In September 2008, an unusual performance took place at the club Le Poisson Rouge in downtown New York. To the right of the stage, alongside six-string adventurer Marc Ribot, was Lou Reed, conjuring clouds of free rock energy with his guitar. Behind them, the avant-garde pillar John Zorn uttered violent and passionate sounds of loud sax. And at the center of it all, churning with the fury of a whirlwind and dancing on his hand-painted drums with the control and talent of a flamenco master, was Milford Graves – the percussionist, healer and interdisciplinary seeker that Zorn once had called “basically a 20th century shaman”, and who died on Friday at 79 after a battle against amyloid cardiomyopathy, NPR confirmed.
“Lou was cool, man,” Graves recalled in 2015, looking at a career spanning around 50 years at the time when he also worked with jazz liberators Albert Ayler, Sonny Sharrock and the New York Art Quartet, as well as the South South African vocal giant Miriam Makeba, and perfected one of the most distinctive and attractive drum designs on the planet, in any genre.
“I think he liked me, because at Le Poisson Rouge, it was the first time I met him, and he looked at me and said, ‘It’s great for a change to play with a drummer who has some rhythm,'” he continued. with a laugh. “It was everything he said. And I know what it is about, because other musicians also want to be fed! The worst thing is being up there playing with a guy who is boring. “
“Boring” would be the last descriptor used by anyone who has ever stepped on stage with Milford Graves – or, by the way, went down the basement stairs of his home in Jamaica, Queens and found himself in a combination of a music studio, warehouse of apothecary and DIY cardiac research facility. His collaborators and admirers range from jazz pioneers like Jason Moran and Steve Coleman to seekers from the rock world, like Thurston Moore and current Alice in Chains frontman William DuVall. “Never before have I met someone so innovative in so many fields, each self-taught,” said DuVall of Graves in 2013. “This man has ancient sacred knowledge, but applies it to cutting-edge methods in a way that could literally change the world. “
Born in 1941 in Queens, where he lived most of his life, Graves was a contemporary of Reed, and just a few years before Reed helped revolutionize the New York rock scene, Graves did the same for jazz. (“They told me he had the old Velvets,” said Graves in 2015, confessing that he didn’t know Reed before the two of them performed together. “I said, ‘Well, who are the Velvets?’ And we are in that similar age group, but I didn’t know about it. ”)
Graves first made his mark with the New York Art Quartet, a collective that included saxophonist John Tchicai, trombonist Roswell Rudd and guest poet Amiri Baraka, who would meet about 35 years after his first recordings presented a stimulating approach, but sharp, from free jazz. Before joining the group, Graves played African drums and timbales in local Latin jazz groups, including a band with then unknown Chick Corea on the piano. When he finally reached the conventional drums in 1962, he had to figure out how to get his feet up to speed with his hands.
“I walked into the set and said, ‘Hmmm, this is interesting’”, he would later say to Ben Young, producer of a stunning New York Art Quartet box set 2013. “My feet were numb on the pedals, they were doing nothing. But up there I was tearing things up; I thought I was playing timbales on the set. (…) I said: ‘I’m going to find out some things to do with these feet’. He was inspired by the timbale master Tito Puente, the African drums he studied and the dance styles he grew up with. “You don’t need to calculate what your hi-hat and kick will do – just dance, and it will make sense rhythmically if you get the feeling, ”he said. “But: You can’t do that unless you can dance. You have to know all of these things – jitterbug, lindy hop, dumbbells and everything in between. “
His unique mix of influences made Milford Graves play the drums like no one else. His innovative percussion colleagues from the 1960s, such as Sunny Murray, Rashied Ali and Andrew Cyrille (longtime friend and Graves duet partner), all emerged through more conventional jazz drum channels. But since his first recordings in the kit, including a series of albums with leaders like Giuseppi Logan and Paul Bley on the cutting-edge jazz label ESP-Disk in 1965 and 1966, which sometimes also featured him playing Indian tabla, Graves spoke only language in instrument: fluid and fiercely articulated, abstract, but transmitting a huge forward impulse. As Lou Reed was all those years later, Graves’ collaborators were surprised and very impressed. “Graves simply confused Rudd and me for not hearing any of New York’s youngest musicians who had the same sense of rhythmic cohesion in polyrhythmic or the same sense of intensity or musicality,” New York Art Quartet saxophone Tchicai told Valerie Wilmer in his historical book As serious as your life.
