The drummer Paul Motian doesn’t get on airplanes anymore. Once, in the mid-1990s, he took a three-week tour involving thirty-five flights. By 2003, he was booking himself with three different bands all over Europe and Japan. Soon after, he decided he was sick of traveling.
It’s not just long distances. “I don’t even go to New Jersey or Brooklyn anymore, man,” he said defiantly on one rainy October day in 2005, looking toward the Hudson River from the window of his Manhattan apartment.
He was seventy-four and had lived in the same spot for nearly forty years, most of that time alone. In his working life, Motian wanted one thing above all: to hear his own drum sound clearly. He found that in the windowless, wedge-shaped enclosure of the Village Vanguard, he can.
His is an unusual sound, which does not limit any part of the drum set to a particular role. Motian has two ride cymbals, one of which he has been playing since the 1950s; he gets a dark, nuanced sound from it. He uses no padding or muffling in his twenty-inch bass drum, and with it he can get a deep, loud, loose noise, almost a splat—a reminder that a bass drum is an instrument of emphasis, not just timekeeping. He uses nylon brushes, quieter than wire ones.
I have seen him play most of the way through “Body and Soul” with no bass drum at all—just one brush on a cymbal, ching-ching-a-ching, and the other, only at the end, lightly rustling on a snare drum, for color rather than rhythm. In general, he plays whatever moves into his imagination. Four of his beats could be marked by a few snare-drum hits, a few clenches of the high hat, and a couple of combinations; in the next bar, he might play small military rolls and one lone cymbal crash.
He works mostly with three of his own groups: his trio with the guitarist Bill Frisell and the saxophonist Joe Lovano, which has grown steadily more influential over two decades; the changeable Trio 2000 + 1, with the bassist Larry Grenadier and either Chris Potter or Bill McHenry on saxophone (the plus-one being the enigmatic Japanese pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, the singer Rebecca Martin, or others); and the group formerly known as the Electric Bebop Band, which became the Paul Motian Band in 2006, and works within an odd structure of three guitarists, two tenor saxophonists, bass, and drums.
Small and bald, with excellent posture—he runs a few miles in Central Park, which neighbors his apartment, nearly every day—Motian practices rapid, streetwise self-deprecation, cussing constantly. That, and a nail-gun laugh, give him the demeanor of an old-school hipster. He is the kind of person who wears sunglasses indoors after 11:00 p.m. and calls a room full of people, at one time, “man.” (As in “Hey, thanks for coming, man!”) But he can’t be reduced that easily. History has shaken him out as one of the greatest drummers in all of jazz—a select group that would include his own favorite drummers: Baby Dodds, Sid Catlett, Philly Joe Jones, Max Roach.
Motian’s playing moves beyond the styles particularly associated with any era of jazz. Spare and never facile, his constant run of improvisation can seem to get beyond thinking. At the moments of his highest musical abstraction, there is great sensitivity, and always the implication of a pulse. Jazz, mostly, is about testing the integrity of a song’s frame. Motian appears to believe that if you truly respect the frame, you can put anything inside it.
Original compositions tend to take up about half of his sets. An amateur pianist since his tenure as the drummer in Keith Jarrett’s quartet during the late 1960s and ’70s, he has written dozens of excellent melodies, flowing and terse. (The other half generally consists of tunes by jazz composers he admires, Thelonious Monk or Bud Powell or Charles Mingus, or popular standards.) He doesn’t overcompose; he likes hearing his music liberally interpreted and lets his band members do what they want.
Motian does not advance any great theories about his style. One day in the mid-1980s, after an uncountable number of different experiences playing with Motian, the pianist Paul Bley suddenly had a moment of clarity. “Oh, now I get it,” he told the drummer. “You play ideas.”
Do you? I asked Motian.
“I don’t know,” he answered, in his chalky voice. “When he said that, I thought, ‘Oh, maybe that’s what I do.’ ”
Another day, during a recording session in 2004, Hank Jones, the wise old pianist, took him aside. “I know your secret,” he whispered. Motian told this story with a baffled shrug. “I wish I knew what he meant,” he said. “Wow!”
