Photo of Roy Haynes by Peter Zimmerman

The jazz drummer Roy Haynes died on Nov. 12, 2024 at the age of 99. He had been a member of Local 802 in the 1980’s. As a tribute, below is an exclusive profile of Roy Haynes written by jazz writer Peter Zimmerman; it was written circa 2019 but this is the first time it’s being published. Peter Zimmerman has previously contributed to Allegro with tributes and profiles of Clark Terry, Yusef Lateef, Hugh Masekela, Cedar Walton, Bobby Porcelli and Buster Williams. Some of his interviews appear in his book “The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight” (University Press of Mississippi, spring 2021). He can be reached at podunkpete@gmail.com. Peter tells us that Roy’s son Craig and daughter Leslie approved this profile below of their father. Some of these stories are being told for the first time. We hope you enjoy this tribute…

“I could swing. I never tell secrets, but that’s one of them. If you can swing, you can play a lot of the other shit. If you can’t, then you can’t play with a lot of other people  —  and make it jump. Think about that.” – Roy Haynes

Born in the Roxbury section of Boston on March 13, 1925, the drummer Roy Haynes is a typical Pisces, who are known for being imaginative, adaptable, and good at “going with the flow” (Pisces is a water sign). He is the third of four sons born to Barbadian immigrants Gustavus and Edna. The Hayneses were married in St. John at the historic Mount Tabor Moravian Church in St. John’s. They emigrated to the States in the early 1920s, a couple of years before Roy came into this world. Thus, like Sonny Rollins, he is of Afro-Caribbean descent.

Back in the 1930’s when Roy was growing up, his neighborhood was racially and ethnically diverse. Today, Roxbury is 57 percent African-American, “the heart of black culture in Boston.” The Haynes house on Haskins Street has long since been razed and “redeveloped.” In fact, Haskins Street no longer exists.

By all appearances, Roy Owen Haynes was just like any other boy growing up in the 1930s. He built and raced go-carts and belonged to the Boy Scouts, all-Black Troop 6, his first experience with segregation. His parents forced him to take violin lessons, which he stuck with for all of a year.

But there was one difference between Roy and his classmates. For as long as he can remember, Haynes has been “thinking rhythms,” in his words. By his own admission, he was a “nervous” kid who would bang on everything in sight, including his mother’s good dishes, walls, and mirrors  —  anything, he says, that “felt good or sounded slick.” Roy also entertained his school classmates by drumming on his desk, which once landed him in the principal’s office. (When his mother was called in, Edna Haynes defended her son and gave the principal a piece of her mind.)

Due to his diminutive stature, 5’3” tall in cowboy boots, they called him “The Kid,” the first of many future nicknames; he later became “Little Roy Haynes” to the singer Sarah Vaughan.

Gus thought he would make a good jockey, but Roy soon had other ideas…

In late 1940, something happened that changed the course of his life forever after. While listening to the radio, the Count Basie Orchestra’s “The World Is Mad” came wafting over the airwaves. At that time, the band featured the drummer Jonathan “Papa Jo” Jones, who played in the “swing” style and was Roy’s first and biggest influence. “Papa Jo’s solo on that tune was really out of sight,” says Roy. “After that, I knew right away what I wanted to do.” (Roy would later describe his own style as “hard swing” rather than “hard bop,” as some critics still label him.)

The Count, Papa Jo, the bassist Walter “Big ‘Un” Page, and guitarist Freddie Green were known as “The All-American Rhythm Section,” one of the greatest ever. The legendary tenor saxophonist and clarinetist Lester Young also happened to be in the Basie band at that recording session. Just seven years later, Young would ask Roy to join his small group.

I was on a mission. I had contacted Roy’s agent multiple times about the possibility of meeting with Roy, but for whatever reason, he never got back to me.

So I decided to “ambush” Haynes as an interviewer.

I noticed that he was performing at Sculler’s, a club in Allston, Massachusetts, just down the road from Roxbury, Roy’s hometown. One morning, I drove the three hours from upstate New York to Boston, having purchased advance tickets to both sets. If I arrived early enough, I might be able to score an interview.

The club’s publicist, Alexandra Yabrov, was nice enough to let me into the club early, at soundcheck, where I found Roy tightly tuning his tom-toms and lubricating his drum and cymbal stands. He looked rather vexed that the stuffing was coming out of the “throne,” the three-legged padded stool that a drummer sits on, in this case perhaps supplied by the club.

Roy’s son Craig was also in the house. Also a professional drummer, he was named after Billie Holiday, one of Roy’s innumerable former bandmates. I walked over and introduced myself, told him that I was working on a book about jazz and that I’d love to talk with Roy. I showed him a list of 17 questions that I had prepared and asked him if he would look it over and tell me whether there were any that I should delete. He crossed off four of them.

I asked Craig what he had to say about his world-famous father. “He’s not just my father,” he said, “he’s a living legend, and he’s playing more than most teenagers.” So, does Roy know how hip he is? “He’s too hip for his own good,” Craig said, smiling. “But you know, he helped invent the word ‘hip.’ I mean, he was there when it started.”

Roy and Jesse Lee Nevels married in 1958. They had three children: Craig, Graham, a cornetist and trumpeter (he appears on Roy’s 1998 CD Praise), and Leslie, a legal secretary who is married to a saxophonist, Randy Gilmore; their son Marcus, now in his early thirties, is also a formidable drummer. Music is a family affair. (Lee passed in 1979.)

Clothes make the man, and Roy has a reputation for being a natty dresser. Not wanting to look like a schlump, I wore a Navy blue blazer, khakis, white Oxford shirt and tie. En route to Beantown, I stopped at Klem’s department store and picked up an inexpensive pair of black shoes. It was a decidedly square outfit, but I did have one thing working in my sartorial favor: I was wearing a beautiful scarf hand woven by my friend Pam in Arizona. In fact, Craig liked it so much that he asked where he could get one.

By contrast, Roy was wearing vintage purple velveteen pants, a bright orange shirt with extra wide cuffs, and an olive paisley jacket. His shoes, which looked like a hybrid of platform shoes, with two-inch heels, and cowboy boots, pointed at the toes. My shoes were $59. His must have cost at least a cool thousand.

Soundcheck was now wrapping up, so I approached the stage to introduce myself.

I had brought Roy a sandalwood bowl that my old friend Nora had purchased in Mozambique, with a mbila player carved on top. The mbila is a xylophone-like instrument with wooden keys and struck with mallets. It’s made from the wood of the sneezewort tree, hollowed-out gourds, bush orange fruit, and a little beeswax.

Roy and Craig joked that it would make a great stash box.

