This year marks the centenary of the birth of Buddy Rich, a musician who was a key formative influence and to whom I owe my lifelong affinity with big band music.
The following is a piece I wrote for the American publication Not So Modern Drummer and is reproduced with permission of the copyright holder.
BUDDY RICH
Buddy Rich’s playing
is something that goes beyond subjective appraisal. Even to the man in the
street with no knowledge of drums or jazz music it was self evident that you
were witnessing greatness. This alone puts him in a very special category;
virtuosity which can communicate with a mass audience.
Let’s get one thing
clear right from the start. If you play the drums and were not even slightly
influenced by Buddy Rich there’s a strong possibility that you inadvertently
took up the wrong instrument. Don’t be too despondent though, as a great many
drummers are influenced by Buddy without even being particularly aware of it.
As with Krupa he influenced a whole generation of players who in turn went on
to inspire the next generation of players who in turn influence the players of
today. These musicians wrote the DNA code of drumming which is common to us
all, and don’t you forget it.
For me it all started
very early. My parents were in their early 30s when I was born in 1963, and
they had been raised on a musical diet of big bands, jazz, and popular singers
of the Sinatra school. Their tastes were fully formed well in advance of Rock
Around the Clock. They had no time for the new musical trend and found it
simplistic by comparison to what they were accustomed to. Don’t be fooled by
the history books; regardless of the fact that Elvis’s baby left him, all the
established musical styles continued much as they had done. They whole world
didn’t suddenly re-tune to rock and roll overnight despite what the
revisionists may want you to believe.
Having being born into
a family where the popular jazz of the mid 60s (Brubeck, Oscar Peterson and the
like) was very much at the top of the playlist was one of those lucky flukes of
circumstance that go on to shape your destiny, added which my father was a very
good semi professional drummer who had studied with a legendary Birmingham (UK)
based Rich disciple named Tommy Webster. Added to which my mother came from a
huge Irish family all of whom played instruments and sang, as is the tradition.
It was in early 1968
that the perfect storm broke.
Having taken the UK by
storm the previous year (measured by audience reaction rather than ticket sales
it has to be said) the Buddy Rich big band became staple listening fare for
musicians of my father’s generation, and in order to listen to his LPs in the
highest possible fidelity he spent £150 (a huge amount of money then) on a Bang
and Olufsen ‘Beogram 1500’ record player. I had just turned five and had never
heard anything quite like it. Speakers that stood as tall as I did at the time
exploding with music reproduced with an immediacy, power and clarity the like
of which I had not previously experienced. From that moment Buddy’s name was
added to my list of identifiable jazz drummers that already included Joe
Morello, Shelley Manne and Cozy Cole.
Seeing is Believing
The exact date is
unclear but the intensity of the moment is as powerful as it was roughly
forty-five years ago, when quite unexpectedly Buddy appeared on a talk show on
British television. It was called ‘Magpie’ and was broadcast on ITV, then the
UK’s only commercial network and was aimed at hip youngsters, (the squares were
watching ‘Blue Peter’ on BBC). No band, just some chat and a drum solo.
Ka-boom!!
I ran upstairs and
started woodshedding and haven’t stopped. There’s a profundity about those
formative influences when your knowledge is in its infancy, and you’re still so
youthfully idealistic to believe that you can achieve anything, and whilst I had
been listening to jazz drumming on records since my earliest days the impact of
the moving image closed the deal. Later that evening my mother, who had
witnessed my enthusiasm, commented to my father, “That’s it, he’s going to be a
drummer”, more with resignation than enthusiasm if I’m honest.
I invested a
disproportionately large percentage of my teenage years trying to come up with
ideas that resembled the kind of things I had heard Buddy play. At that point
not the greatest reader of notation and never having seen the merit of
transcribing I set about this Herculean task by listening only, as this was
just prior to the VHS/Betamax explosion, and all I had to check my work against
was fleeting glimpses of Buddy’s hands seeing him on television or playing live
a couple of times each year. Adolescence brought with it the chance to play big
band jazz for real and I was afforded the opportunity to put my hours of
practice before an audience. My fellow drummers all talked about Buddy, but
players of other instruments would talk about Mel Lewis, from which I concluded
that to occupy a hypothetical middle ground between their two contrasting
styles might be a good plan.
It was/is.
Many times I have
wondered, if Buddy had played a genre other then the big band jazz for which I
knew him at the time, would the impact have been quite as strong?
Much as I was
massively in awe John Bonham and particularly Ian Paice, the musical context of
their playing didn’t move me half as much, and whilst my playing influences and
wide ranging and almost incalculable, it is Buddy Rich and Buddy Rich alone to
whom I owe my lifelong affinity with big band music. Rock and pop got me
excited about the industry, but jazz, especially of the big band variety, made
me want to play.
It’s worth remembering
that the 70s produced a great deal of very good big band music. It was a time
before post-modernism and forward thinking leaders and arrangers were keeping
the music relevant. In addition to Buddy I soon discovered the then current incarnation
of Woody Herman’s Herd, Maynard Ferguson, Stan Kenton, Thad/Mel, Don Ellis,
Toshiko Akiyoshi, and a whole heap of top drawer American college bands from
North Texas State One O’Clock Lab Band on downwards, but it was the music of
the Buddy Rich Big band from 1966 onwards that provided the all-important
gateway. That’s not to say that I didn’t develop an appreciation of Rich’s
earlier work, but that would come later, and for all the excitement generated
by the 1950s Verve imprints (play along with Verve Jam Session Vol 7 some time
if you want to get a handle on swinging hard) for me it all begins with
Swinging New Big Band.
The opening title,
Bill Holman’s ‘Readymix’ is not so much an opening tune as a statement of
intent. There’s almost a feeling of anger in Holman’s counterpoint and you hear
a fresh, new orchestra with a point to prove. Buddy’s playing on this track in
particular is like an accelerant, and sets fire to everything it touches. I
love how he can sit on the front of the beat without speeding up (most of the
time), but it’s a skill that big band drummers should use judiciously, and is
perhaps best held in reserve for those days when you are meeting the band
payroll yourself: suffice to say it doesn’t lend itself to an evening of
melodies from the Glenn Miller era.
Now, let’s take a step
further back in time to another Rich-led big band record date, ‘This One’s For
Basie’. More than ten years prior to Swinging New Big Band but the 1966 Buddy
Rich is a wildly more contemporary and hip sounding drummer then a decade
previously. None of us can definitively say why (just like nobody knows quite
how his left hand technique worked-videos with titles like ‘Buddy Rich’s Left
Hand Technique Explained’ leave me somewhere between despairing and murderous;
how Buddy’s left hand or for that matter any part of his playing worked is not
the point, about which more later). The modernisation of style is self-evident.
Was it the ascendancy of the likes of Joe Morello and Sonny Payne that made him
dig deep into that vast reserve of talent to remind the young Turks of the
status quo? (More than once I’ve heard it said of the Rich vs Roach session
that Max finished in third place}. With nobody to answer these questions we
have no choice but to resort to conjecture, but a listen through recordings of
Buddy with Harry James between 1962 and 1966 clearly display a new stage in his
evolution. The sound changes (thank you Remo!) and the unrelenting virtuosity
of tracks like ‘Explosion’ (Chicago Opera House, October 2nd 1955)
remains, but seems somehow tempered with space, more considered, (‘Caravan’
August 1961) and becomes even more dazzling as a result. There’s a live
recording of King Porter Stomp recorded at Chicago’s Holiday Ballroom with the
James band that epitomises rhythmic hipness by today’s standards. What that
must have sounded like to the ears of 1964 we can only imagine.
Key to all this
though, is whatever modernisation, self-reinvention, or whatever you want to
call it took place, he’s still unmistakeably Buddy Rich. Only once briefly was
this not the case, the truly dreadful Buddy-Rich-Plays-Disco abomination ‘Speak
No Evil’ possibly BR’s sole significant lapse of integrity as a recording
artist. In fairness he was by no means alone. Jazz musicians were fair game for
record labels looking for a cash-in; records like this could be recorded
quickly and relatively inexpensively and who knows? Surprise chart success
couldn’t be entirely ruled out. In case you don’t know this recording and I’ve
piqued your curiosity I say one word to you. Avoid. Others may cite the MCA
record from the early 80s, but I actually rather like the chart of Never Can
Say Goodbye, even if Buddy’s tom sound is such that he could have probably got
a similar result from playing the empty cases.
Similarly, with only
slight and usually short-lived variations he stuck to the same, no-nonsense,
simple drum set layout. I remember in about 1980 some friends had been in New
York and came back to the UK having seen Buddy at the Bottom Line. We were told
that he was “using concert toms” and nightmarish images haunted my young mind
of a marine pearl Quadra Plus outfit replacing the much-loved ‘Krupa’
configuration (for that’s what it was). Having being previously alarmed by Roy
Haynes’s flirtation with concert toms could Buddy have gone down the same
pathway? Happily, not.
This brings me to
another point, and it’s an important one.
Rich’s virtuosity was
often a soft target for the self appointed jazz intelligentsia, the British
journalist (and sometime drummer) Richard Williams is amongst the worst
offenders, and many such chin strokers have wasted much copy bandying about a
relatively limited repertoire of clichéd, unfounded and shallow barbs, so allow
me if you will to take a moment to torpedo a handful of these right now.
‘Buddy Rich didn’t
invent anything he played, he merely took from others’.
The great
consolidator, Buddy took the best of everything that his late 1930s peer group
could do, rolled it all into one and did it better. His playing of that era is
full of all kinds of influences, from Krupa to Chick Webb, Tony Briglia to Jo
Jones. Philly Joe Jones did something similar a couple of decades later where
he tool all the best bits of bop’s
founding fathers and assimilated them in his own recognisable style. We all do
this; it’s called being influenced. Not only that, in later years there are a
number of things that appear in his playing that are his alone, and owe little
or nothing to what went before.
Groove playing.
How many times have I
heard drummers say;
“Buddy Rich couldn’t
play rock”.