He came up with a fantastically judicious list of music to listen to. He kept claiming not to have an aptitude for thinking about music analytically. Later it became clear that he knew exactly what he wanted to talk about.
Motian grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, hearing big bands downtown at the Metropolitan Theater and at Rhodes on the Pawtuxet, a dance space just outside the city. He entered the navy in 1950 during the Korean War, considering it a better option than being drafted into the army. That decision enabled him to attend the Navy School of Music in Washington, which he attended briefly and remembers as “a farce.”
He sailed around the Mediterranean for two and a half years in the admiral’s band of the Seventh Fleet and then was stationed in Brooklyn in the fall of 1953. Discharged a year later, he moved to Ninth Street in the East Village. His share of the rent was $12.50 a month. He collected unemployment, ate potato knishes, and played at jam sessions.
The first piece Motian wanted to hear connected to his days of playing marches in the navy. It is from Baby Dodds’s Talking and Drum Solos, one of several documentary records he made in the 1940s.* Dodds, the great New Orleans drummer of the 1920s and ’30s, worked with Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and Johnny Dodds, his brother; his career had a second wind in New York City during the 1940s Dixieland revival.
The ten-inch record, on which Dodds also discusses his history and technique, is a primer on different rhythms for different drums. Cueing up the record on his turntable, Motian started with Dodds’s solo version of the traditional New Orleans march tune “Maryland.” He singled it out not to talk about surface flash, technique, or speed; he just wanted to show how, while playing a march rhythm on the snare drum all the way through, Dodds delineates the verse from the bridge by pumping a bass drum on the bridge but not on the verses. That was all.
“I guess my point is that it makes a difference,” Motian said. “He’s in a different part of the song.”
What about that cymbal sound? I asked. The one tap at the end of each section. Why is it so soft? Was Dodds, who worked during the earliest days of jazz recording, just respecting the sensitivity of the microphones? “No, I don’t think so,” Motian replied. “You know, the drummers in those days—I don’t think they bashed the cymbals like they do now. It’s delicate. It’s a cymbal, man. It’s not a jackhammer.”
He took the needle off the record. “The first drum set I had was made during World War II. It didn’t even have metal. It had wooden rims. My drum sound was closer to that than it is to my sound now. I wasn’t that aware of sound. Not like I am now.”
In 1955 Motian met the pianist Bill Evans. A few years later Evans formed his own trio, with Motian and eventually Scott LaFaro on bass, which destabilized the pyramid structure of the normal piano trio, increasing the mobility of the bassist and drummer around the leader. Among their recordings were a few genuine twentieth-century landmarks, Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby. Motian loved the group, especially with LaFaro involved, and it was steady work; his diaries from 1962 show that he played twenty-five and a half weeks with Evans that year.
That period, the late ’50s and early ’60s, before he graduated to being a bandleader, was the busiest of his life. As he talked about it, he brought out one of his date books from that time, from the year 1958. The pages were crowded with musicians’ names, phone numbers, and the amount he earned for each club or studio job. A sideman’s well-kept date book is valuable to jazz. It tells everything that isn’t glorious enough to be wrongly understood: quickly disappearing bands, failed jazz clubs, average pay scales.
Two weeks with Lee Konitz: the book had it that Motian earned $125 for the first week, $135 for the second. “A lot,” he said, surprised. “Usually I remember a week’s pay was like, ninety or a hundred dollars.” A recording session with Warne Marsh and Paul Chambers, produced by Lennie Tristano: $34.64.
On another page, in Motian’s careful hand: “The Enchanted Room.” “I don’t know where that was, man,” he said. “Where was that?”
In 1958, he had played in Tony Scott’s band, with Sam Jones on bass, Jimmy Knepper on trombone, Kenny Burrell on guitar, at a club called the Black Pearl. “It was on the East Side, in the seventies,” Motian remembered. “Ten p.m. to four a.m.” Billie Holiday sang a few tunes. “I remember she had on a fur coat. I think she kept it on while she sang. Ha, ha! But you know, Tony Scott forced her to sing. She didn’t want to sing. Tony Scott said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Billie Holiday! Give her a hand!’ She’s shaking her head. But Tony Scott was just too insistent.”
In 1964 and ’65, he worked with the singer and pianist Mose Allison quite a bit. During a three-week gig at Birdland in January 1965, Allison’s trio played on a double bill with the John Coltrane Quartet. One of those nights, Motian sat in for Coltrane’s drummer, Elvin Jones, who couldn’t make it to the club. Coltrane liked him, and they talked after the show. “Where are you going next with Mose?” Coltrane asked. “Oh, Mose doesn’t travel with us,” Motian answered. “He hires his own bands wherever he goes. It’s easier for him to gig around that way.” “I wish I could do that,” Coltrane told him, to Motian’s great surprise. (Coltrane’s quartet, at the time, was the greatest small group in jazz.)
A few pages later: Too bad, I’ve got to work. “Look at that. I wanted a day off,” he said, commiserating with his old self. Anniversary. “Yeah, I was married. That was the first anniversary of our marriage. What does that say?” Tomorrow is my wife’s birthday. “Ha, ha!” He quieted. “She’s long gone.” It was Motian’s only marriage, and it ended in divorce; she died in 1980.
Motian played with many other bandleaders too in that period: Stan Getz, Lennie Tristano, Martial Solal, Zoot Sims, Eddie Costa, Johnny Griffin, and even with Tony Martin, the actor and romantic singer. For one week in Boston, in 1960, Motian got to play with Thelonious Monk. (Elvin Jones was supposed to be the drummer, but he went missing.)
Motian chose Monk’s version of “Carolina Moon,” an old waltz which had been commonly understood as cornpone. Monk rethought it when he recorded it in 1952. He plays the end of the waltz melody as a short piano introduction, and then bass and drums crash in, playing a speedy 6/4. In the middle of the tune the drummer, Max Roach, slows down to midtempo 6/4—a very unusual rhythm to swing through—and the soloists, Lou Donaldson, Kenny Dorham, and Lucky Thompson, continue to phrase in waltz time. Listening to it, he turned on like a lamp. He didn’t have much to say; instead, he clapped and counted all the way through, laughing.
Monk was an easy boss. He paid Motian two hundred dollars for the week, good wages, and didn’t demand much. One night he asked Motian to sing him his cymbal beat. He did, and Monk thought about it and sang a corrected version back to him, with a tiny bit more emphasis on the last stroke of the triplet.
Next was Big Sid Catlett, the great swing drummer. We heard “I Found a New Baby,” from 1944, on one of the few sessions that Catlett led during his life. It’s a drummer’s showpiece, with three different drum-solo breaks; it forms an essay on the ecstasy and flexibility of 4/4 swing. But the remarkable thing is that the action of the song is nearly all located on the snare drum.
The other remarkable thing, to Motian, is that Catlett plays variations on the melody with his drums. You can hear the song in his drum breaks. Catlett plays the first chorus-length solo (thirty-two bars) with brushes, and the second (thirty-two bars) and third (eight bars) with sticks; he keeps raising the stakes so that three-quarters of the last solo is one continuous, propulsive, clattering roll.
“That’s great, man,” Motian said, as soon as the track stopped. “It’s mostly snare drum—once in a while he hits a tom-tom. I don’t know about that tom-tom—it’s sort of a dead kind of sound. But that’s the way they’d use them in those days. The bass drum is almost exactly the kind of sound Max Roach had—that muffled sound. I mean, I don’t have anything against it. But it’s not what I would do. I want to play that again.” He cackled.
We heard it for a second time. “It sounds like it’s simple and easy,” he said, as it ended. “I don’t know why I keep saying this, but it’s like talking. The last eight that he played . . .” Orally he imitated the roll, then the light, dancing figure in the fourth bar. “Drummers that play now—I haven’t heard that many, but it seems like they want to beat the shit out of the drum. Full of technique. Who was it—Lester Young?—who said, ‘Yeah, man, that’s great. But what’s your story? What are you saying?’ ”
Max Roach used to live a few blocks away from Motian on Central Park West and has long been one of his idols. (Roach, who died in 2007, was seven years older.) When Motian joined the New York jazz scene, in 1955, Roach, who was the great drummer of bebop’s first wave, was already taking that music into a new territory with the Clifford Brown–Max Roach Quintet.