Although I had owned the bowl for years, given Roy’s Afro-Caribbean heritage, I thought he would appreciate it.

A shameless bribe, but it worked: Roy agreed to let me buy him a drink.

Approaching the bar, Roy and I must have looked like a bit like Mutt and Jeff, because I’m nearly a foot and a half taller than him! Thankfully, bar stools are a great equalizer. I bought him a Bacardi and tonic with a wedge of lime, and I had a pint of pale ale.

Out of deference to his age (he is 33 years older than me), I addressed him as “Mr. Haynes,” but he insisted that I call him Roy. When I took out my trusty microcassette recorder and folded-up list of questions from my coat pocket, Roy waved them off.

“Let’s just rap,” he said.

Since our exchange wasn’t recorded, I have supplemented my own recollections of our conversation by poring over many other interviews and articles, some dating to the early 1950s, and by listening to quite a few of Roy’s 600 recordings.

Roy reminds me a bit of Proteus, the Greek god of the sea, ever-changing and unpredictable, who evaded capture by assuming different forms, including various animals, a tree, and especially water, which is impossible to grasp.

Nasar Abadey, who leads the D.C.-based band SUPERNOVA® and teaches jazz percussion at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, became friends with Haynes in the Seventies. Conversing with Roy, he says, is like a “sparring match.”

“It’s his way of helping you to understand how to show respect for him, because he could be doing something better than what’s going on at the moment, especially at his age, or at any age for that matter.” Abadey added, “Roy will challenge you with reality. He wants people to understand what they are saying and what it might sound like coming back at you. Can you really defend yourself on the reality of what you just said or asked? Do you really know what that sounded like?”

Or as Roy himself has been quoted as saying, “Too many people out there have their questions, and they get their answers, but they can’t get beyond that. You know, I’m good when I’m performing late in the evening, when I’m into my instrument. Then I might have answers. If they have good ears and a good imagination, they can get it while I’m serving it, and I don’t have to talk about it.”

Getting the chance to talk with Roy was a surreal experience. I’ve been a big fan since high school, having purchased his Out of the Afternoon more than 40 years ago. Recorded in 1962 and considered one of his masterpieces, the album features the ever-iconoclastic Roland Kirk, who later became known as Rahsaan. Down through the years, I have also worn out my copies of two other early-Sixties LPs that feature Roy: McCoy Tyner’s Reaching Fourth (a trio with Henry Grimes), and Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth, featuring an all-star cast of Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard, Bill Evans, and Paul Chambers.

Roy must have sensed how excited I was, because right at the beginning he leaned over, cupped his hand to my ear, and whispered, “Hush now…”

Not missing a beat, I immediately replied, “Don’t explain,” the first four words to a famous Billie Holiday song that Roy undoubtedly knows by heart — he knows a lot of lyrics, plus he happens to have backed Lady Day at her final concert, back in 1959.

Roy reacted by screwing up his face, looking me up and down and smiling. Evidently I had passed muster. Le Roi, as I have nicknamed him — which is French for “The King” — ended up giving me a whole hour of his time, face to face, uninterrupted.

It was in 1941, at the age of 16, that Roy picked up his first pair of drumsticks. He took a few lessons from a man on his block named Herbert Wright, who had once toured with James Reese Europe, and who taught him the double stroke roll. Whenever he had saved up a little money, he’d walk over to Rayburn’s music store on Huntington Avenue and buy one drum or cymbal at a time.

In 1942, with his patchwork drum kit, Haynes began gigging around Boston with various local bandleaders (Frankie Newton, Sabby Lewis, Tom Brown, and Hillary Rose), sat in with New Orleans legends Sidney Bechet, Arvell Shaw, and Bunk Johnson, and even tried his hand at Dixieland, with George Brunies, at Storyville and the Harvard Jazz Club. He would also check out whomever came through town, including Fletcher Henderson’s big band, featuring a young drummer named Art Blakey, then in his early twenties.

In 1943, Haynes decided to take the plunge. He dropped out of Roxbury Memorial High (his favorite classes were “music, art, and recess”), joined the union, and became a professional musician. During the next year, he studied percussion briefly at the Boston Conservatory, but found that his teacher, Karl Ludwig, was unable to teach him anything about playing jazz. This training, and those lessons from Herbie Wright, are the extent of Roy’s formal musical education.

In the summer of 1945, while he was working in a dance band on Martha’s Vineyard, Haynes got his first big break. It came in the form of a special-delivery letter from the Panamanian pianist Luis Russell, offering him a job with his big band, at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, no less, along with a one-way ticket to the Big Apple. Roy took the job and moved to New York where he has lived ever since.

After spending a month on Russell’s couch, he took a room with a fireplace for five bucks a month in a brownstone on Sugar Hill. His neighbors included W.C. Handy, Duke Ellington, and Cab Calloway. Roy was in heaven.

“I learned one thing from Luis,” Roy recalled. “He said, ‘If you ever get lost, lose the meter, or lose your place,’ he told me to roll. If you roll, there’s no bap-bap-bap-bap-bap. There’s no time. That’s how I learned to play free, because you don’t give no definite beat. You just let it flow.”

Roy stayed with Luis Russell’s big band for two years, during which time he also found time to tour the South for a week with Louis Armstrong’s big band, jam with Gene “Jug” Ammons in Chicago, and work briefly with Nat “King” Cole at the Earle Theatre in Philly. He was beginning to get a name for himself.

In 1947, Haynes joined Lester “Pres” Young for two years; the sextet recorded a few dozen tracks live at the Royal Roost in 1948 and 1949. Pres, who bestowed nicknames on everybody, called Roy “the Royal of Haynes,” “Lady Haynes,” or just plain “Lady” (he called everyone Lady). Billie Holiday, in turn, is the one who came up with Pres, which is short for President  —  she admired FDR  —  while Pres dubbed her “Lady Day.”

In 1949, after Young went on tour with Jazz at the Philharmonic, Roy joined Charlie Parker’s small group, a gig that lasted on and off for three years. “This little guy’s got all the moves,” Bird once said of Roy, citing him as his favorite drummer. By then, a new music that critics dubbed bebop had taken the Big Apple by storm. Haynes went into the studio with the pianist Bud Powell’s Modernists, featuring a 19-year-old Sonny Rollins, Sonny’s first recording session. Also in ‘49, Roy formed his first, albeit short-lived, group as leader, with Kenny Dorham on trumpet. Unfortunately, no recordings survive, but the two did cut 13 tracks together, along with Bird, in June and July of the following year.

When I asked Roy about polyrhythms, he told me that his career began so long ago, they hadn’t even been invented yet.

