Roy Haynes has passed away. He was the last surviving member of a small but elite cadre of drummers who rose to fame in the mid-1940s, introducing conversational elements into jazz’s rhythmic vocabulary and challenging the idea that a percussionist’s primary function was to keep time. Dubbed “Snap Crackle” by bassist Al McKibbon – purportedly in an approximation of his uniquely crisp snare drum sound – Haynes distinguished himself with his innovative use of cymbals, driving the groove while adding rhythmic commentary to what the other musicians were playing. By using percussive color and shading to support the soloists and build tension, he joined fellow sticksmen like Art Blakey, Kenny Clarke, and Max Roach in pushing jazz drumming forward into a new era of virtuosity.
During his remarkable 75-year career, which began at the end of the big band swing era and traversed everything from bebop, to free jazz, to fusion and Latin jazz, he appeared on over 600 records — many of them with jazz’s biggest names, like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. And though he remained relatively unknown outside the insular world of jazz musicians and aficionados, his collaborators saw him as a player whose dexterity and energy were unmatched. John Coltrane described him in a 1966 interview as “one of the best drummers I’ve ever worked with.” Pianist Chick Corea, who began his career playing alongside Haynes in Stan Getz‘s mid-1960s band, called him “a national treasure” — and Pat Metheny, one of his close collaborators in the 1990s, dubbed Haynes “the father of modern drumming.”
Early Years
Born on March 13, 1925, Roy Owen Haynes grew up in the Roxbury area of Boston, Massachusetts, the third of four sons to Gustavus and Edna Haynes, who had emigrated to America from Barbados. His father, who worked at the Standard Oil company, was an amateur musician who sang in a choir and played the organ. Haynes’s affinity for rhythm was evident from an early age. “I had always wanted to play drums,” he told the Grammy Awards website in 2007. “I’d be playing on my mother’s dining room table and dishes and I would just be breaking up everything.”
At age 15, Haynes decided to get serious after his brother played him the “The World Is Mad,” a Count Basie big band tune that crackled with syncopated polyrhythms courtesy of Jo Jones, the pianist and composer’s dynamic sticksman: “When I heard it, I really knew that’s what I wanted to do,” he would tell Smithsonian magazine in 2003.
The Big Break
After cutting his teeth in a series of local swing bands, he got his big break in 1945, when Panamanian pianist Luis Russell invited him to join his 10-piece big band in New York. Russell’s fluid approach to rhythm was life-changing for the 20-year-old drummer. “That’s when I learned there isn’t a definite time with the music, just space,” he told Smithsonian magazine when describing his year with the group. “You could be looser with the rhythms. But I also learned you had to have control and swing.”
After leaving the band in 1946, Haynes continued exploring that premise during a two-year stint with tenor saxophonist Lester Young, a musician whose style bridged swing with the hip musical currency that was sweeping New York at the time: bebop, a complex new form of jazz that emphasized instrumental virtuosity in a small group setting. By then, he had started working deft percussive flourishes into his performances, using cymbals and snare patterns to color outside of the lines of the beat. As the 1940s rolled into the 1950s, that airy, elastic approach would become his trademark — especially after he began collaborating with alto saxophonist and bebop pioneer Charlie “Bird” Parker, whose experimental approach to melody, harmony, and rhythm complemented his exploratory instincts.
Haynes’ ability to strike the right balance between aggression and restraint made him a highly desirable sideman. Through the 1950s, he collaborated with singers like Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday, who helped hone his sensitivity as an accompanist, as well as an array of instrumentalists, including trumpet legend Louis Armstrong. But it was his work alongside jazz’s most unapologetic experimentalists where the drummer truly excelled. During that decade, he appeared on several modern jazz masterpieces, including Miles Davis‘ Miles Davis & Horns (1951), Bud Powell’s The Amazing Bud Powell (1952), and Sonny Rollins’ The Sound Of Sonny (1957). More and more, Haynes seemed to approach ensemble playing as a conversation — listening intently to what the soloists were playing and responding with rhythmic rejoinders and asides.