Motian saw the band play a lot. “I went to hear them once,” he said of that group, “and I think Sonny Rollins was on tenor. I was with this bass player I used to play with a lot, Al Cotton, and he said: ‘Look at Max. Watch: when he’s playing, he uses his whole body. He’s exercising when he’s playing. He’s moving around. He’s not just sitting there. It’s not just in the wrist, in the hands. It’s the whole body.’
“I’m talking about the midfifties, when I got turned on to that: the drums and me should be one thing, you know. It’s part of me. From head to fingernails to the end of my toes, man. The drums, it’s all me.”
He wanted to hear the Victor Young movie theme “Delilah,” a midtempo minor-key ballad, from the Brown-Roach band’s first album, recorded in 1954. It has incredible clarity; the definition of each section makes it shine like a hit pop song. “It’s so organized, man,” Motian said. “Arranged so beautiful. Simple, but great. Nice bass drum sound,” he said. It was that muffled sound, though, that he had just been referring to. “Well, it’s not what I would do, but it’s nice. Very nicely tuned, nice intervals, nice sound.”
Did he get to know Roach right away when he got to New York? “Not really. Except one time, when I was playing at the Half Note with Tony Scott, and he had to use my drums. At that time, it was like a white-pearl drum set made by a company called Leedy. And in those days, I used to tune the drums really taut, high-pitched. I had to make every stroke. Anyway, my drums were on the stage, but I was late for the gig, and Max Roach was there. He played the set for me, on my drums. When I came in, he said to me, ‘Man, your drums are really hard to play.’ The drums are easier to play when they’re loose. You can fake stuff.”
There’s a Max Roach solo in the middle of “Delilah,” for an entire chorus. Just as Baby Dodds did—and just as Sid Catlett did—Roach indicates the structure of the melody in his solo, changing his patterns to mark its divisions. I suggested that a thread was emerging here, kind of an unusual one. He smiled a little bit and raised one eyebrow and kept talking. “He plays different sections of a song, he points it out to you. No confusion at all. You know what I mean?”
Kenny Clarke and Max Roach were the first great drummers of bebop, lining out the pulse on the ride cymbal rather than the bass drum; suddenly, jazz drumming became higher pitched and more flexible. Motian idolized Clarke, as well. He saw Clarke play many times at the Café Bohemia in the West Village, before the elder drummer resettled in France in 1956; later, Motian got to know him in Paris in the early 1980s, a few years before Clarke died.
Clarke played with a Miles Davis group for the 1957 soundtrack to the Louis Malle film noir Ascenseur pour l’echafaud (Elevator to the Gallows), and Motian, only in recent years, has become partial to the record. “I was in a restaurant,” he said, “and they were playing this on the music system. Blew me away, right?” He knew it was Miles Davis, but he didn’t know what album it came from; he bought five different Miles Davis records before he realized it might be from the movie. We listened to “Motel,” a fast trio improvisation with trumpet, bass, and drums, based on the chords of “Sweet Georgia Brown.” Clarke plays with brushes on a snare drum, varying his patterns within the same rhythm all the way through. There’s not one cymbal crash, no bass drum. For a musician who likes to boil things down, it is justification.
“Just to get so much music and so much feeling and so much swing from the minimum amount of drums, man; that’s incredible,” Motian said. “Just that beat. You can’t get any better than that, I don’t think. There’s so much music there, just on a snare drum. It’s like a symphony to me.”
Set List
Baby Dodds, “Maryland” and “Tom Tom Workout,” from Talking and Drum Solos (Atavistic Unheard Music Series), recorded 1946–1954.
Thelonious Monk, “Carolina Moon,” from Genius of Modern Music, vol. 2 (Blue Note), recorded 1952.
Sid Catlett, “I Found a New Baby,” from Sid Catlett, 1944–46 (Classics), recorded 1944.
Clifford Brown and Max Roach, “Delilah,” from Clifford Brown and Max Roach (Verve), recorded 1954.
Miles Davis, “Motel,” from Ascenseur pour l’echafaud (Elevator to the Gallows), original soundtrack (Verve), recorded 1957.
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* This is a different Baby Dodds record from the one Roy Haynes talked about in the preceding chapter. That was a ten-inch record on American Music, called Baby Dodds no. 3.