Polyrhythms involve the simultaneous use of two or more contrasting rhythms, usually by one player. Some of the polyrhythms used in jazz are based on earlier African forms of music, brought to the United States by way of Cuba and other Caribbean islands.

Mistakenly assuming that Roy was pulling my leg, I sent a Facebook message to my childhood friend Clint De Ganon about Roy’s comment. Clint is a professional drummer who has worked with everyone from opera singer Renée Fleming to hard rocker Edgar Winter. “I’m sure that’s not a joke,” Clint wrote me back. “Roy was being humorous about his age, but what he said is actually a truism. Polyrhythms didn’t come into play until later on, although of course they existed.”

Besides their use in jazz, polyrhythms also turn up in the music of Romantic and 20th-century classical composers (Charles Griffes, Grieg, and Rachmaninoff) and all types of rock music (progressive, metal, industrial, and arena), as well as by artists as disparate as Philip Glass, the Talking Heads, Aaliyah, and even Britney Spears!

***

By the time he reached his 25th birthday, on March 13, 1950, Haynes had already worked with some of the greatest musicians in jazz history, including such legends as Don Byas, Wardell Gray, J.J. Johnson, Ray Brown, Junior Mance, Stan Getz, Fats Navarro, Milt Jackson, and Miles Davis. The “fresh-faced Boston boy” (as one newspaper article described him) was beginning to make a name for himself.

Roy began hanging out on 52nd Street, which Variety once dubbed “America’s Montmartre,” where many clubs had sprouted up, such as the Three Deuces, the Orchid Room, the Royal Roost, and dozens of others, almost all of which have long since gone belly-up, except for the old Birdland, which is now a strip joint. “That was a beautiful time,” Roy recalls. “I couldn’t wait to go to work at night… I was lucky to have been a part of that period. We dressed, hung out with the fine ladies, and played the music!”

After gigs, he would head uptown to Minton’s Playhouse, where after-hours jam sessions featured the likes of Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and Kenny Clarke, all masters of their respective instruments. He befriended the bandleader Machito’s timbales player Ubaldo Nieto and steeped himself in Afro-Cuban jazz, a nod to his Barbadian roots. “I always liked the sound of timbales, the approach. Sometimes when I played my solos, I’d approach the traps with that same effect, like when I hit rim shots.” (Traps are a drum kit without toms. Rim shots involve hitting the head and rim of the drum at the same time).

One summer night in 1950, downtown at the Cafe Society, where Roy, Charlie Parker, and Kenny Dorham were playing opposite Art Tatum, Lady Day dropped by and they all did a set together  —  Tatum and Bird, the most virtuosic pianist and saxophonist of all time! Ray Bolger, aka the Scarecrow, was in the audience and got up on stage and did a soft shoe. (Today, at 92 years young, Roy still tap dances at any given performance.)

In the early Fifties, he reconnected with Miles on two of the trumpeter’s earliest albums, called Conception (with Stan Getz and Lee Konitz) and Blue Period (with Sonny Rollins), and, along with Bird and Bud, appeared on Dizzy’s 1951 rendition of “A Night in Tunisia.” Roy also played on Bird with Strings, recorded at the Apollo Theatre, Carnegie Hall, and the Pershing Hotel in Chicago, between 1950 and 1952.

In 1952, when Duke Ellington’s drummer, Louis Bellson, was leaving the band, the Duke offered Roy the job, but Roy turned him down. He was busy working with Bird at the time, and Bird was the hottest ticket in town. Over the ensuing years, Roy and Duke went on to become fast friends, getting together from time to time to break bread and compare musical notes at a Harlem eatery called Ma Frazier’s. At Billy Strayhorn’s memorial in 1967, after Roy played a solo version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (known as the Black National Anthem), he looked out on the audience. Everyone was giving him a standing ovation, including Duke, which Haynes counts as one of the greatest thrills of his life.

Between 1949 and 1952, he played and recorded with Ella Fitzgerald at various venues around town, from Bop City and the Royal Roost, to the Palladium and Carnegie Hall. The band’s bassist, Ray Brown, was married to “The First Lady of Song” at the time.

In 1953, he joined the singer Sarah Vaughan’s band and ended up touring with “The Divine One” for five years. It was during this time that he made his first trip overseas and appeared on the cover of a French magazine. Roy describes Vaughan as “the Charlie Parker of vocalists.” After hearing her sing, Frank Sinatra, known as “The Voice,” quipped that she made him feel like “cutting my wrists with a dull razor.” Sarah introduced Roy to his first hangover (on Gordon’s gin) at an after-hours club in Philly.

In 1954, they collaborated on Sarah Vaughan and Clifford Brown, featuring Paul Quinichette, who was known as the Vice President, a nod to Lester. A brilliant trumpeter, Brown died two years later in a car accident, along with Richie Powell (Bud’s brother) and his wife Nancy. “Brownie” was only 25.

That October, Roy made his first two records as leader, a 10-inch called Roy Haynes Modern Group (sans apostrophe) and Busman’s Holiday, featuring Ed Gregory, later known as Sahib Shihab.

In 1957, Sonny Rollins recorded six albums as leader, going through eight drummers in the process, including Papa Jo, Philly Joe, and Elvin Jones, Max Roach, and Art Blakey, as well as Shelly Manne and Kenny Dennis. For his part, Roy turns up on The Sound of Sonny, along with the pianist Sonny Clark. The following year, he backed Rollins’ big band on Brass & Trio. To this day, nearly 60 years later, Roy often covers Sonny’s exciting “Grand Street” during one of his sets.

In the summer of 1958, the year he left Sassy, Roy added John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk to his burgeoning résumé, recording Live at the Five Spot. Month earlier, he had appeared at the same club with the same band, only with Johnny Griffin instead of Coltrane; this band was captured on Thelonious in Action. (Griffin saddled Roy with “Hagnes,” yet another one of his nicknames.) The same year, Roy joined forces with fellow drummers Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones, and percussionist Ray Barretto on Blakey’s Drums Around the Corner, which inexplicably was released for the first time in 1999.

In 1958 and ‘59, Roy also made more than a dozen other records, teaming up with Phineas Newborn, Jr., and Paul Chambers on We Three, and accompanying everyone from Sonny Stitt, Lee Konitz, and Kenny Burrell, to George Shearing and the jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby. At the tail end of the decade, he jammed with “free jazz” pioneer Ornette Coleman at the Five Spot. Haynes worked with many other jazz greats in the Fifties, including Coleman Hawkins, Horace Silver, Oscar Pettiford, Randy Weston, John Lewis, Lennie Tristano, and Buckshot La Funke, alias Cannonball Adderley.

