Perspectives: Jean Toussaint

Saxophone giant and Jazz Messenger Jean Toussaint talks to David about his favourite drummers, as well as feel, tradition and innovation.

"What I look for in a drummer, personally: I want a drummer to listening to the all the music that's happening, as apposed to just playing time, laying back and sitting in the pocket. I want him to interact with improvised lines, and you get that from Tain. He's always listening; he has incredible ears. In fact he has perfect pitch - I guess that helps with his writing – and he's always listening to the solos, and listening how to interact with that solo. If you listen to all the great drummers they do that. . . That's what I'm looking for in a drummer, and Tain is a master at that. It's like a conversation between soloist and accompanist and everybody has that place that they can fill basically; the piano can, the bass can, the drums can and the soloist can as well. But it's like a four-way, in a quartet situation. It's a four-way conversation. It's not like because you're soloing you're talking over the band, and everyone else is just listening. It has to be a give and take, and a good drummer will lead you to certain things, will give you and say, 'How about this,' and he might throw you something up and they'll say, 'Oh yeah I hear that, I can do that too, yea, but check this out as well.' It's a back and forth thing, always an exchange. That's when you really hear the magic, when you get people that are wide open like that. And that's why Tain and Branford [Marsalis] have got that thing that they do, because they're like the same mind.

"His time-feel is great because . . . he hears time the way Sonny Rollins hears time. It's not in one place; he shifts it around. He can play on top of the beat, behind the bear or right in the middle of the beat. And he'll do that while he's playing. Tony Williams had got into some of that, shifting the beat. Where as Elvin was the elasticity of the triplety feel, which that in itself gives you a shift, because with triplets, it's always going forward. I don't know if he's listened to Rollins a lot but he has that sense of beat where it doesn't have to be here or there. But Branford is really into Sonny Rollins so I'm sure that he's influenced Tain in that way as well. The thing with Rollins that I find is the way that he hears the beat. Coltrane is right on top of the beat, in the middle on the time. Regardless of how complex he's getting, his swing feel is right on top there. Dexter Gordon is way behind the beat; regardless of what he's doing he's laying back in it. Rollins could be in any of those places: in front of the beat, on top of the beat or behind the beat, and what he can do is shift it around like a drummer. Drummers are the only people who were doing that, and he started shifting the focus like that. And Tain's got that down; he's one of the only guys doing it..

"Now with Ralph [Peterson]. . . that's another beast. Ralph's knowledge of past drummers is just phenomenal. He just really understands the inner workings of styles. He knows, he can really feel the heartbeat of the style. Like I've heard him play like Tony Williams; I've heard him play like Art Blakey, and if you close your eyes you'll think it's those guys playing. He can really capture that moment. . . He knows the history of the drums and he takes all those different styles and creates his own style. And he has what a lot of drummers don't have. One of the master drum teachers in the history of this music was Alan Dawson and Ralph has really studied Alan Dawson. He's got Alan's concept down; he knows it inside out. Alan Dawson was the teacher that created Tony Williams, Clifford Jarvis and modern player Terri Lyn Carrington. And Ralph, I don't know if he actually studied with Alan . . . but I know he knows Alan's concept and really understands it inside out. . . I know he studied with Michael Carvin and I don't know if he could have gotten it that way. Maybe Michael was someone that came through Alan, I don't know.

"I remember in the late-nineties I did a week with him at Sweet Basil in New York . . . and he just played so much drums that week it was scary. It was just incredible. I was overwhelmed; I didn't know what to do! He was playing so much drums, and I wish I could go back to that week because I think I'd be better equipped to deal with it!

"Ralph thinks differently than Tain. . . It's always that conversation; it's like speaking to a different person. They'll have their own ideas about things, and he has his own ideas, and they're quite valid ideas. But he gives you that interaction; he never just sits back. He's throwing things at you, absorbing what you throw out and sort of taking your lines. A good drummer could just take your line and support it, and make it, sort of give it a backbone. But it's all about the beat in the same place, and a good drummer can listen to whoever their playing with, whoever they're accompanying, and match where they hear the beat. You see? Just jump onto where they hear the beat. As opposed to saying, 'Well it's here' [or] 'no it's here', and then it becomes a fight. If you say, 'Well I'm hearing it here' and they say, 'Oh, OK, cool. I can hear that too.' Some people, they have to hear it where they hear it and they say, 'Well this is where it is; I'm not gonna go with you,' then the music never gels. You know, you got people hearing the beat in different places; it never comes together. It's about locking onto that idea of beat. And I don't like the idea of the beat to be concrete; I want it to be shifting. I mean, I come from the school of Rollins; I like that shifting beat and the drummer has to be flexible enough to feel that. Because it's there; the whole idea of it will still be centrally grounding. It won't go that far away from the foundation. But the flexibility to push it and pull it makes it fun, for me especially.