My recollection is
that I never heard him play anything other than jazz with jazz musicians. If
there exist bootlegs of him jamming with Jimi Hendix, Moby Grape, or the 1910
Fruitgum Company for that matter I am happy to be enlightened. The self
proclaimed ‘too hip for Buddy Rich’ brigade of drummers of the time (I could
name names!) were quick to accept the received wisdom about this aspect of his
playing, a point of view which history has comprehensively disproved. Like much
of the jazz/rock crossover drumming of the late 60s there is a strong element
of improvisation in the time feels, an unrelenting straight beat would have
been way too vanilla for the context of the music. And as for some of those
breaks, just check out the call-and –answer shout chorus on ‘Love and Peace’. I
know those two bar phrases inside out and they still sound incredible.
Testimony to this is the amount of times Buddy’s breaks and fills have been
sampled by more contemporary artists.
The Jazz Waltz
Undoubtedly the Shaw
and Dorsey orchestras would have played in 3/4 for dancing but the jazz waltz
came into vogue from the late 50s. Having a far from encyclopaedic knowledge of
the Harry James repertoire I can’t be completely certain but it’s a fair bet
that Buddy probably didn’t play a jazz waltz until his late 40s. Jazz drummers
of the day, tended to play jazz waltzes like ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Someday
My Prince Will Come’ with space and a lightness of touch. Contrast this with
Buddy’s four-limbed turbocharged approach. It’s like harmony on the drumset
rather than time with a few left hand comments. You can hear it in development
on ‘Willowcrest’ (that eight bar solo would change beyond recognition on later
versions) and it was fully formed by the time of recording ‘Preach and Teach’, 'Goodbye Yesterday' and ‘Ode to Billie Joe’
just a year later.
Right until the end
there was ongoing development. The last time I saw him play on his final UK
tour in late 1986 he came onstage and rather than setting the tempo for the
opener on the hi hat, he began to play the ride cymbal instead. Then with his
left hand he unleashed continuous eighth notes with syncopated accents. It was
breathtaking and he had proved the point yet again before anyone else on stage
had even played a note.
Imitate then innovate
Over the years I’ve
seen a number of players who had Buddy’s style down cold, which is without
doubt an extraordinary achievement however you look at it. For myself I’ve
always had enough trouble sorting out my own solos never mind playing anyone
else’s, but listening to Buddy and other early influences instilled in me the
habit of reverse engineering, whereby I would strip back an idea I liked in
order to get to the root of it, and then look at all sorts of different ways in
which the idea could be extrapolated. I remember mixing a Buddy idea with one
of Gary Chaffee’s concepts years and years ago and I still haven’t worn it out.
Listen first, the listen some more and then learn how to learn. That’s the
point.
I’ve never tired of
those great big band records of the 60s, 70s and 80s considering that some of
that music has been part of my life for nearly half a century. There isn’t much
music that many people listened to through their childhood and adolescence that
is still so cool. After he passed I didn’t listen for a very long time until
the Pacific Jazz reissues appeared with all the missing tracks that we had
known about for years, but that all changed about a decade ago.
Having a long
established track record as a big band leader myself there had often been
requests to play ‘hit’ tunes associated with other bands, and Buddy’s
repertoire was always very close to the top of that list. Always I had resisted
as my modus operandi as leader was to showcase new musicians playing and
recording work by new or little-known writers.
That all changed in
2006 when I got calls to appear on a couple of drum shows, the condition being
that the content would include some of ‘Buddy’s Greatest Hits’. So well
received were these performances that Tony Bennett’s former manager Derek
Boulton offered me a UK tour headlining in theatres if I was prepared to do
something similar. How long do you think I took to consider that decision?
For my own amusement I
ditched the double bass drum pedal and secondary ride cymbal and got hold of a
period correct set of Slingerlands for that cool, classic look. I don’t
consider myself a ‘heritage’ player and big band accounts for probably only
about fifteen percent of my work as a freelance professional but to have been
gifted with opportunities like these helped me to connect with all the reasons
I wanted to learn to play in the first place, something which every player
should always keep in mind.
In conclusion a
personal reminiscence
Years ago the BBC used
to run an annual big band competition, and as well as winning bands there were
prizes awarded to individual players, so it was quite a coup aged just 16 to be
awarded with the Jack Parnell prize for best drummer. This was quite
prestigious and I was featured in the newspapers, on television and radio. A
few months after all this palaver Buddy’s band were playing in the UK and I
went to the concert in Nottingham. The promoter knew me because of my recent
glancing brush with success and arranged for me to meet Buddy prior to the
concert. To my embarrassment the concert promoter proceeded to regale Buddy
with full details of my recent achievements and alleged prowess. Buddy very
graciously congratulated me, and asked if I would like to sit in (!)
I knew he had hung one
or two over confident young players out to dry so thinking quickly I responded
thus;
“Oh no, these
people have come to listen to you, they don’t want to hear me”.
He gave me that
look, wished me luck in the industry and then went out and played with a
casual, almost nonchalant virtuosity, which no one who ever saw him at the peak
of his powers will ever forget.
Thank you Buddy Rich.
If it hadn’t have been for you, I wouldn’t be me.