On April, 20, 1959, at George Wein’s Storyville in Boston, Roy backed Billie Holiday at what turned out to be her final concert. The trio was made up of her regular pianist Wal Waldron with “Champ” Jones on bass, and Mal Waldron, and Lady Day sang some of her signature sad songs, such as “Lover, Come Back To Me” and her own “Billie’s Blues (I Love My Man).” Even though Holiday was seriously ill, her performance was “mesmerizing,” and she played five sets. The next day, reviewer John McClellan proposed that “finger-snapping hipsters be required to attend classes taught by Billie.” Why? “They just don’t swing. Billie Holiday does.” Another critic wrote, “Other singers sing about emotion  —  Billie actually projects the emotion itself.”

Lester Young, her soulmate, had died a month before the concert, and Billie died three months later, at age 44. It is said that Billie sang like Lester played his sax, and vice versa.

With the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, a very busy Roy Haynes picked up where he left off. In the 1960 alone, he turns up on recordings by Jimmy Forrest, Tommy Flanagan, Toots Thielemans, Dr. Billy Taylor, the singers Etta Jones and Betty Roché, and Eric Dolphy (on Outward Bound, his first LP as leader). On The Great Kai & J.J., Roy, Paul Chambers, and Bill Evans back trombonists Kai Winding and J.J. Johnson, considered by some the greatest slide trombonist of ‘em all.

In 1961, Roy propelled a big band session called Trane Whistle, fronted by Count Basie’s tenor saxophonist Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis. Several years later, Haynes joined Duke’s band members Johnny Hodges, Ray Nance, and Paul Gonsalves, on the latter’s Tell It the Way It Is!

Between 1963 and 1965, he worked again with Coltrane, sporadically subbing for Elvin Jones, Trane’s regular drummer; Roy is featured on Selflessness and Dear Old Stockholm. Haynes has described Coltrane as a musician who possessed his own internal drummer, a man of few words who gave his band members very few instructions at recording sessions. Playing with Coltrane was “a beautiful nightmare,” a spiritual experience that reminded him of what it was like growing up in his mother’s Pentecostal Church.

Roy remembers one particular week he spent splitting his time between gigs with Coltrane and Stan Getz. Coltrane passed away in July 1967 at age 40.

During the Sixties, Roy performed with both Wayne Shorter and Joe Henderson at Slug’s in the East Village, and he collaborated with many other horn players as well, among them Ted Curson, Don Cherry, Frank Wess, Steve Lacy, and Archie Shepp; he also joined forces with Herbie Hancock on the altoist Jackie McLean’s It’s Time!

Between 1960 and 1964, he led four record dates: Just Us, a trio with Richard Wyands and Eddie De Haas; Cracklin’, with Texas tenor Booker Ervin, and two albums featuring Frank Strozier, named Cymbalism and People. He recorded the latter soon after Funny Girl opened on Broadway.

In 1968, along with the bassist Miroslav Vitous, Roy appeared on Chick Corea’s seminal Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, reprised 13 years later with the group’s Trio Music, consisting of seven “free improvisations” and seven compositions by Monk. Between 1966 and ‘69, Roy recorded three albums with the vibraphonist Gary Burton. Over the ensuing decades, Haynes would continue to work steadily with Corea and Burton.

Also in the late Sixties, Roy contributed to The DeJohnette Complex, a session led by fellow drummer Jack DeJohnette (who is 17 years younger than Roy), accompanied the singers Jimmy Witherspoon and Jackie Paris, laid down a Latin beat on Willis “Gator” Jackson’s Bossa Nova Plus, and tried his hand at “free-bop” on Clifford Jordan’s In the World, which features Kenny Dorham, his old pal from the halcyon days on 52nd Street.

In 1970, now in his mid-forties, Roy embarked upon the second half of his life and career, both literally and figuratively. Like the fellow drummer and bandleader Art Blakey with his Jazz Messengers, Roy began recruiting much younger musicians for a new group that he called The Hip Ensemble. The first incarnation consisted of the tenor player George Adams and trumpeter Hannibal Marvin Peterson, later renamed Hannibal Lokumbe. Freshly arrived in New York from his native Smithville, Texas, the 22-year-old Peterson was only half Roy’s age, just as in the late Forties, Roy had been only half Lester Young’s age. A Georgia native, Adams was fully 15 years younger than Haynes.

During the Seventies, Roy cut three albums with Adams and Peterson and also worked with other greenhorns, including saxophonists Ricardo Strobert and Bill Saxton, trumpeter John Mosely, pianists Stanley Cowell and Kenny Barron, and guitarist Marcus Fiorillo.

Meanwhile, between gigs with the Ensemble, Haynes continued working with his relative contemporaries, recording trio sessions with the pianists Duke Jordan and Tommy Flanagan, and also joined forces with some of his seniors, including Benny Carter and Stéphane Grappelli (both of whom were old enough to be his father), Mary Lou Williams (on A Grand Night for Swinging), Hank Jones (Ain’t Misbehavin’), and Dave Brubeck (All the Things We Are).

The beginning of the Seventies represented the end of an era. Pres, Billie, Bird, Bud and Trane had split the scene, as had many of Roy’s former bandmates, a short list including such jazz icons as Satchmo, Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, Paul Gonsalves, Eric Dolphy, Paul Chambers, and Sonny Clark. Within a few years, they were joined by Tadd Dameron, Oliver Nelson, Booker Ervin, Wynton Kelly, and Kenny Dorham. One of his idols, Duke Ellington, passed in ‘74.

Meanwhile, a new form of music had burst onto the scene. Known rather hazily as jazz fusion or simply “fusion,” it involved the hybridization of jazz with other genres, especially rock, as well as R&B, soul, funk, folk, world, and various Latin forms. To give just a few examples of this meshing, the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Carlos Santana and Blood, Sweat & Tears covered “A Love Supreme” and “God Bless the Child,” respectively; Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke” was his paean to Ellington and other jazz greats; and Joni Mitchell collaborated with Mingus, Jaco Pastorius, and Tony Williams.

To the dismay of “mainstream” jazz purists, acoustic instruments, specifically piano, bass, and guitar, were supplanted by their electric counterparts. Even Bill Evans dabbled with the Fender Rhodes.

Some of Roy’s friends spearheaded this new movement. The decade kicked off with the genre-busting Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, the trumpeter’s first gold record, followed in 1973 by Herbie Hancock’s super-funky Head Hunters. Milt Jackson’s Olinga, Freddie Hubbard’s Red Clay, and Ron Carter’s Yellow & Green were released on Creed Taylor’s CTI label, as well as wildly popular records by Return to Forever and Weather Report, groups led by Wayne Shorter and Chick Corea, respectively. Ever looking forward, Roy would undoubtedly have been keeping an eye on his “competition,” the bumper crop of young drummers who played on these sessions, including Jack DeJohnette, Harvey Mason, Lenny White, Billy Cobham, and Alex Acuña.

