Pioneer free jazz drummer Milford Graves, who was credited with turning the metronome role into a musician, died at age 79, NPR confirmed. The cause of death was congestive heart failure.
Musicians including Vijay Iyer, Superchunk, Oren Ambarchi, Moorish Mother, Clipping and Ryley Walker paid homage to Graves. Jazz critic Nate Chinen said he was “a creative galaxy in human form. Possibility of unfolding in each molecule. “
In 2018, Graves was diagnosed with amyloid cardiomyopathy, also known as rigid heart syndrome, and had six months to live. The Queens-born musician has studied heartbeat as a source of rhythm since the 1970s, encouraging other musicians to incorporate their pulse time into their performances.
“It’s like a higher power saying, ‘OK, buddy, you wanted to study this, here it is,” he told the New York Times shortly after the diagnosis. “Now the challenge is within me.”
He made his illness part of his music and his work as a visual artist, believing that heart disease could be helped by making recordings of a sick heartbeat and then playing a healthier rhythm to stimulate biofeedback. A recent exhibition at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art analyzed his career up to his most recent works.
Born on August 20, 1941, Graves started playing drums at the age of three and soon expanded his studies. In his 20s he performed in dance and Latino groups in New York; listening to the John Coltrane Quartet with Elvin Jones inspired him to push his own musical explorations, transposing the dance steps of his Latin band’s days into a new technique: “So I said, ‘This is all I will do. I’m going to start dancing down there, ‘”he told the New York Times. “I started dancing in the top hat.”
He developed a unique style and setting, as described by critic Val Wilmer in his book As Serious As Your Life:
Graves moved around his battery with surprising speed, hitting fast tattoos with both hands on each surface. Each stroke was clearly defined so that there were no rollers in the conventional sense; the emphasis was on clarity. He used his cymbals in the same way that another drummer would use a gong or another drum. With NYAQ [New York Art Quartet], Graves’ box was tuned high as was the norm, but its tom-toms were already producing a deeper sound than normal. In the late 1960s, however, he dismissed the box and his three toms were tuned as loosely as is common in rock today … Graves was probably the first American drummer to remove all of his lower heads because of its tendency to absorb sound.
In 1964, he joined Roswell Rudd, Giuseppi Logan and John Tchicai at the New York Art Quartet. In that decade, he played with the trio of Albert Ayler, Miriam Makeba and Sonny Sharrock, and released the album Percussion Ensemble alongside drummer Sonny Morgan, who has been hailed as one of the greatest percussion albums of all time.
Graves would later collaborate with Sun Ra, John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Bill Laswell, Lou Reed and Sam Amidon.
He also pursued a wide range of non-musical endeavors – natural healing, herbology and frontline science – believing that they were complementary practices to encourage healing and awareness. In the 1970s, he invented Yara, a martial art form based on the physicality of the praying mantis. He taught at Bennington College in Vermont on a variety of subjects from 1973 to 2012.
In 2000, Graves was named Guggenheim Fellow and used part of the prize funds to further his studies on the relationship between music and the heart. In 2017, he and a group of Italian biologists patented stem cell regeneration technology that uses frequency response.
Jazz critic John Corbett wrote: “Graves’ heart studies … confirm the falsity of one of the easiest non-metric or polimetric drum shots in free jazz, that is, that it is not natural and does not imitate the heart , which is presumed to have a knock. “
Still in 2018, Graves was the subject of the documentary Milford Graves Full Mantis. Director Jake Meginsky, who studied with Graves for 15 years, told Quietus about his subject’s “almost scientific impulse to explain his creative process, [which] it is clearly extremely complex and dynamic. He is not cautious or protective. He is full of energy to share. This is a rare thing for a musician. “
• This article was changed on February 13, 2021. In an earlier version, musician Roswell Rudd was incorrectly named Roswell Judd.