His Most Formidable Sparring Partner
Of the many musicians he collaborated with in the 1950s New York scene, perhaps his most formidable sparring partner was Thelonious Monk, an eccentric pianist and composer whose music was defined by angular melodies, unusual chord changes, and shifting meters. “There was a lot that was tricky about playing with Monk,” Haynes told JazzWax in 2008. “You really had to listen to this guy ’cause he could play the strangest tempos.” Still, on the 1958 live albums Thelonious in Action and Misterioso, Haynes proved that he was one of just a few drummers who could navigate the pianist’s slippery rhythmic idiosyncrasies with aplomb.
“Haynes always had a way of lighting a fire under Monk’s band, no matter what the tempo,” wrote author Robin D.G. Kelley in his 2009 biography Thelonious Monk: The Life And Times Of An American Original. Monk, for his part, described Haynes’ drumming style as “an eight ball right in the side pocket.”
Despite his busy schedule as a sideman, Haynes found time to 30 records under his own name during his career, debuting in 1954 with the bop-inflected Busman’s Holiday. In 1962, he released the cool, mellow Out Of The Afternoon, where he led a quartet that included the blind Ohio-born multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk. A blend of swinging standards and original hard bop material, it would come to be remembered as Haynes’ definitive work, a testament not only to his virtuosity behind the kit — especially on the self-penned, polyrhythmic “Snap Crackle” — but also to his gift for establishing a deep creative rapport with other musicians.
Though he was then nearing his forties, he hadn’t lost his taste for adventure — venturing into the farther reaches of progressive jazz on a series of albums with avant-garde icons like Eric Dolphy (Out There, 1960), Andrew Hill (Black Fire, 1963), and John Coltrane (Impressions, 1963). Like his friend Miles Davis, he had by this point garnered notoriety as a style icon, known for his love of sharp Italian suits and fast cars. “During that period I was getting more play for that than for playing the drums,” he told the Grammy Awards website. “When I would go to Philadelphia, the young hipsters would come to see [what I was wearing].” In 1960, Esquire named him the Best Dressed Man of the Year.
The Later Years
Even as the jazz world experienced a period of commercial decline in the 1970s and 80s, he continued to expand his musical horizons, experimenting with pop-jazz, Latin music, and electric fusion in a variety of contexts. In 1988, he won his first Grammy — for Best Jazz Instrumental Jazz Performance, Group — after teaming with pianist McCoy Tyner, saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders, and bassist Cecil McBee to record Blues For Coltrane: A Tribute to John Coltrane, which blended energetic retoolings of several Coltrane songs with original material. “The thing that sets Roy apart from other musicians is that he listens so well,” Tyner told Smithsonian in 2003. “He teaches you to listen carefully and to respond accordingly, to put things in perspective, not to simply go out for yourself.”
Between 2002 and 2012, Haynes led a jazz group called Fountain Of Youth, which he used to support young, up-and-coming talents like tenor saxophonist and future Blue Note artist Marcus Strickland. The recipient of a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France’s top artistic honor, in 1996, he continued garnering accolades in the last two decades of his life, including a 2010 Lifetime Achievement award at the Grammys and a George Peabody Medal from John Hopkins University, recognizing individuals for their outstanding contribution to American music.
Haynes, who continued to drum well into his nineties, lived out his final years on Long Island, just a few hours outside New York City. Even in his old age, he seemed to defy both nature and time, appearing in photos with the trim, muscular physique of a flyweight boxer – an image recalling the youthful energy that never ceased to flow through his music.
With his magnetic stage presence and rhythmic ingenuity, Roy Haynes showed the world that there was more to drumming than maintaining a steady beat – and that musicians in supporting roles could be as equally creative as the players they accompanied. “When someone else is playing a solo, I am decorating it, with things that come to my mind, things I hear,” he told The Arts Desk in 2011. “I paint pictures, I tell stories.”