Legendary Legacies: Roy Haynes and Wayne Shorter

Roy Haynes was a legend, not just as a drummer but in jazz as a whole. One of the last remaining greats from the jazz age, and an inspiration to myself and many others, not just because of how he played the drums, but because he was still playing shows well into his 90s! That is exactly what I want to be doing - beating the drums until the day before I die! Roy left us at the age of 99 in November 2024. He left us with a legacy of innovative music.

All great drummers, all good drummers, develop their own unique sound, one that is instantly recognisable. Roy Haynes style is more recognisable than most, so much so that he was nicknamed “Snap Crackle” because of the snappy way he played the snare drum and his crackling rhythmic vocabulary. This vocabulary is punctuated by unusual accents, creative polyrhythmic voicings, and explosive dynamics. When the music allowed for it, his playing often broke outside the conventions of standard bop drumming, even though he was able to play well within the borders too.

For me, it was Chick Corea’s “Now He Sings, Now He Sobs,” that introduced me to Roy Haynes’s drumming. Roy’s playing and interplaying is one of the elements that elevates Corea’s album to probably the greatest piano trio album of all time. It is a record I continually come back to for inspiration and instruction. That, and Pat Metheny’s “Question and Answer.” I also, enjoy a more subtle Roy behind Sarah Vaughan, not to mention Olivier Nelson’s fantastic “Blues and the Abstract Truth.”

All of this, though, is to introduce this rare video interview of Roy from 2018, when Roy was 92 years old. I am not sure Roy interviews very well or whether Jon Batiste is a good interviewer, but it is interesting nonetheless, revealing something of Roy’s career and the history of jazz - he even played with Louis Armstrong. And, Roy clearly still has a bristling energy on the drums.

 

 

I also wanted to share another Jon Batiste interview, this time with Wayne Shorter. Some saw Shorter as the greatest living jazz composer and improviser, before his death at 89 in 2023. He was definitely a legend. One of the greats. He too, was playing music well into his later years, touring a lot with his quartet that included Brian Blade. I was lucky enough to see them play a couple of times.

Wayne is a quirky character and he always drops some nuggets of wisdom; some deep insight into music and life that at first take seems to be too simple. He muses on burning with purpose and the life-changing moment when he realised music was his calling. Plus, his impressions of Miles Davis: “I am not what I do, I do what I am”…!?! And Charlie Parker’s advice on learning scales and then forgetting them. Very Zen.

 

 

The point of both these interviews, for me at least, is to learn something about the people behind the music, the experiences they had and more importantly, perhaps, their philosophies and insights into the life musical.

There is a lot to learn from these legends, not just from their music but from how they lived. It should inspire us, in some small way, to carry their legacy into the future.

Have fun. Make music.