In 1976, a 22-year-old guitarist named Pat Metheny released his debut album. Roy’s future bandmate was born in 1954, the year Roy released his first LP. At last count, Metheny has won 20 Grammys. He shared one of them with Roy and Chick on Gary Burton’s Like Minds, voted Best Jazz Instrumental Performance in 2000.

At the same time, musicians across the musical spectrum were writing songs about jazz, as well as covering earlier jazz compositions. Santana and fellow guitarist John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra recorded Coltrane’s “Love Supreme” and “Naima.” Steely Dan played a note-for-note version of Ellington’s 1927 “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” and Andre Previn took a turn at Duke’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing” (If It Ain’t Got That Swing), while Stevie Wonder’s chart-topping “Sir Duke” was a paean to the Maestro and other jazz legends. On Frank Zappa’s “Be-bop Tango (Of the Old Jazzmen’s Church),” on which George Duke played keyboards, the rocker scatted Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser.” Joe Zawinul’s “Birdland” paid homage to the New York nightclub where Roy Haynes and Bird once held court.

***

In 1978, Roy participated in a decidedly acoustic session co-led by the trumpeters Ted Curson and Dizzy Reece. Its repertoire consisting of equal parts bop and ballads, Blowin’ Away is a beaut of an album, especially Reece’s bluesy solo on Victor Young’s oft-covered “Stella by Starlight.”

At around this time, Roy released quite a different kind of album that reflected the changing musical times. I was all of 19 years old — and Roy 52 — when I picked up a copy of his Thank You Thank You, described as “smooth 70s electric jazz.” Compared to Blowin’ Away and all those great albums on Impulse!, I confess that it took me a while to warm up to it.

Some of the tracks are admirably old-school, including a duet with percussionist Kenneth Nash on “Processional” and a monster solo on his own “Quiet Fire.” On the other hand, George Cable’s electric piano on the title track sounded a little cheesy to me, and John Klemmer’s honking saxophone somewhat abrasive. Was Roy “selling out,” as others such as George Benson, Donald Byrd, and even Miles, had been accused of doing? After giving the record a few dozen spins, however, I came to appreciate that Roy was simply trying to create something different, rather than merely resting on his mainstream laurels.

One reviewer singled out Roy’s own “Bullfight” as the album’s best cut, which sounded “a little like Ravel’s ‘Boléro’ and Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain but even more erotic, with an insistent building beat,” while another bemoaned the “out-of-place John McLaughlin-esque electric guitar spots.” All in all, the record was well-received: “A nice mix of ballads, jump tunes, and solo efforts”… “distinguished by vaguely exotic sounds”… “not stuck in one limiting bag”… “one of the best pieces of contemporary jazz on record in a long while.”

Roy would probably most appreciate what his hometown paper, Roxbury’s Bay State Banner, had to say: “It all swings nicely.”

In the early Eighties, Roy formed a new quartet consisting of Craig Handy, Darrell Grant, and the bassist Ed Howard, who ended up staying with Roy for 20 years. He led only one record date in this decade, called True or False, a tune he co-wrote with the bassist Steve Swallow. The band consisted of Howard, Ralph Moore, and Dave Kikowski, who also became a longtime band member. All three, a critic wrote, “are experienced practitioners of the art of the slow burn.”

Roy toured extensively with Chick Corea, appearing on three of his albums, as well as recording with Hampton Hawes, Warne Marsh, Toshiyuki Honda, and the French violinist Michal Urbaniak. In 1982, Roy, Chick, and Miroslav performed a medley at the White House and were then joined by Dizzy, Stan Getz, and Itzhak Perlman on a version of “Summertime.” Ronald Reagan was in Latin America at the time so Nancy hosted the event. Roy looked as sharp as ever in a crisp white suit, with a gold handkerchief.

In 1983, he appeared on Freddie Hubbard’s Sweet Return, one of Freddie’s best albums, also featuring Joanne Brackeen, Lew Tabackin, and Eddie Gómez.

In 1985, Roy mourned the loss of Papa Jo, his idol. Many other drum legends also passed in the Eighties, including Philly Joe, Klook, Cozy Cole, J.C. Heard, and Sonny Greer and Sam Woodyard, both of whom worked with Duke, as well as Buddy Rich, Dannie Richmond, Walter “Baby Sweets” Perkins, and Frank Butler. Since then, we’ve lost almost all of the great innovators who were on the scene back in the day: the two Arts (Blakey and Taylor), Max, J.C., and Elvin. Now that Candido has retired, Roy is the last man swinging.

At a Paris concert in July 1989, Roy participated in an all-out blowing session featuring the compositions of Charlie Parker with an all-star front line of Jackie McLean, Johnny Griffin, and the trumpeter Don Sickler, assisted by the bop pianist Duke Jordan and bassist Ron Carter. The resulting double-CD, Birdology, is outstanding.

In December 1989, to round out the decade, he and Dave Holland appeared on Pat Metheny’s Questions and Answers. The repertoire runs the gamut from “Old Folks,” a Thirties evergreen, to Ornette Coleman’s “Law Years.” The album and subsequent tour “re-jumpstarted” Haynes’ career, according to allmusic.com. (Roy was 64).

In the late Fifties, a reporter from the Citizen Call of Nanuet, N.Y., observed that Roy was “sorely underrated,” even though he was “playing the most intimate, musically satisfying drums of anyone around.” The headline read: “Roy Haynes, the ‘Uncrowned’ King.”

In 1960, Esquire named him one of America’s Best-Dressed Men, along with his buddy Miles Davis. Both were also sports-car enthusiasts and used to race across Central Park.

In 1962, by which time he had already played with Pres, Bird, and Trane, and Ella, Sarah, and Billie, Haynes told Leroy Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) that although he’d been on the New York scene for 17 years, he still hadn’t won a single poll from a major music magazine, not even a “new star” award.

“I’ve been around longer than most of the old stars,” he told Jones. “People are always saying I’m underrated  —  like it’s something to be proud of!” He recalled that when he was with Stan Getz, someone came up to him and asked for an autograph, saying, “Will you sign this so I can have all your names here?”

Four years later, in 1966, a writer from Downbeat summed it up best: “He’s recorded with practically everybody. He never wins a poll.”

In 1981, when he was 56, he remembers that a fan came over to him and told him that Roy Haynes is a household name. “And I know I’m not,” says Roy, “but maybe in his house I am. And that’s a beautiful feeling, to know somewhere in the world that you are.”

