December, 1995 & May, 1996

My Mom and Dad were jazz lovers. They had music playing constantly in the house - Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Nat "King" Cole, Dixieland jazz and smatterings of bebop like Charlie Parker and Art Blakey. I was listening to this stuff when I was three or four. They would just put it on and I would get deep into it.

I had never known this but my father was a drummer, a retired drummer. One day he brought his drum set down out of the attic and set it up. I walked over to it, picked up the sticks and sat down and started playing Gene Krupa-style stuff right away. I was about four and my parents saw that I was actually playing rhythmical stuff and not just banging.

So my Dad taught me how to play a ride beat, and the next day he took me down to see his friends who had a jam session going in a club downtown. They let me sit in. I was so short, I had to stand up to play the pedals, but I even remember the tune - "Sweet Georgia Brown." I could already play time and even a solo, so the whole thing was really already there for me.

When I was about six or seven, I got into the school band and by then I had already done a few local TV shows as a Buddy Rich or Gene Krupa-style child drummer. When I was nine I used to play the solo that Louis Bellson recorded on Duke Ellington's "Skin Deep." I knew every note by heart. In my opinion that solo is a masterpiece, an innovation. It's a classic that sounds as modern today as it did then. I got into Rufus "Speedy" Jones, Sonny Payne and, later, Sam Woodyard. I always checked out Buddy and learned the "molar" technique in the left hand - finger and wrist control developed by a classical drummer to increase speed.

New Orleans:

When I was about eight or nine my father took me down to New Orleans, to the Famous Door club, where I sat in with Murphy Campo's Dixieland band and with Mike Lala. Then he took me to a place called the Paddock Lounge and I played there with Octave Crosby. I also sat in with Clarence "Frogman" Henry.

So I had a little career going as a child drummer. I would come back once a year or so and play in New Orleans. I played as a guest soloist with the Paul Neighbors' big band in the Blue Room of the Roosevelt Hotel. We did tunes like "Flyin’ Home," "Crazy Hamp," one of Lionel Hampton's charts, "Cherokee" and "Indiana." I met many New Orleans jazz drummers such as Dick Johnson and Paul Ferrara, who played with Al Hirt.

Moving to Texas:

After that I moved to Texas. My parents split up and I divided my time between the Dallas / Fort Worth area and Sacramento.

I met an influential drummer in Dallas named Paul Guerrera. He would let me sit in and, eventually, I subbed on his gigs. It didn’t matter if you weren't old enough, really. They would hire kids to play in the blues clubs, too.

One day my father was mowing the lawn and some guy heard me practicing, walked up and knocked on the door. He wanted to know if I could do a gig. He was a blues singer and guitarist. He took me to a kind of barbecue night club with a barbecue pit in the middle of a dirt floor. There were picnic tables set up in front of the stage. He turned around, looked at me, snapped his fingers and said, "Kick it off with the foot drum." I just started a groove. I was about 12 or 13.

That's how the blues thing started happening. I started playing with all kinds of blues acts. And I wasn't the only kid out there playing, either, but the others were more like 15 or 16. Sometimes my Dad would stay at the gigs and sometimes he would drop me off and then come and get me. He was an avid fan of the music. I backed up Jimmy Reed, Jimmy Hughes and O. C. Smith.

Around that time I was listening to people like Little Richard, with Earl Palmer on drums, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Little Milton Campbell, LaVern Baker, Fats Domino, Little Junior Parker, Albert King, Albert Collins, Bobby Bland, B. B. King and Bill Doggett.

When I got to high school, I played in all kinds of bands. I played with big bands and I played bebop, rock and funk. I was starting to listen to early '60s Blue Note jazz records by Lee Morgan, Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley and Cannonball Adderley, to name a few. I stayed up with the latest inventions in all types of playing, if I could.

I learned to read music from a guy named Bill Nawrocki. That was really the only time I actually studied with somebody. All the rest of the stuff I did myself. Nobody ever showed me how to move the hands or any of that. I just listened to records. I had some kind of innate understanding of how the hands and feet worked. I never had to work things out that much, but later on, when it came to coordinated independence, I had to sit down and really deal with it.

The Bay Area scene:

When I was back in the Bay Area I played with Sly Stone at my high school. He was playing guitar with Bobby Freeman, who had "The Swim." Whenever they came to the school, they'd always ask me to play. After that I played with a lot of soul and rhythm & blues acts in the Bay Area - Sylvester & the Hot Notes, Little Junior Sharper and Alice Jean Davis, a stone-cold blues belter.

Right after high school I went back to Texas and worked in a house band, backing up Albert King, Freddy King, Ray Sharpe and Delbert McClinton. I played rhythm & blues and jazz gigs in the Dallas / Ft. Worth area. We all had fake IDs. The club owners knew but nobody cared.

Around then I spent a lot of time going to see people like James Brown, the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, Ray Charles, Little Richard, Sam & Dave, the Temptations and the Isley Brothers.

I'm very deep into shuffles - Texas shuffle, organ trio shuffles, Art Blakey shuffle, half-time shuffle, the off-beat shuffle, etc., etc. I can always tell how deep a cat can swing by the way he plays a shuffle, whether it's drums, bass, guitar, piano or horn.

Two of my major influences in the funk thing were Bernard Purdie and Clyde Stubblefield, especially Clyde’s work on James Brown’s "Sex Machine" album. What he did on "Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose" is some of the finest drumming I’ve ever heard.

About Ray Torres:

My main influence and mentor in the funk style was Ray Torres. I first met him in Fort Worth and then, a year later, I ran into him and his family in a park in Sacramento. They used to call him "Good Rockin' Ray." You could feel his rhythm in the parking lot. We used to get to the gig, and as soon as we got out of our cars, we could feel Ray in there gettin' down. The whole parking lot was moving. He had a whole movement and a rhythm to his playing that the band built on, and it was astounding. He was the first cat I ever heard break up the sixteenth notes and play over the bar line. He'd put things in and leave things out. It was like a solid improvisation all the way through. He was playing in Leo Valentine's organ trio. They played in the style of Jr. Walker & The All-Stars.

He just doesn't play into the center of the sound. He creates a rhythm that's all his own. We call it "the Ray thing." When he does "the Ray thing" the whole club does it, the band does it, the people in the parking lot do it, the people down the street do it. Everybody seems to be smiling and having the best time of their lives as soon as he starts. Everybody in Texas and around the Bay Area would say, "Hey, man, can you do 'the Ray thing'?"

He became my mentor and my idol. I used to get to the gig a half hour early, watch him set up, and just sit there and wait and listen to every note. I'd go every night to hear him, and each night there'd be a new innovation, and each night he'd show me what he did with his hands and how he was playing time. He was so funky that the place was jammed full of dancers. Unless anybody has heard Ray I can't really explain it to them, but the only other drummer I've ever heard play a rhythm that seemed to move the whole structure of the building and the ground along with it was Bernard Purdie. Those are the only two cats I've ever heard do that.

Ray was the drummer who recorded "Hey Baby" by Bruce Channel. While he was in Texas, he played all the blues gigs in Fort Worth - Delbert McClinton, Ray Sharpe and everybody.

After I heard him, I went right into the shed and reworked my stuff along the lines of funk. Everybody who knows Ray knows what I'm talking about. He's one of the greatest drummers of all time and probably the funkiest drummer I've ever heard in my whole life, bar none.

Jazz gigs:

About 1964, right when I was getting out of high school, I heard Tony Williams and Elvin Jones. That changed everything for me and I tried to play like those guys.

I got heavily into Philly Joe Jones, Art Blakey, Max Roach and Roy Haynes. I dug Joe Chambers and Dannie Richmond, Clifford Jarvis, Ed Blackwell, Billy Higgins and Louis Hayes. From Jimmy Cobb I learned how to get the quarter note thing together on the ride cymbal. I listened to everything he recorded with Wynton Kelly, Wes Montgomery and Miles Davis.

About this time I went on the road with Vince Guaraldi. I played on and off with him for several years, until I was about 25. We played straight ahead jazz and a little corner of acoustic funk from that time period. I'm on the soundtracks for the "Peanuts" Charlie Brown Christmas TV specials with Vince. One night Vince asked me to start playing some funk on the gig, solo. I set up a groove and he came in with a line that he kept repeating. He made it up right on the spot and from that moment on we used it as a break tune. After we recorded it, it became the Charlie Brown theme song. Vince wrote all the music for those shows.

During that time, I also played with a lot of jazz players whenever they came through the Bay Area: Bobby Hutcherson, Woody Shaw, Joe Henderson, Dave Liebman, Mose Allison, Pharoah Sanders. I also played on and off with Eddie Henderson for 20 years. I love Eddie. He taught me a lot about jazz music and we still play together to this day. I played with all these guys at the Both/And and the Keystone Korner night clubs in San Francisco as well as on the road.