At the time of The Complete Yale Concert, a duo performance recently relaunched in 1966 with pianist Don Pullen, he perfected his mature style, which combined an ever-changing cymbal pulse, like a hummingbird, with a flood of bass that somehow seemed to caress as much as to strike . As Graves later said, his goal was to free the battery from a stiffness that he saw as a rejection of its true purpose:
“There is an ethnic problem involved because of slavery and the rise of the New Orleans period,” he told Wilmer. “People have completely lost their identity and what the drummers have been playing so far has little to do with their African composition.”
In 2015, he explained how drummers can reverse this process. “I tell them to throw the metronome and the box away,” he said, referring to the tense drum so central to modern kits, but for which he had no use after his early years. “’When are you going to be a musician, man? When are you going to speak on the instrument? ‘I mean, it’s a shame. They took that drum and turned it over to a timekeeper, a military timekeeper. “
Graves’ performances have evolved to include dance, spontaneous vocalizations, even improvised stories and reminiscences, all having the effect of attracting the listener and erasing divisions of style or culture. In the decades after his initial appearance, he continued to play in nominal free jazz environments, working with master improvisers like David Murray (his wonderfully recorded 1994 duo album Real deal is one of the best places to hear Graves on tape) and Peter Brötzmann. But he also traveled the world, performing in rural Japan and collaborating with buto dancer Min Tanaka, and taught music for years at Bennington College in Vermont.
Meanwhile, at home in Queens, he evolved into the 20th century shaman that Zorn had described. In Jake Meginsky’s 2018 meditative and illuminating documentary Full praying mantis, Graves describes becoming a “complete praying mantis” in his martial arts practice – choosing to follow his suggestions from the movements of mantis rather than human practitioners. In search of deeper and deeper connections between disciplines, he began recording his heartbeat and listening to the music on it. “A lot of that was like free jazz,” said Graves The New York Times in 2004. “There were rhythms that I had only heard in Cuban and Nigerian music.”
He began to analyze and diagnose heart irregularities in other people, and to create a “corrected heart beat”, which he reproduced for them. “Milford is at the forefront of these things,” said a doctor to Times. “He brings to him what doctors cannot, because he approaches him as a musician”
He was at the forefront until the end. Last year, as his illness worsened, he was monitoring his own heart with an ultrasound machine he bought on eBay, even while working with curator Mark Christman on “A Mind-Body Deal”, a magical exhibition about his career in Philadelphia ICA was the best thing after visiting Graves’ basement and talking to him.
Graves left behind a small but rich discography of a pair of solo albums released by Zorn’s Tzadik label that play as private rituals for Albert Ayler’s yearning Love Cry, recorded shortly after Graves performed with Ayler at John Coltrane’s funeral. But just as no musical school or medium of expression can contain it, nor does traditional sound documentation. As Reed experienced that night in 2008, and anyone who was lucky enough to be in the room when Graves was playing the drums, he found a way to feed the soul of anyone he played with, dismantling the barriers between playing drums and dancing, between concert and healing ceremony, and even between musician and instrument.
“You have to start by listening to what’s going on with the instrument itself,” Graves told writer Garth W. Caylor Jr. in a 1965 interview. “The drums are the instruments that contain all the things a person needs, but it just wasn’t touched. The drums are much closer for a reason – the drums are made of skin, of meat, remember, so they have a special way of life … There is a lot of life in this tense membrane, and it seems that the musicians have forgotten about it . That’s what I’m interested in. “