By the mid-Eighties, Roy still felt that he hadn’t gotten the respect he deserved, but an avalanche of awards and accolades would soon follow. Indeed, like the title of his 1992 CD, When It Haynes, It Pours.

In 1987, he won a Grammy for his work on McCoy Tyner’s Blues for Coltrane, voted Best Instrumental Album.

In 1993, he was voted into the Hall of Fame at University of Pittsburgh’s International Academy of Jazz. Pitt is ranked as one of the nation’s top jazz schools.

In 1994, he picked up Denmark’s prestigious International Jazzpar Prize (and approximately $24,000, enough for a few new drums and cymbals at Rayburn’s). On the plane ride home, the man behind him was perusing a newspaper, Roy recalls, “and he is reading names like Margaret Thatcher and Hemingway and he comes to Boston drummer Roy Haynes, describing how I had won this prize. That was a thrill, very big-thrill.”

The same year, “I also got an award at the Smithsonian. Benny Carter, myself, and a local guitarist who was in a wheelchair, dying of cancer. The three of us got this particular award. But nobody knew anything about it.”

In 1995, he was awarded the Jazz Master Fellowship by the National Endowment of the Arts, the nation’s top honor for jazz musicians, comparable to the Jazz Hall of Fame (which doesn’t exist). This honor was all the more special because Papa Jo had won it in 1985. In 1996, he received the prestigious French Chevalier des l’Ordres Artes et des Lettres and won Best Jazz Drummer in the Downbeat Critics’ Poll.

In 1998 and 1999, Modern Drummer magazine and the Percussive Arts Society voted him into their respective Halls of Fame.

In 1999, the album that he made with Sassy and Brownie in 1954 was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. The original album has been reissued with eight additional tracks as Sarah Vaughan: Complete Recordings with Clifford Brown.

Roy was inducted into the Downbeat Hall of Fame in 2004. Billboard called him “one of the seven wonders of modern jazz,” while failing to identify the other six. On March 13, 2005, Roy’s 80th birthday, Boston celebrated Roy Haynes Day; on that day, however, Roy happened to be in San Francisco, performing at the Masonic Hall.

In 2008, Dreyfus Records released A Life in Time: The Roy Haynes Story (a 3-CD, 1 DVD anthology of his whole career), which The New Yorker named one of the year’s Best Box Sets. In 2009, Haynes became Harvard University’s Jazz Master in Residence, not too shabby for someone who dropped out of Roxbury Memorial High, just down the road. The Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation named Roy a Jazz Living Legacy, and the Jazz Journalist Association voted him Drummer of the Year.

In 2011, he won the Grammy’s Lifetime Achievement Award. The other recipients included Dolly Parton, the Juilliard String Quartet, and the Ramones. It would have made for an interesting jam session.

***

When Ed Howard introduced me to Roy, the first thing he did was to ask me what I played. When I told him that I was an ex-trumpeter, he looked through me like I wasn’t there, until he found out about my interest and experience in martial arts. He became interested in me again at that point and we discussed fighting and fighters for a little while. Roy was good friends with one of my Taekwondo mentors, who had been one of his drumming proteges in the early Fifties. I later had the great pleasure of bringing this mentor to a show at the Vanguard sometime during the Nineties and reunited them after many decades. “Georgie from Jersey!” is what Roy exclaimed when he saw him. In between sets I got to hang out at the bar and drink with my friend, George “Red” Wolcott, Roy, [the drummers] Grady Tate and Max Roach….

 —  Mark Lesly

Between 1990 and 1998, Roy cut five records. In addition to Kikoski and Howard, he brought in some young guns such as David Sanchez, Kenny Garrett, Craig Handy, Nicholas Payton, and Christian McBride.

Recorded in 1990, The Island wasn’t released until 2007. A blend of swing, fusion, funk, and even a little reggae, this recording features Roy’s son Graham on cornet as well as George Adams, formerly of the Hip Ensemble. Roy plays some beautifully understated brushes on the title track, a ballad composed by the Brazilian songwriters Ivan Lins and Vitor Martins. (Roy’s old running buddy Sarah Vaughan covered the song on her 1982 CD, Crazy and Mixed Up.)

In 1994, Haynes performed with hoary veterans like Clark Terry, Illinois Jacquet, and Benny Carter (18 years older than Roy) at a concert in Oakland’s Paramount Theatre. The same year, he recorded My Shining Hour with Tomas Franck, Thomas Clausen, and bass phenom Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, and also appeared on Kenny Barron and Charlie Haden’s Wanton Spirit.

In 1995, Roy was interviewed  —  at great length, 78 pages’ worth  —  by Anthony Brown for the Smithsonian’s Jazz Oral History Project, and Marian McPartland featured him on Piano Jazz, her show on National Public Radio.

In ‘96, he accompanied the pianist Michel Petrucciani and Stéphane Grappelli on their CD, Flamingo.

On Roy’s Te Vou!, released in 1997, he and Metheny pull off an almost impossibly fast-tempo version of Monk’s “Trinkle Tinkle,” a song with an extremely difficult melody, “replete with sixteenth-note runs and angular phrasing” (monkzone.com).

The same year, Haynes informed JazzTimes that he was coming out of “semi-retirement” because he had been getting so much positive press. Now in his seventies, he started booking fewer gigs, eating more carefully, and hanging out less. He went on a tour sponsored by the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest National Jazz Network, and hooked up again with Chick Corea on Remembering Bud Powell, also with Wallace Roney and Joshua Redman… who is 44 years younger than Roy!

The bassist John Patitucci met Roy through their mutual friend Chick Corea in the late Eighties at a concert in Nagoya, Japan. At the time, Roy was touring with Milt Jackson, Hank Jones, and the Czech bassist George Mraz.. In 1996, the first time that John worked with Roy, Patitucci felt slightly intimidated at the prospect of working with what he calls “the whole encyclopedia of jazz in one human being.” However, Roy soon made him feel right at home in what John calls “an equal voice trio.” He added that having a chance to play with Roy was “a huge honor and validation for me.”

In the Fall of 1999, Roy went into the studio with Patitucci and Panama-born pianist Danilo Pérez, who were a combined 72 years younger than their boss. On The Roy Haynes Trio, described as a “neo-bop” session, the group covered half a dozen compositions written by his old friends Bud, Miles, Duke, Sarah, Monk, and Chick. Patitucci is an Ambassador at Berklee’s Global Jazz Institute and is also involved with Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead program.

Patitucci calls Roy “Papa Haynes.” In fact, the pianist Dorothy Donegan observed that as Roy got older, he even began to look like his idol, “Papa Jo.”

