Roy Haynes Meets Mr. Raucous

I despair at the task of making you understand what drummer Roy Haynes, who just died, meant to jazz. You need to really understand jazz and jazz history to fathom the impossible sweep and significance and miracle of who he was and what he accomplished.

This was not just jazz hero #600 dropping dead. Not "he played so well." Not a "long and storied career". Not "beloved the world over." Let me try to explain Roy Haynes via analogy to a realm you probably know better: writing.

Say Roy Haynes anonymously wrote Beowulf. And, as a cohort of Chaucer, composed one of the Canterbury Tales. Say he was an important member of the Continental Congress helping Jefferson revise the Declaration of Independence, and a pioneering author of wicked Victorian political satire who'd given Oscar Wilde his first break. Say he went on to write Emmy-winning screenplays for Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, and sip absinthe with Hemingway (who looked up to him like a hero) in Key West. Then say, at age 90, you found him writing fiendishly intricate postmodern novels as vibrantly modern as any of the young leading lights. Better, even.

Say he did all this not like some crafty operator making strategic pivots - donning a bunch of wigs and making superficial course changes - but that every single step was brilliant and right and slick and AHEAD of the curve. He sounded not just like twelve different guys from twelve different eras, but like the BEST guy from each of twelve different eras.

It seems ridiculous. Nobody ever did that. Nobody ever could do that. It sounds like I'm exaggerating. But Roy Haynes, who'd played easy, lyrical swing with Lester Young and frantic bebop with Charlie Parker and Blues Rock with the Allman Brothers and modern jazz with Chick Corea and fiendishly complex late-stage intellectuality with the smuggest recent youngsters, truly was that guy. Nobody else in jazz ever did anything remotely like this. Nobody in any field of endeavor that I'm aware of ever did anything remotely like this.

Also, there was my minuscule cameo appearance. 

One night Roy walked into my weekly blues gig - my first steady work out of school - in a trashy little gin mill in the ghetto of Roosevelt Long Island where Eddie Murphy, just a couple years prior, had done his first standup (there was an 8x10 glossy in the manager's office made out "To Mr. Hicks' Place, where I lost my comedy virginity, from Eddie") and Roy was, as always, dressed like a million bucks and had his slick sports car parked out front, and I wasn't the least bit surprised to see him there because Roy Haynes was everywhere and into everything and knew everyone (the garrulous bartender at Skylark Lounge where I hung out when not gigging was Roy's best friend because of course he was), and I, a cocky lad compensating for deep shyness and insecurity, especially here in this ghetto bar at the height of a dangerous crack epidemic, overcompensated by rocking the joint with trombone so raucous and funky that our band's guitarist, Bo Diddly Junior (no relation), who played his axe with every part of his body including his crotch, occasionally took me aside to suggest I tone it down a notch, and on this night Roy was joking around in the back room with the club's manager and a small entourage as I ducked in on a break to make sure my horn was out of everybody's way when conversation suddenly stopped and I immediately began to sweat buckets, sensing that I was about to take some focus, and, sure enough, Roy said "Hey man sound good out there" and I froze. Absolutely froze. I couldn't respond, I couldn't acknowledge, I couldn't even let myself imagine that it was me he was addressing. Must be anyone else.

No more Mr. Cocky, just an awkward white suburban kid right out of school feeling mortified that Haynes, a subtle, poetic musician with a sublimely light touch, had walked in to hear me playing the most raucous fatback and collard greens trombone, and, at age 24, I wasn't wise enough to realize that he bloody well knew I was simply playing the gig as it needed to be played - anything but subtle! - and furthermore heard the poetry latently beneath it all, but I was committed to my embarrassment at being caught with my pants down, so to speak, despite the seemingly solid counter-evidence of "Hey man sound good out there", which only confused me further - was he addressing Mr. Raucous? - leaving me unable to respond or look up or breathe or move or live.

I went on to exist in the periphery of a lot of Roy Haynes stuff. That bartender was my buddy, too, though we never hung together with Roy. I was friends with many of the young players Roy hired to play in his band. I caught a bunch of his gigs, marveling at his pliancy and otherworldly, Faust-bargain-level touch and finesse. As he climbed through his 70s, 80s, and 90s, Roy never failed to sound far more modern and youthfully, nimbly energetic than anyone from my generation.

I never exchanged a word with him. I'd botched my chance, but was quietly present in his world, popping up in the little hood joints unknown to fans or jazz writers where Roy let his hair down between concert tours. Part of that furniture. And it never bothered me much, because there are far worse things than being comfortable furniture for Roy Haynes. If you're gonna Zelig, that's how you Zelig.

Insiders knew that Roy Hayne's favorite record of his was "Out of the Afternoon." It was my favorite even before I learned this. I invite you to download it now and listen. It's remarkable. The blind saxophonist Roland Kirk, who is featured, was important to me, though I never got to meet him. At the same time I was blasting the paint off the gin mill in Roosevelt, I was also seeking out Kirk's surviving sidemen, wherever they were, and befriending and playing with them, poetically and subtly. Roy never stopped into any of those gigs, alas (though those farflung clubs were certainly on his radar, because nothing wasn't on Roy's radar for, christ, literally 99 years), so I never got to be Mr. Poetry for Roy Haynes.


So check this out. This guy 1. is EIGHTY SIX YEARS OLD, and 2. started out with Lester Young, who was one generation removed from "When the Saints Go Marching In”: