm always looking for something else. I'm looking for the feeling in a ballad that some of the young players may not give, regardless of what instrument. I heard Roy Hargrove play a ballad and it knocked me out. Kenny Garrett has a lot of fire in him. Donald Harrison. Donald Harrison did a lot of work with me. There I go naming people. I'm always going to leave people out. I like Joshua Redman.

AAJ: Speaking of your gig, when audiences come to hear you play, what would you like them to take away from the music?

RH: Maybe, they could take away something great, like that lady had told me, the four seasons. I would like them to feel that they never heard anything quite like that or to make them feel that good, the atmosphere, "Wow! I didn't realize it would be that great or that involved musically. I didn't realize it would make me feel that way."

AAJ: What would you like "historians" to say Roy Haynes? What would you like your legacy to be?

RH: I think a lot of the things I would like them to say, I've heard them say or I've read them. Not just hitting on one thing. I did a profiles thing for National Public Radio and they asked me that question and I didn't know what the hell to say, and when Nancy Wilson, who does the narrating on the thing, when she heard it, she wasn't there, something was crackling and she said, "I take that Roy's nervous." She knocked me out. I wasn't nervous, maybe I was nervous. I wasn't nervous, there was no audience there. We were at the studio and I'm on a telephone and a lady from L. A. was asking questions as I was sitting there. I think what I've done musically should speak for itself. I played with everyone, from Lennie Tristano to Louis Armstrong. I recorded with Ray Charles. Roy Haynes, whatever he did and whomever he did it with musically, he did it like it was cut out for him. I'm bragging, but different managers of different people call me up and like the music itself and want to make a record date. They see I have made a record date with Pat Metheny or Chick and maybe they like to call up and make a record with them. I don't like the studios, like I said, but these guys, I was close to these guys and they make it comfortable for me, where as I wouldn't want to tell any musician, don't do this for me, or let me do this, or let me lay out here, anybody young or old, I don't like to, so I just don't bother. These guys know how I feel, I think, even though Chick Corea's a work-a-holic, he'll rehearse like crazy. But anyway, I may not be leaving tomorrow.

AAJ: Any parting messages?

RH: Wherever I perform, it will be jazz that I'm performing. And it will be swinging. And I want people to feel that Roy Haynes is the swingingest motherfucker. I would just like to sit, over in a dark corner and swing all night. And if I can't swing anymore then I'll stop, but as long as it makes the audience feel good, the musicians feel good, and I feel good, I'll keep swinging. And the beat goes on.

Comments