Depending on whether he’s working at a club, concert, or recording session, Roy has traditionally used a simple five-piece drum kit or an expanded set-up with a selection of pitched tom-toms, temple blocks, percussion instruments, and a gong. These days, he leans towards a leaner kit. He plays Yamaha drums (snare, bass, two tom-toms, and two floor toms), Zildjian cymbals (hi-hat, crash, thin crash, crash ride, and flat-top ride), and his own Roy Haynes Artist Series wood tip sticks, also made by Zildjian. He is also known for his brush work, put to good effect on his collaboration with Sonny Rollins on “Some Enchanted Evening,” which was written in 1949, the same year that Roy and Sonny recorded “Bouncing with Bud.” Sometimes he’ll play a solo piece on mallets. (For the record, Roy is five years older than Sonny.)

He is an innovator especially in his approach to the hi-hat and flat ride cymbals, his meticulous attention to tuning his drums melodically, his way of drawing the sound out of his drums, and his use of a high, tight, and shallow snare, which resulted in his most famous nickname, “Snap Crackle,” purportedly coined by the bassist Al McKibbon and George Shearing. Roy rarely plays the hi-hat on beats 2 and 4 or the traditional jazz pattern on his ride.

The story goes that after recording Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, Chick liked the way Roy played his flat ride (with no bell) so much that he made off with it, and still owns it today… with Roy’s blessing, of course.

“Roy Haynes has always been an identifiable drummer from his very first recordings in the 1940s,” says the drummer Adam Nussbaum, who has worked with Roy’s friends Stan Getz and Gary Burton. “He has the unique ability to put his ideas wherever he wants them, whenever he wants to, in order to serve the music. He hears incredibly quickly and has amazing reactive skills. This has allowed him to always sound modern.”

At the beginning of the Third Millennium, now in his 75th year, Roy formed his ironically named Fountain of Youth Band, still going strong today, as of 2017. As with the Hip Ensemble, he staffed it with younger generations of up-and-coming musicians.

In 2001, Haynes put out Birds of a Feather: A Tribute to Charlie Parker, joined by Dave Holland, Roy Hargrove, Dave Kikowski, and Kenny Garrett. Two years later, in 2003, Roy played at the 50th anniversary of the Massey Hall concert, along with Herbie, Kenny Garrett, Dave Holland, and the trumpeter Roy Hargrove. The original one, dubbed “the greatest jazz concert ever” by Toronto’s Globe and Mail, featured Dizzy, Bird, Bud, and Mingus, except Max Roach, not Haynes, was the drummer.

In the recording studio, the Fountain of Youth seemed to be playing revolving chairs. Recorded live at Birdland in 2002, Fountain of Youth featured the pianist Martin Bejerano, saxophonist Marcus Strickland, and bassist John Sullivan. On 2003’s Love Letters, it was the guitarist John Scofield, Joshua Redman, Holland or Christian McBride on bass, and on piano, either Kikowski or Roy’s old friend Kenny Barron. On 2006’s Whereas, Sullivan remained on bass but Jaleel Shaw took Strickland’s place and Robert Rodriguez subbed Bejerano’s place.

When I asked Roy how he finds his band mates, he raised his hands over his head, and slowly fluttered his fingers down to the ground, like falling snowflakes; in other words, they come from on high. But I believe he was putting me on, as he is sometimes wont to do with writers and critics. The fact is, all three members of his current long-standing quartet  —  Bejerano, bassist David Wong, and alto and soprano saxophonist Shaw  —  graduated from some of the country’s top music schools.

For example, Shaw earned a dual degree in Music Education and Performance at Berklee, which is where he first met Haynes in the late 1990s, and then earned his Master’s from the Manhattan School of Music. A Philadelphian, he also leads his own group as well as working in the bands of drummers Nate Smith and Jaimeo Brown. New Yorker David Wong graduated from the Juilliard School with a degree in classical music; he has studied with Ron Carter, John Clayton, and the New York Philharmonic’s Orin O’Brien, and when he’s not busy with the Fountain of Youth, tours with the Heath Brothers (Jazz Master Jimmy Heath recently turned 91, while “Tootie” is only in his early Eighties).

Roy’s pianist since 2001, Martin Bejerano received a full scholarship to Florida State, where he studied classical and jazz piano, composition, and arranging. He earned his Master’s from the University of Miami  —  also a full scholarship  —  and now heads the jazz piano department at the university’s Frost School of Music. Shaw and Bejerano have both released three CDs as leaders, while Wong has appeared on recordings by Benny Green, Jeb Patton, and Roberta Gambarini.

Now in his forties, Bejerano was a green 27 years old when he first joined the Fountain of Youth in 2000. At the time, Marcus Strickland was all of 22, and John Sullivan also in his twenties. At 76, Roy was the same age as the three of his bandmates put together!

When I asked Martin what it’s like working with such a legend, he observed that “Roy never treats me, or anyone, as a lesser musician or anything but a band equal, despite our being so much younger and less experienced. This attitude translates to the stage, where he is all about making great music. He always gives us room to stretch and go places.”

In 2011, Haynes released his most recent CD, called Roy-Alty. His only recording this decade, it features his current band with special guests Corea and Hargrove.

These days, Roy continues to tour, although his schedule is considerably less hectic than in years past. He still lives on Long Island, as he has for decades, but sometimes takes some time off and kicks back with friends in Las Vegas, where he has purchased a second house, with a pool.

After a 2010 concert at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theatre, one reviewer described how he “used silences and moderation and self-imposed restrictions to make their sneaked upbeats pop more vividly… a mesmerizing, affirmative, flexible, and incredibly artful performance.” At the 2011 London Jazz Festival, he “showed off a lifetime’s mastery of delayed beats, fiendish cross-rhythms, and melodic construction.” The same year, he appeared on David Letterman.

In March 2014, a week shy of his 89th birthday, and a year after my conversation with him, he returned to Scullers with the Fountain of Youth and special guests Roy Hargrove and conga player Roberto Quintero. A reviewer, Nelson Brill, reported that “Haynes always seemed to be thinking ahead to create a wholeness, an intelligible melodic direction, to whatever he plays.” Hargrove took a gorgeous solo on a rendition of “‘Round Midnight” that, towards the end, segued into “I Can’t Get Started,” as Dizzy G had done 52 years earlier, at Newport in 1963, the same festival where Roy had performed with Coltrane.

In 2015, at the Blues Alley in D.C., Roy showed an “open mind and inquisitive spirit,” balancing a “propulsive thrust with a keen sense of dynamics and a playful wit,” reported the Washington Post, whose critic also noted that Haynes has managed to adapt to hard bop, avant-garde, and “forward-thinking, contemporary jazz.”

Above all, Roy listens. As Stan Getz once remarked, “Roy has the biggest ears this side of heaven.”