"As long it's open to be re-interpreted while it's happening, as long as it's not locked. When it's locked then it forces you down a road and you can't go anywhere else but down that road. I just want flexibility; I want it to be constant but open. It can go wherever the magic takes it. That way you allow the magic to come in. Because the magic of that moment might be to speed up slightly or to slow down slightly or just go out of time all the way. . . If your mind's not blocked then those things are possible but if you have that block on and you say, 'Well we're playing this tune and that's how it goes,' then there's only way that it can go. I want it to go however it will go. I don't want to know how's it gonna go! That's the ultimate for me: when I don't know how it's gonna go!

"The bass and drums, I want them to have that flexibility of time as well. The worst thing is to see a bass player and drummer, and they can't come to some kind of agreement. They keep fighting each other: 'Oh, no it's here, it's here; it's there, it's there!' It's neither! You should meet and have a pleasant positive conversation, as apposed to a war. Now sometimes war could be creative as well, but it has to be like a playful war, because war is always negative. It has to be like, 'Yea, if we really wanted to we could fight, and we know that.' So it's creative that thing, as apposed to not being able to exist outside of it, and the only thing you can do is fight, because that's what happens. And again you're just forced down a road. I'm looking for that openness. One of the worst things from a rhythm section is when it becomes automatic and they just stop listening . . . That's death! Everybody should just be listening at every moment, and to every note, and to think, 'I'm not just playing the piano' [or] 'I'm not just playing the drums' [or] 'I'm not just playing the bass' [or] 'I'm not just playing the saxophone' [but] 'I'm playing the whole band.' That way you make room for everything, the total sound, and your sound fits into the whole puzzle, and it's one thing. That's what I'm looking for: that oneness . . .

"There's a lot of new drummers, or just new players in general, who don't really understand the tradition, and you can hear that in their playing. And they're trying to play a music that has a very rich tradition, and when you do it without the history then its hollow, it's empty, because all the listeners and the musicians have listened to the greatness of this music, and it's like playing without the greatness when you do it without the history. You could say, 'Well I'm trying to do something new.' Well if you're trying to do something new then do something totally different; don't say you're going to play jazz and you're gonna swing and you don't know what swing sounds like. It doesn't make any sense. A lot of people, they do that because they claim that they're trying to be an individual, they're tying to be unique. Well, all the masters are unique and they still speak the same language. So it goes to say that it's harder to be unique within this given language than it is to come up with something totally brand new that nobody understands. It's more imaginative and creative to be unique within that given language and the history. In a lot of new players you miss the history; what they play is hollow. They might have a lot of instrumental technique; they have a lot of harmonic knowledge; they might have a lot of confidence. But that in itself, those elements, don't go into making creative music. Just because you show a lot of technique, doesn't mean you're being creative. Just because you play loads and high and fast, doesn't mean its creative, doesn't mean it's good. You hear that in a lot of younger players but there are a lot of good players as well . . . and they're the ones who last the time. They're the ones that people listen to and they last out, they make a career of it. The ones who don't have that foundation and the history behind them, they sort of fall by the way side. And then they turn around being very bitter: 'I'm doing this new shit and nobody wants to hear it.' Ornette Coleman was fresh and new but he had tradition. He had Charlie Parker in him. He had Charlie and a whole lot of people, blues, a lot of the rhythm and blues and Texas stuff. He had that tradition in it. It was there; you could hear it in what he was doing. People . . . want to be that drastic, they want to be different. They want to say, 'I'm gonna turn this on its head.' It's hard; they can't set out to be an innovator.