About Jack Walrath:

Jack had a very strong influence on me as a musician and we've been friends for 25 years. We played jazz together in the early '70s before he went with Charles Mingus. He was instrumental in helping Paul Jackson and I develop our style of funk. Jack, Paul and I had many bands together in the Bay Area. We covered all styles of music including avant garde jazz. Jack would write tunes that would suggest different feels and he also made suggestions that helped shape the kind of playing you heard from Paul and I in Herbie Hancock's band. Jack and I still make records and tour together.

About Jack Waller:

I met Jack Waller in Oakland in 1970. He used to play with an organist named Buck Green in a club called the Purple Manor in Harlem. Bernard Purdie and all those guys used to come and sit in. Jack was getting ready to go on the road with Lou Donaldson when he moved out to California.

The word was out on the street that he had just gotten there from New York. I went to hear him, and he was burning. We became friends and we remain so to this day. He played with the Free Spirits when Larry Coryell and those guys started that band. They had all moved out to California. They were really the first fusion band.

He profoundly influenced my drumming. He taught me to swing fat with a greasy feel. The accent was on how nasty a beat you could play on the swing side. He taught me about Elvin Jones, and he showed me how to "tip" and stay loose - not real busy, just swinging real nice without a whole lot going on. Hopefully I was able to incorporate what I learned from him into my playing and make it my own. Everyone owes it to themselves to hear Jack. He also worked with Vince Guaraldi. He lives in Montana now.

About Vince Lateano, Philly Joe Jones & song form:

Vince Lateano was born in Sacramento and moved to San Francisco in 1966. He played with Cal Tjader for years and also with Vince Guaraldi, Woody Shaw, Chet Baker, Zoot Sims, the Woody Herman Orchestra, the Don Piestrup big band and many others. He was a real positive influence on the Bay Area jazz scene, and a class act as a person. When I first met him in 1967 he was playing with Ike Cole, Nat "King" Cole's brother. He had a great sound and he was swinging his ass off. Vince is truly one of the greatest big band drummers in the world. He plays great Latin and his jazz drumming is killin'. Everyone who comes to the Bay area knows he's the cat to call.

Philly Joe Jones was his man, and if anybody wants to know about Joe, they should ask Vince. He hipped me to what Philly Joe was about, you know, the Wilcoxson thing. [Charles Wilcoxon's rudimentary studies for the snare drum.] Philly played all those ruffs and drags. He used rudiments to tell his story. I checked out his phrasing, his humor and his logic. Philly killed me 'cause he played in the cracks.

Through my friendship with Vince I gained a deeper perspective about Max Roach, Philly and Art Blakey. Through studying their phrasing I learned how to set up song forms. It's like diagramming sentences. In the inner workings of the dialogue between the drums and the main soloist, you're not only responding to what he's playing, but you're also sending up signals and sign posts addressing the song form. It becomes like a chess game except you're all playing on the same team.

The more you're in touch with the history of jazz, the deeper the conversation you can have. The song forms, jazz language and an overview of the history of the music and the people who pioneered it are essential for a good foundation. I don't play a lot of the licks the guys before me played because I have too much respect for them and the tradition. However, because I have a deep foundation in the roots of jazz, it frees me up to play my own ideas, with a deep confidence that I'm enhancing the music from my own point of view.

This is what gave me the power to improvise all the way through "Actual Proof." People ask me about that recording, and they usually ask me from a drumming perspective, but an understanding of the roots is where it's really coming from - everything from Chick Webb till now.

David Garibaldi and Gaylord Birch:

When I developed my funk style in the Bay Area there were two other guys who were playing a similar style: Dave Garibaldi and Gaylord Birch. That was like the Bay Area style. When you walked by a night club, that's what you heard at that time. It was a really exciting period.

I first heard David Garibaldi in 1971. I considered myself a jazz guy who was experimenting with funk. When I heard him with Tower Of Power, it was so great, I was shocked. He was just so funky! He was so funky I almost passed out, and that's true. I love Dave Garibaldi's drumming. I guess what made my style different is that my music is rooted in jazz.

The other drummer who was into this Bay Area style at that time was a really great drummer named Gaylord Birch. He was a strong performer who played funk and jazz and he had a red hot spirit. He was so fiercely hot that it was scary. What made him magnificent was that he had hands like Sugar Ray Robinson. To watch him was gorgeous, his movement around the set was so graceful it reminded me of Sugar Ray. He put shots together that were uncanny and he could raise the spirit so high, you would jump for joy. This guy was an amazing drummer.

He played with the Pointer Sisters and with Cold Blood, but really, he played in his own bands and other people's bands and organ groups around Oakland, and that's where you got to hear the real stuff. That other stuff was great but it was produced and he had to do like we all did, he had to deal with the business. But at home, in the back alley, is where you could really hear Gaylord get down. He was frightening.