Drummers from Around the World Come to the Newport Jazz Festival

Three of the most influential percussionists of the 20th century were on hand for the Newport Jazz Festival last weekend, though only one of them was from the United States. And yet they all deserved a place at the three-day celebration of this art form invented by African-Americans a century ago. Jazz continues to attract virtuosos from around the globe—and those converts continue to inject their own culture into jazz.

Nigeria’s Tony Allen, for example, changed African music forever in the mid-’60s when he teamed up with Fela Kuti to invent afrobeat. Kuti wrote the songs and sang the politically charged lyrics, but it was Allen’s drumming that gave the sound its distinctive flavor. He found a way to combine the non-stop grooves of Lagos’s highlife dance music with the elastic syncopation of North American jazz to create a rippling, nuanced pulse that allowed songs to go on for 10, 15 minutes without ever growing tiresome.

Tony Allen photo by Adam KissickAllen has spent most of his career keeping the dance music in the foreground and the jazz in the background, but in recent years he has flipped that order. At Newport, the 78-year-old percussionist led a quintet with the same instrumentation (drums, bass, piano, trumpet and saxophone) as the Jazz Messengers led by his early hero, Art Blakey. The two American horn players played short phrases that seemed to float upon the river of multiple rhythms. Now, instead of jazz transforming Nigerian music, Nigerian music was transforming jazz.

Just like Allen and Kuti, Brooklyn drummer Andrew Cyrille teamed up with pianist Cecil Taylor in the mid-’60s to fashion a musical breakthrough: an even freer form of free jazz. Taylor was pursuing a music unrestrained by chord changes or bar lengths, and he needed a percussionist who could keep the forward momentum going without those signposts. He found the perfect man for the job in Cyrille, a Haitian-American who could keep the rhythmic stream flowing no matter where the pianist directed it.

When Cyrille, also 78, performed at Newport as part of Trio 3 with the John Coltrane’s bassist Reggie Workman and the World Saxophone Quartet’s Oliver Lake, he wore a white baseball cap and blue-and-orange windbreaker. During Lake’s “Newport Suite,” a composition commissioned for this festival, Cyrille started the piece with a strolling pattern of rim shots, before erupting in surprising bursts of fury. When Cyrille took a long, unaccompanied drum solo, he again used a gradual build and ever-shifting patterns to command attention. At the end, he announced, “That was a tribute to Art Blakey.”

Tabla player Zakir Hussain was already a virtuoso of India’s classical music—an accompanist to Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan—when he discovered American jazz and found it added a new flexibility and vocabulary to Mumbai’s ragas. Thus, it made sense that Hussain would be the South Asian drummer that England’s jazz-rock guitarist John McLaughlin recruited for his Indo-jazz group, Shakti. Soon Hussain was invited into projects with such Americans as Bela Fleck and the Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart.

At Newport, Hussain reunited with the trio of Sangam, joining reed player Charles Lloyd and kit drummer Eric Harland. Sitting cross-legged on a riser beneath a nest of dark curls and behind a semi-circle of small hand drums, Hussain used his individual fingers to tap out rippling rhythms punctuated by sharp slaps. Because phrases in Indian classical music can be as short as three beats or as long as 128 beats, each musical sentence can go on at great length, but Hussain keeps each unit full of variety and momentum so a Western listener’s patience is never tested.

In Sangam’s Newport set, Hussain engaged his two collaborators in a give and take that reflected the collective improvisation of North American jazz. But because a lot of what Hussain was giving had its sources in India, this musical conversation had a South Asian accent. The rippling succession of Hussain’s percussion notes are well matched to Lloyd’s rippling runs of flute notes and thus encouraged the latter to play more flute than he usually does in a set. It’s such a pretty-sounding instrument that it can easily become sentimental or even cloying. But Lloyd has a way of adding just enough tartness to his solos—often withholding expected resolutions—that he saves the instrument’s loveliness from itself.

All three of these percussionists—Allen, Cyrille and Hussain—emphasize the lower pitches of the drum family. Allen and Cyrille focus on the bass drum and tom toms and play far less cymbals than their colleagues. And Hussain sticks to the lower-register tablas and foregoes India’s castanets. Thus the three men avoid the high, airy splash of cymbals and other metal accessories that so often dominate jazz and concentrate of the booming bottom of the big skins. This lower range has echoes of the drum choirs of Western African villages, where the deepest roots of jazz lie.