Defending The Drum Solo

Colin Fleming insists that its bad rap is unearned:

In jazz, unlike rock, the drum solo is afforded the utmost respect. The genre’s percussionists pore over the work of giants of the form like Art Blakey, and with good reason. Consider Blakey’s solo on “Bu’s Delight” from 1963, a mini-masterpiece of pacing, narrative, and sonic architecture. The cymbals, maintaining the beat from earlier in the track, provide a low-key intro, to which Blakey adds tom rolls that have this spooky, hoodoo vibe to them, something for Macbeth’s witches to dance to. The rolls coalesce into a riff that advances and then retreats, as though feeling out its environment, gaining more confidence in the process, and then giving in to pure and mighty blues funk, a soundtrack to kick up a jig under moonlight. This is the drum solo at its best.

But plenty of jazzers do indulge in the same excess that made so many rock drum solos the kind of thing that Animal skewered on The Muppets, bashing away like a furry Dionysius at the wine fair. Lightyear Entertainment’s recent album of Buddy Rich solos—just solos—illustrates this well. It’s a record meant to blow your mind once and then never be listened to again.

You can do so above. Update from a reader:

With the futbol ongoing in Brazil, I thought you needed more of a Latin tinge – so, live at the North Sea Jazz Festival in 2002, here are: Michel Camilo (Dominican) on piano, the great Horacio “El Negro” Hernandez (Cuban) on drums, and Anthony Jackson (U.S.A.!!) on bass: