Give the Jazz Drummers Their Due

The most exciting jazz reissue of the year has been Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy, a tape rescued from the forgotten bowels of the New York Public Library. It captures these jazz giants performing at a Greenwich Village basement club during their all-too-brief, six-month collaboration.

Much of the attention lavished on the two-CD reissue has gone—and deservedly so—to the two reed players who were finding new ways to remake compositions through freewheeling improvisation. But the discs also capture drummer Elvin Jones at his peak, refashioning the possibilities of rhythm as thoroughly as Coltrane and Dolphy were reinventing harmony.

It’s a welcome reminder that drummers can do a lot more than just keep time. Just as horn players can leave the original melody implied as they improvise variations, so can drummers leave the underlying pulse implied as they play alternate patterns against the unstated groove. And it’s that distance between the implicit and the explicit that allows percussionists to bring their creativity and personality to the music.

There are a lot more opportunities to explore these possibilities in jazz than in pop music. It’s no surprise that one of the most impressive bandleaders in jazz today is a drummer: Allison Miller. Her latest album, River in Our Veins, finds her leading a sextet with five of her frequent collaborators: pianist Carmen Staaf, violinist Jenny Scheinman, clarinetist Ben Goldberg, bassist Todd Sickafoose and trumpeter Jason Palmer.

Miller’s dozen compositions are built from the bottom up, with a strong pulse that governs the music even when it’s left unstated. The rhythm section of Miller, Staaf and Sickafoose plays around the edges of that groove, revealing the many ways it can be syncopated, multiplied and punctuated. And it’s out of those ever-shifting rhythms that the horn and fiddle lines take shape.

The album includes a tune named “Potomac,” the river near Miller’s childhood home in Maryland, and another called “Hudson,” the river near her current home in New York. There’s also the powerful influence of the Mississippi as it flows through New Orleans and the push-and-pull carnival dancing in that city’s streets. An echo of that city’s birthing of jazz can be heard in the clarinet/trumpet give-and-take—and even more so when the five guest tap-dancers are added to the sextet. The clickety-clack of their metal-studded soles reinforces the difference between machine beats and human-body beats—less perfect perhaps but more compelling.

Brian Blade was the drummer in the Wayne Shorter Quartet from 2000 to this past spring, when one of the century’s top jazz bands ended with its leader’s death. Blade (whose older brother Brady Blade has been the drummer for Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller and Steve Earle) was the perfect percussionist for Shorter, for both men favored understatement to hyperbole, suggestion to aggression.

This year Blade appeared on Joshua Redman’s new album, Where We Are, but more impressive is the less heralded album Perspective, credited to the democratic trio of Blade, Scott Colley and Benjamin Koppel. The first sounds you hear are Blade’s quiet, shuffling dialogue between his snare and tom drums. It soon becomes a three-way discussion with Colley’s upright bass and Koppel’s alto sax, evolving the way the best conversations do.

Koppel wrote five of the nine tunes, and he has a Shorter-like gift for melodies that insinuate their way into our attention without ever insisting. But the record is mixed so that all three instruments share the foreground equally. Blade doesn’t have to keep time, because time is so clearly understood, and he elaborates the tunes’ potential as much as the horn.

The cover of Johnathan Blake’s new solo album, Passage, pictures the drummer in the lap of his father John Blake, a longtime violinist for McCoy Tyner. The son has grown up to be a much-in-demand drummer for the likes of Bill Frisell, Kenny Barron and Lonnie Smith. This project opens with an unaccompanied drum piece that is less interested in showing off his chops than in charming the listener with its musicality. That finesse continues when he’s joined by such young jazz stars as saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins and vibraphonist Joel Ross.

Blake wrote half of the 10 tunes, but he also includes two from bassist Dezron Douglas, one by pianist David Virelles, one by his drum hero Ralph Peterson, and one by the leader’s father. The younger Blake uses the entire kit, giving as much weight to the toms as to the usual snare and hi-hat. His rumbling movement across drums and cymbals provides a persistent but never repeating momentum to this tuneful music.

Rudy Royston—best known for his work with Bill Frisell, Dave Douglas and Rudresh Mahanthappa—has reconvened his own band, Flatbed Buggy, for their first album in five years, Day. The similarities between a jazz combo and a classical chamber group are often noted, and Royston underlines that commonality by working with and by employing mallets nearly as often as sticks in his own drumming.

The sound of the bulbous-ended mallets hitting drumheads produces a warmer, more diffuse sound than the sharp, focused impact of a stick. That warmth blends well with the sustained sonorities of cellist Hank Roberts, clarinetist John Ellis and accordionist Gary Versace. The result is a delightful example of what used to be called “Third Stream Music,” that no man’s land between jazz and classical.

It wouldn’t work as well as it does if it weren’t for the surprising melodies on Royston’s nine original compositions and the unexpected displacement of the beats in the leader’s drumming. Whether it’s the bouncy energy of the opening track, “Morning,” or the lulling dreaminess of “It’s Time To Sleep,” this album is a showcase for all the things a percussionist can do besides keeping time.