Roy Haynes, a jazz drummer and bandleader whose talent and flexibility led him to carry out with artists as various as Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Chick Corea and Pat Metheny over his seven-decade profession, has died.
A consultant for Haynes confirmed to the Times that the prolific percussionist died Tuesday. His daughter, Leslie Haynes-Gilmore, informed the story New York Times his father died after a brief sickness. He was 99 years previous.
Haynes’ intensive resume boasted expertise in most stylistic areas of jazz historical past. Called to play the music of New Orleans, swing, bebop, avant-garde, fusion, modal jazz, jazz rock, acid-jazz and extra, he responded with extraordinary talent and creativeness.
“You can really feel the essence of all these phases, live shows, dances, events and jam classes within the freedom of his rhythm and mastery of tempo,” wrote critic Stanley Crouch, himself a drummer, for the net journal Slate. “Haynes,” he added, “does not have arduous knowledge on how he performs. It is and has all the time been up to date.”
Haynes’ extraordinary longevity as an artist was underlined over the a long time every time he performed at New York City’s venerable Birdland jazz membership. In December 1949, he was the drummer of the group that opened the corridor: the Charlie Parker Quintet, with visitor singer Harry Belafonte.
His enjoying within the Nineteen Forties, when bebop was turning into the principle dialect of jazz, nonetheless sounds outstanding. Along with contemporaries comparable to Kenny Clarke, Max Roach, and Sid Catlett, Haynes helped rework the drums from their conventional timekeeping position right into a crisp assemblage of percussion and cymbal sounds designed to maintain the music alive and thriving.
The top quality of his work from that interval is obvious in recordings of classics comparable to Parker’s “Anthropology”, Miles Davis’ “Morpheus” and Bud Powell’s “Bouncing With Bud”. Often known as “Mr. Snap, Crackle” in homage to his full of life and articulate drumming type, he wrote a tune of the identical identify for his 1962 album, “Out of the Afternoon.”
What made Haynes totally different from lots of his contemporaries, nonetheless, was his constant musical receptivity and adaptableness. As new attitudes and kinds arrived – the avant-garde of the ’60s, the fusion of the ’70s and ’80s – he shortly grasped their strategies and integrated them into his persistent musical imaginative and prescient.
Haynes “has a manner of being throughout the musical second with a depth that’s really uncommon,” Metheny informed the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2003. “He has a listening sensitivity that enables him not solely to play superbly each time, however to create the musicians round him develop into the beneficiaries of his musical knowledge.
Roy Owen Haynes was born on March 13, 1925 in Roxbury, Massachusetts. His dad and mom, Gustavus and Edna Haynes, had moved to the realm from Barbados. Roy was the third of 4 kids, all boys. His older brother Douglas was a trumpeter who launched him to jazz. Another older brother, Vincent, was a photographer and soccer coach, and youthful brother Michael served a number of phrases within the Massachusetts legislature.
Haynes was nonetheless a young person when he made his skilled debut within the early Nineteen Forties. By mid-decade, he was enjoying with quite a lot of swing teams, in addition to the Luis Russell huge band, one in all his uncommon prolonged associations with a big ensemble.
By the late Nineteen Forties, he had develop into a member of the group of latest younger up-and-coming musicians related to bebop. In a notable sequence of live shows, he performed successively with Lester Young, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan and Thelonious Monk. In the Nineteen Fifties he was with George Shearing, Stan Getz, Kenny Burrell and Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. From 1961 to 1965, he changed Elvin Jones within the John Coltrane Quartet.
Early in his profession, Haynes was not as seen to the broader jazz viewers as Max Roach, his senior by simply over a 12 months. In half, this may be attributed to the truth that Haynes hardly ever led his personal teams, spending most of his time as a first-call sideman. He as soon as jokingly identified that he was rather more fascinated about ensuring his mortgage funds have been paid than in establishing himself as a pacesetter.
But Haynes has all the time been universally admired by different drummers.
“What Roy has as a musician is a really, very particular factor,” drummer Jack DeJohnette informed Smithsonian journal in 2003. “The manner he tunes his drums, the projection he will get from his drums, the best way he interacts with the musicians on stage: it is a uncommon mixture of avenue manners, excessive sophistication and soul.”
Despite his comparatively low visibility, Haynes’ complicated however all the time swinging type has had a major impression: first on in any other case extremely unique drummers comparable to Jones, DeJohnette and Tony Williams and in more moderen years on Jeff “Tain” Watts, Eric Harland, Matt Wilson and others.
Small and compact, all the time match, Haynes has balanced his refined drumming with an equally elegant wardrobe. Esquire journal, in 1960, listed him as one of many best-dressed males in America, together with Clark Gable, Fred Astaire and Cary Grant.
In his later years as a musician, Haynes ceaselessly led a altering group of musicians in a band often called Fountain of Youth. It was an acceptable title, on condition that the musicians he selected to work with have been typically three or 4 a long time youthful. But from his seemingly ageless perspective, when it got here to creating music, there have been no variations.
“When we get on the bandstand,” he informed the Times Union of Albany, New York in 2007, “all of us develop into one age, the identical age. It has nothing to do with how previous you’re or the place you are from, it is what you are able to do musically.
Haynes, who was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 1995, leaves behind his daughter and two sons: Graham, a jazz cornetist, and Craig, a drummer. His nephew Marcus Gilmore can also be a drummer. Haynes’ spouse, Jesse Lee Nevels Haynes, died in 1979.
Heckman, a longtime jazz critic for The Times, died in 2020. Writer Alexandra Del Rosario contributed to this report.
