Elvin Jones
Elvin Jones
I’ve had three spiritual experiences in my life. Two were visions, the third happened on a Friday night in a nightclub in downtown Seattle a decade ago.
I had read an ad about a drummer named Elvin Jones whose drum solos were supposedly like sonatas. I figured I liked drumming and I was at that age when going out to nightclubs was a big adventure. It was expensive—all jazz clubs are expensive now. When I showed up to the performance alone the people working the door assumed I was a drummer too, so they put me at the table right underneath Elvin’s drum set where all the other drummers were sitting. They were talking shop, mostly, except they were also talking about the shock of Tony Williams’ recent death—at that time I did not know who he was either, but I played along. I acted like I was sort of a beginning drummer and found that the other guys liked me immediately. They couldn’t show off to each other, but maybe they could show off to this new kid.
Elvin’s band got on stage and he talked about what an honor it was to play music in front of an audience. They performed and I thought ten minutes had passed. The set had lasted an hour. I was in shock. Here was this gigantic man, in his late forties or early fifties, who played music with more intensity than I had seen anyone do anything. He played a set with no amplification, and his mastery of volume seemed unreal to me. His playing could be deafeningly loud, but there was clearly something feminine about his performance that I cannot explain. Perhaps it was his use of mallets and brushes—which he used with the same physical power that he displayed while playing with regular drumsticks. The drum set literally shook when he played, the cymbal stands swayed back and forth, and at one point in the night he actually broke some of the hardware holding the kit together.
But what I remember most was his growl, or snarl, or chant. He vocalized through his whole performance, and it was audible over the sounds of the drums, horns and piano (all of the other instruments were amplified). I was terrified by him. His facial expressions, aside from their intensity, simply didn’t resemble facial expressions I’d ever seen before. After seeing him play I realized that I would be a drummer, despite the fact that I’d never played a drum kit before. I never decided to be a musician, I realized it would happen. I had to quit a career that would have made me quite wealthy, and I have never regretted it. There will always be opportunities to make money, but having the absurd belief that it is possible to become a genius drummer is a beautiful delusion that may only come once in a lifetime.
What happened during the performance that radically changed my life? Well, first, let me talk about what didn’t happen. The performance I saw was probably not even a particularly good performance by the standards of that band. And Elvin Jones was not in his late forties, he was in his late sixties when I first saw him. And he was not a giant—he was nearly a foot shorter than I am. I saw him play a dozen times over the years after that first performance….
Later
In what turned out to be the year before his death I decided to see Elvin Jones play again. He used to come to Seattle every year, but by the time he was 73 or 74 his playing had started to obviously decline, and I told myself that I did not want to see him again. But I went anyway.
He flickered onstage like a shadow. His vocalization was gone—he no longer had the energy. In fact, it’s possible that he no longer had the lung capacity—in his last days he played with an oxygen machine on stage next to him. Much of his power had left him. But for a few moments on one song, when he was using the brushes, he sounded like the man who, forty years previous, had been the greatest percussionist on the surface of the earth. I noticed certain things about his drumming that I had never noticed before because they were concealed by the bluster and intensity. His sense of rhythm was perfect—and I don’t mean metronomic. I mean his Sense of rhythm was perfect. His timing was immaculate. And that feminine grace that I had sensed but could not understand years earlier was now coming to the forefront of his playing. I noticed that the tones of his drums and cymbals were straightforwardly lovely.
After all these years of seeing him play, I had never met him. I had been avoiding contact with him that might expose him as a human being. But I wanted to shake his hand once—his grip was legendary. I went to the backstage area where he was resting in between sets. He shook my hand and I could tell his strength was almost gone. He was huddled in the corner of the room, with a heater right next to him, covered in a shawl. He really was small. I towered over him. He looked, suddenly, like an old grandmother in that shawl, trying to stay warm.
Someday I will be an old grandmother, wrapped in a shawl, trying to fight off the cold and the inevitable, waiting for the future to reappear.
Lauren J-L V,
2005