Post by merg on May 19, 2004 10:31:30 GMT -5
Sign On San Diego
May 19, 2004
Associated Press
Elvin Ray Jones is shown in an Oct. 26, 1997, file photo while performing at the San Francisco Jazz Festival.
Elvin Jones, one of the most innovative and acclaimed drummers in the history of jazz, died yesterday in New York. He was 76.
Although ailing so badly in recent months that he sometimes required an oxygen tank on stage, Mr. Jones performed with his band as recently as late last month in the Bay Area. He did so, his wife told an audience at Yoshi's in Oakland on April 26, because it was his wish to spend his last moments doing what he loved best: drumming with his band.
"Elvin died of heart failure," Keiko Jones, his wife and manager, said yesterday from Manhattan.
During a career that began in the late 1940s, Mr. Jones recorded on nearly 500 albums and performed in concert with everyone from Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker to Miles Davis and Charles Mingus. He also established himself as a formidable band leader in his own right with his Jazz Machine, a hard-driving ensemble that helped shape such notable young artists as saxophonists Joshua Redman and Ravi Coltrane.
But Mr. Jones was best known as a charter member of the pioneering John Coltrane Quartet, a group that almost single-handedly reinvented modern jazz during the first half of the 1960s. The quartet, which also featured pianist McCoy Tyner and bassist Jimmy Garrison, set a standard with its controversial, envelope-shredding style on such landmark albums as 1964's "A Love Supreme."
It was while playing with Coltrane that Mr. Jones established what came to be known as his "circular" drumming style. With it, he produced a continuous wave of polyrhythmic flurries and textural nuances that were equal parts fire and finesse.
Like jazz drum greats Kenny Clarke and Max Roach before him, Mr. Jones de-emphasized the standard time-keeping role of jazz drumming. But he then went several steps beyond, constantly subdividing the beats he played and creating a free-flowing pulse that was a marvel of intricacy and invention. His stunning work earned him a broad array of admirers, including such top rock drummers as Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead and former San Diegan Matt Cameron of Pearl Jam.
"Elvin really tied together the essence of swing, bebop and free jazz," said saxophonist Joe Lovano, a winner of multiple Grammy Awards who toured and recorded with Mr. Jones.
"A lot of the current beats and things people play today are a direct result of things Elvin expressed in his drumming over the years," Lovano said. "His energy and his beautiful spirit came through in every beat he played, the joyous feeling of music and communication."
Those sentiments were echoed by veteran San Diego Symphony percussionist Jim Plank and by Daniel Atkinson, the jazz program coordinator for the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla.
"Elvin was one of the most important and original drum stylists in jazz, ever," said Atkinson, who is also UCSD Extension's director of arts, humanities and languages.
"He expanded the vocabulary of drums in jazz," said Plank, whose many jazz credits include working with Mr. Jones' older brother, the pianist Hank Jones.
"What Coltrane brought to the saxophone, Elvin brought to his instrument," Plank said. "He took both freedom and complexity to a new level in drumming, and his playing was like a river running – a never-ending succession of ideas and events. Only his body has died; his spirit didn't."
Elvin Ray Jones was born Sept. 9, 1927, in Pontiac, Mich. He was the youngest of 10 children in a musically rich family that, besides his brother Hank, still active at 85, included trumpeter/cornetist Thad, who died in 1986.
Mr. Jones was barely a teenager when he taught himself to play. The world of drumming – and jazz – would never be the same.