Occasional Jazz Conjectures

“We’re here to have a ball” - Art Blakey

Drum on your drums. . .
Sling your knuckles on the bottoms of the happy
tin pans. . . go husha-husha-hush with the slippery sand-paper. . .bang altogether drums,
traps, banjos, horns, tin cans–make two people fight
on the top of a stairway and scratch each other’s eyes
in a clinch tumbling down the stairs. -Carl Sandburg

Rimshot. Press roll. Machine gun punk-choo-ation. Synaptic displacement. It’s from the drums that we discover in jazz the secrecy of matter. Rhythmic clatter and pulse: the gorgeous concrete poetry of its onomatopoeia of ratamacues, hemidemisemi quavering mama-daddy shuffles, ching-Chicka-ching, and its OopapaDa bomb-dropping nerve beats. The drummer is the chess piece that wasn’t — leading the charge in war.
Whenever jazz has needed a revolution. . .the drummer’s always been the first in line. . . crazy mo-foes-it-doting shtekn zetsers. Straddling spontaneity and discipline as though they were stick-wielding kin of both Parmenides and Heraclitus, the drummer speaks easy with tapping toes and nodding heads, swirling dervish-style, crashing, careening off waveforms and horn-spiralled riff . . .filling all available holes loose with a freedom that only comes from establishing the scene of the crime–dabbling in forms of sympathetic magic.
Baby Dodds knew this: “Drumming is spirit. You have got to have that in your body, in your soul. And it can’t be an evil spirit. If you’re evil, you’re going to drum evil, and when you drum evil you’re going to put evil in somebody else’s mind, and the first thing you know, that somebody’ll put the evil in somebody else’s mind. Well, what kind of a band have you got? Nothing but an evil spirit band. Now if a spirit is good, any good spirit will dwell with good spirits. And God help a bad spirit band!”
PS Note to Clark Coolidge: Today, October 11 is Billy Higgins’ and Art Blakey’s birthdays.. . can you add them to this list poem?

DRUMMERS
      for Larry Fagin

Jimmy Zitano
Ronnie Free
Jeff Morton
Nick Stabulas
Frank Isola
Art Mardigan
Gene Gammage
Lawrence Marable
Joe Dodge
Lloyd Davis
Herb Barman
Chuck Flores
Bill Bradley Jr.
Frank Butler
Joe Harris
Osie Johnson
Shadow Wilson
Al Harewood
Rudy Collins
Bert Dale (Dahlender)
Stan Levey
Chuck Thompson
Nick Fatool
Cliff Leeman
Jack Sperling
Grassila Olliphant
Pete Littman
Johnny Crawford
Roy Harte
Sam Ulano
Jimmy Campbell
Mousey Alexander
Alvin Stoller
Mickey Sheen
Ray Mosca
Charlie Perry
“Sticks” Evans
“Specs” Powell
Chauncey Morehouse
G.T. Hogan
Tony Spargo (Sbabaro)
Donald Bailey
Dave Bailey
Al “Tootie” Heath
Al Torre
Frankie Capp
Bobby White
Lex Humphries
Al Leavitt
Jake Hanna
Denzil DeCosta Best
Tiny Kahn
Joe Hunt
Bill Clarke
Billy Osborne
Steve Ellington
Rudy Nichols
Larry Bunker
Charlie Persip
Ben Riley
Dennis Charles

- Clark Coolidge, 1967