Earlier this month, in the grip of whimsy and curiosity, I set up a small game or quiz. I posted two solos by a professional jazz drummer, no amateur, without naming the person, the date, or the occasion. I was hoping that my readers were as wise as I think they are.
Three people identified the musician without hesitation, and one sharp-eared reader heard that the performances were in stereo, which meant they would have been recorded no earlier than 1957. Others took what they thought were educated guesses, none correct but all enthusiastic. Some praised him; others thought he wasn’t very good.
I will now pull back the curtain to reveal, not a frost-free refrigerator, but the identity of this musician: Benjamin “Buzzy” Drootin, born in the Ukraine c. 1920, died 2000. Many of his associations were with Ruby Braff, Eddie Condon, Sidney Bechet, George Wein, Vic Dickenson, but he also recorded with Serge Chaloff:
Charlie Parker loved his playing. (Now you know the origin of Bird’s BUZZY.) I realize I am doing the debatable thing here of establishing a pre-Coltrane musician as somehow “important” by saying he also had associations with more “modern” types, but for some, that gambit is necessary.
Buzzy was a thoroughly original player, with his own sonic orchestra, a style that he sustained no matter what the context, and (to me and a few others) a completely recognizable sound. Ride cymbal, assertive rimshots, a growling enthusiastic accompaniment, a ferocious pulse. None of that polite padding-along-with-brushes-stroking-the-snare for our Benjamin: he came to play, and you couldn’t ignore him. I saw him a number of times in the summer of 1972, and he never coasted, never pulled worn tricks from a bag of drum cliches. I regret I was too timid to approach him, but I admired him for his musical personalities.
If my experiment is an accurate measure, he is marginalized beyond belief.
Here he is on film and in color: probably in the Seventies, with Wild Bill Davison, cornet; Bill Allred, trombone; Chuck Hedges, clarinet; Bob Pillsbury, piano; Jack Lesberg and another, string bass. The songs I’ve chosen to show him off are AVALON and STRUTTIN’ WITH SOME BARBECUE. (For those enticed, I’ve posted the whole session on YouTube under the same title.) Hear how he drives the ensemble, how he anticipates and responds. A master of glorious propulsive noises:
If you think I am overstating the case for Buzzy, let me bring in some authorities, people who know.
First, Dan Morgenstern:
and drummer-scholar Kevin Dorn:
and
Why isn’t Buzzy known and remembered? And there are a thousand other fine musicians who are never written about. The reasons have nothing to do with musical merit.
I have written elsewhere about the Star System in the arts, not only in jazz. I don’t know whether it’s the limits of our collective ability to absorb and retain information, or it is a function of “the media,” publicizing some at the expense of others. But it feels as if the collective has only limited space for a small number of people to praise, unless, of course, we are speaking of movie stars or celebrated athletes. In jazz, it seems as if there is only room for three trumpet players, two saxophonists, four pianists . . . you get the idea. Everyone else is waiting in the dust for the Bus to Acknowledgment to pick them up.
The casual jazz listener has shrunk the pantheon over the years. Trumpet? Miles or perhaps Louis. Saxophone? Coltrane or Bird. And thus the casual listener, faced with a playful quiz like this, makes quick assumptions. Extended drum solo? It must be Buddy Rich. Never mind that Buzzy sounds nothing like Buddy; it’s a long solo, so Buddy’s is the first and sometimes the only name to come to mind.
And here the ideological ice may become thinner. Pre-Coltrane jazz, again to the casual listener, might as well be Palestrina: at best, acknowledged in one sentence but marginalized as ancient. And musicians are supposed to stay in their own personal stylistic tiny houses.
Buzzy Drootin was a jazz drummer. He had his own quirkily personal style. If you had time-traveled him into the Blue Note studios in 1963, he would have sounded perfectly at home on a Hank Mobley recording — that is, of course, if a listener was not so trapped by their assumptions of what jazz drumming on a Mobley record should sound like.
But Buzzy and many other memorable musicians have been pigeonholed and pushed aside for reasons of race and a name given to a style. Tactlessly, “white Dixieland,” which is seen as the province of amateurs in striped vests and straw boaters wandering through MACK THE KNIFE (reading it off their music) at someone’s eightieth birthday party. And jazz criticism, or what now passes for it, seems like the House Un-American Activities Committee.
“Sir, have you ever played ‘Dixieland?'”
“No, I play music.”
“I submit for your examination a phonograph record. Do you recognize it?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Would you describe it to the committee?”
“It’s my band, the Hot Seven.”
“Would you read the songs that your band recorded?”
“TIN ROOF BLUES, MUSKRAT RAMBLE, BLUES MY NAUGHTY SWEETIE GAVE TO ME – – -.”
“That will be all. Bailiff, take this man into custody.”
It’s a pity. If we are able to actually listen to the music, when it is played with invention and emotional depth, it sounds timeless. It stirs us.
Your life-homework? Search out those players who aren’t in the pantheon. Your ears will reward you.
May your happiness increase!
JAZZ LIVES 