Much more than just a drummer, Roy’s an entertainer, a performer, who tells stories, soliloquizes, sing a little, and even dances around the stage (“still spry,” reports the Boston Globe). While playing, he is known for making constant eye contact with his band members and encouraging them to solo, although they never know when! For instance, at the Scullers concert, he asked Jaleel Shaw to play “Star Eyes” unaccompanied, apparently with no advanced notice. Roy recorded this song, which is associated with Bird, on his 1994 Homecoming CD.

Sometimes he’ll get up from his throne between songs and rap and joke around. On this particular evening, he told a hushed audience that “every moment is precious,” repeating for emphasis, “Every moment is… precious.” During another speech between songs, he sang the refrain of Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler,” with the famous line, “You gotta know when to hold / know when to fold….” It’s a song about playing the hand you’re dealt and dealing with what life hands you, as told by a card shark dying on a train, who advises a stranger that the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.

To Roy, “The Gambler” has another layer of meaning. In 2007, he told Jazziz magazine that “sometimes I take chances. One time I told a guy who was interviewing me, ‘I’m a gambler.’ He thought I meant I wanted to go to Las Vegas and gamble. But I’ll go overboard. When you talk about playing free, that’s part of the beginning of playing free, not playing the hi-hat on 2 and 4 and letting that stuff be loose. You don’t have to play anything in 7/8 or 6/8. It’s all there anyhow.”

That night, the repertoire consisted of three standards from the Forties, three Monk compositions, and four “jazz standards” each, by Bird, Sonny, Duke, and Chick. Roy kicked off one set by scatting Miles’ solo on “Autumn Leaves,” while Martin Bejerano played a stride-tinged version of Monk’s “I Mean You.” The band also launched into “Trinkle Tinkle,” which turns up on Roy’s Fountain of Youth (2004) and on Chick and Roy’s Live at Montreux (1981). Haynes played one piece unaccompanied, a melodic and at times thundering version of his own composition, “Shades of Senegal.”

I had positioned myself all the way stage right, so I could take pictures, and fiddle around with my laptop, camera, notebook, and pens on the small round table. I wanted to be able to do research during the set without bothering anyone. But this turned out to be a costly mistake. As is his wont, Roy delights in poking fun at any unsuspecting writer who might be in the house. At one point, when I was looking up which song the band was playing, he stepped down from the bandstand, walked out into the audience, and then circled behind me. The next thing I knew, the audience was cracking up, and when I looked up to see why, I realized that the joke was on me! I never did find out what went down, but I suspect Roy must have said something along the lines of, “Get a load of this guy, he comes to hear music and ends up staring into his damn computer!”

After Roy played the last set, he sat around a table of his devotees, staying up into the wee hours. I thought of my parents, who are not much younger than Roy but hit the hay by ten. I stopped by for a minute to thank him for talking with me, and asked him if we would sign one of his CDs. He inscribed it simply, “Why not!”

When Roy claims that he has “played with everybody,” it’s not much of an exaggeration. In addition to working with modern jazz musicians (from Andrew Hill and Booker Little to Zoot Sims), and singers like Dinah Washington and Carmen McRae, he once backed an R&B vocal group called the Ravens, recorded with Ray Charles (Genius + Soul = Jazz), appeared at Yankee Stadium with B.B. King and Jimmy Smith, and once even pulled a one-nighter in Atlanta with Ike and Tina Turner.

In 1996, he made a cameo appearance with Whitney Houston in The Preacher’s Wife. George Coleman, Ted Dunbar, and Jamil Nasser were also in the band. In 2001, he worked with Aretha on a VH1 Divas special also featuring Clark Terry and Herbie Hancock.

Over the past 75 years, he really has played with just about everybody, from pop singer Lee Wiley to the Latin jazz icon Tito Puente.

In the rock arena, he has jammed both with Phish and the Allman Brothers (on Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro-Blue,” no less!), and the Rolling Stones’ drummer Charlie Watts even wrote a song about him, although “Roy Haynes” doesn’t capture “the ebullient spirit of that ageless hipster” (in the effusive words of mtv.com).

In 2014, when a New York Times reporter asked Roy how he maintains his stamina, he quipped that if he knew the answer, “I’d just write a book about it and forget playing drums!” Roy observed that he has been on the road since 1945 and still finds traveling exciting, “and I’m sure it keeps me young.” The Times article, entitled “Old Masters at the Top of Their Games,” also featured other nonagenarians: the financier T. Boone Pickens, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, actor Betty White, and Tony Bennett, who Roy once hung out with in Vegas.

“Even though I’m a lot older than a lot of the people I play with, when we’re on stage, we’re the same age,” Roy reflects. “Maybe the secret of staying youthful is playing the drums. Performing makes me feel good, and it also helps me sleep well.”

In May 2012, a writer from Chicago Jazz magazine asked Haynes how he spends his time when he’s not performing.

“I just like to be in the world,” he replied. “I enjoy a lot of things, but it has been great being here for this length of time and I would like to stay here forever.”

Roy Haynes died on Nov. 12, 2024 at the age of 99.

***

POSTSCRIPT

In addition to Haynes and Luis Russell, other jazz musicians of Afro-Caribbean descent include Chano Pozo, Mario Bauzá, Candido Cameron, Mongo Santamaria, Chico O’Farrill, Carlos “Patato” Valdez, and Alfredo “Chocolate” Armenteros (from Cuba); Alphonso “Dizzy” Reece, Wynton Kelly, Randy Weston, Roy Burrowes, Monty Alexander, Don Shirley, and Coleridge Goode (Jamaica); Eddie Gómez and Juan Tizol (Puerto Rico), ), Alex Blake and Luis Russell (Panama), Andrew Hill (Haiti), David “Happy” Williams (Trinidad), and Mario Rivera (Dominican Republic).

Discography:

We Three (1958)

Out of the Afternoon (1962)

Togyu (1975, with Richard Davis)

Birdology (1989)

Birds of a Feather (2001)

A Life in Time: The Roy Haynes Story (2007; 3 CDs, 1 DVD)

Accompanist:

Aurex Jazz Festival All-Star Jam (with Clark Terry and Richard Davis)

Birdology (1989)

Booker Little (with Richard Davis)

Jaki Byard, Out Front! (with Bob Cranshaw)

Lester Young, Master Takes/Savoy Recordings

Paul Gonsalves, Cleopatra Feelin’ Groovy (with Dick Hyman)

Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Other Folks’ Music

Stan Getz Quartet at Birdland (with Steve Kuhn)

Teddy Edwards, It’s All Right (with Cedar Walton)

The Great Jazz Trio, Flowers for Lady Day (with Richard Davis and Hank Jones)