"Innovation is something that happens when you least expect it to. If you're trying to be true to yourself and trying to be as creative as possible you might innovate but you might just be a good exponent of that art form, and there's nothing wrong with that. I think innovation happened to a few. A lot are looking for it but you can't force innovation. Some people are just born with that way of hearing whatever you hear. . . That will be the thing that takes it forward. It's not anything that they did, because they're coming through the same tried training grounds and learning the history, like Coltrane, for instance. He came up the same way that Rollins did and came through the same things. Rollins was a prodigy; he at sixteen, seventeen, was burning. He just took it like that and ran with. With Coltrane it simmered. It wasn't until he was thirty that he really started to change things. And that was when he joined Miles in '55. That was his first innovation; that's when he started to change the way the saxophone was being played. And in '55 he's very influence by Sonny Stitt, and very influenced by Charlie Parker. He used to play alto before, played a lot of alto, and if you listen to most of those solos in '55, they're in the alto range. Most of them they're in the alto range and a lot of them he doesn't go below the alto range. So, even though he's playing tenor, he's hearing like an alto player. And he was very influenced by Dexter Gordon, Sonny Stitt. His sound comes from Dexter Gordon, where his swings comes from Sonny Stitt. But his lines, they are informed by Charlie Parker  . . . the guy who laid out the rules for bebop, if you call them rules because are meant to be broken anyway. But you got to know those rules before you can break them, which is what Ornette did. He learnt the rules and then broke them. So Coltrane in a sense was hearing that in that way, and I've heard Jimmy Heath and Benny Golson, they grew up with Coltrane, and Golson said Coltrane wasn't impressive [but] he was a good player. He was a very good friend of his; they were tight. But he wasn't that impressive when he was young (I'm talking teenage). Jimmy Heath was killing; he was smokin'. He sounded like Charlie Parker. But Coltrane had that little thing behind that he didn't even know he had. That's were innovation comes from; it's from way back there. It's the way you hear that, and you hear it differently from everybody else. But you gotta have the foundation; you gotta have the history. And if you look at all the innovators of this music, they all have that language and that history, and that rich legacy. They all play similar things but it's the way they do it that makes it unique, that makes you put on a record and say, 'That's Miles.' But Miles plays the same kind of lines that Dizzy plays. It's just that he plays it differently. That Miles personality comes through that music just like Dizzy's personality comes through his. It's just like Louis Armstrong. . . You have a lot of stylists in the music obviously. It's not everyone that's gonna be an innovator. They're not gonna change the music but they'll definitely put their personal stamp on it. People like Dexter Gordon Lockjaw Davis, Bill Evans with his touch . . . Keith Jarrett . . . But innovations go deeper than that; it changes the direction of music like Miles did, like Bird did. Bird and Dizzy did in bebop, from swing to bebop, like Miles did in the sixties, like Trane in in the sixties, like Ornette did – those are different branches – and in my day, one of my only peers that I've seen that is a true innovator is Steve Coleman. He's one of the only guys, and he follows all that criteria as well, because he has the tradition. He grew up with the tradition; he understands Coltrane; he understands Charlie Parker; he understands how to swing; he understands Ornette's music. So he's taken all those elements and said, 'Well, I wanna hear like that, I wanna create a music around this,' and he's come up with something different. That's very valid. You can still hear the tradition because it's a direct line . . .

"For me, innovation is changing the whole face of the music. Now you have the master drummers, people who put their personality, stamp their personality on the scene: Tain, Ralph, Eric Harland. Those are personal drummers, they got their style. Billy Kilson . . . As far as drummer innovators, have there been? Yea, you could say Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, Art Blakey, the ones who got the rhythmic backdrop of bebop and set up this foundation that all the modern drummers today are playing off of. But after that, it was a continuation of that.

"Kenny Washington is a fabulous drummer. I did a record with him. I didn't play much with him in New York but I had the opportunity to do a recording with him. He's an incredible drummer. . . He knows the tradition inside out . . . That's his thing, that's what he wants to do, his desire to play just the tradition and that's fine. He does a great job with that. That's what makes him happy; that's what he wants to do. His hero was 'Philly' Joe Jones.

"A lot of them [younger drummers] are influenced by the times. . . That influence is in there but with a player like Eric [Harland] you still hear the tradition, you still hear the richness of the history of the music because he has listened to all the guys and he knows them. It doesn't matter what of your experience you bring into the whole thing, you just have to have that foundation. If you just bring in your experience without the foundation then there's nothing to hold it up. It's like building a house and starting from the roof; you have nothing to hold up; it'll fall down eventually. The great young drummers that are coming up . . . they've come up in the hip hop era and they're bringing a lot of funk and back-beat music into the whole thing, but you can still hear the tradition, you can still hear Elvin, you can still hear Art, you can still hear Max Roach, you can still hear Roy Haynes, and they still understand those players and they still listen to them."

Jean also discusses his experiences with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers here.

For more information on Jean Toussaint visit www.myspace.com/jeantoussaint