We’re moving quite a bit closer to the present day with the subject of this month’s ‘Groovers and Shakers’. Buddy Miles was very much a child of the sixties inasmuch as that was when he came to people’s notice, including mine. It’s no secret he’s listed up there at the top of my favourite drummers
We know Billy Gussak was born in 1920 but exactly when and where seems to be something of a mystery. He was a ‘Swing’ drummer during the thirties who had an exceedingly proper gig with the CBS Staff band. He played under a conductor called Leith Stevens (who was responsible for the music soundtracks for
If you think about it, there has been a rich tradition of drummers as entertainers and comedians. In the UK, Norman Wisdom, Michael Bentine and Peter Sellers were all serious comedians (pun intended) who could also play the drums. The Americans had Mel Brooks, Sammy Davis jnr, Jerry Lewis, Mickey Rooney and even Johnny Carson.
Freddie Below was born in Chicago on September 19th, 1926 and is credited with inventing the art of blues drumming as we know it, and for slipping the all-important offbeat into it at the appropriate place. But of course he didn’t begin as a blues drummer; he took up drums while he was in a
Ronnie Tutt was born on March 12th, 1938 in Dallas Texas. His mother started him with tap-dancing lessons at three years old after he started singing along to the family’s radio and record player, and he kept up these lessons for eight years. During this time he became interested in the playing side of
Roger Hawkins, born on October 15th, 1945 in Mishawaka, Indiana, is the drummer who played on a great many of the songs that I (and many other drummers of my ilk) love to play live. When someone in the band I’m playing with at a gig calls out: “Respect”, “Chain Of Fools”, “I’ll Take You
I’ve been waiting patiently to get to Carmine because he’s very much of my generation and I know there’s far more to him (and the effect he has had on music) than meets the eye. For my money, he had a great deal more to do with the development of ‘rock’ drumming than he’s been
Kenneth Spearman Clarke was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on January 2nd, 1914 to Charles Spearman and Martha Grace Scott. His mother was a pianist who taught him the piano until her sad death when he was just six years old. Things got worse after this disaster when his father left the family and Kenny was
‘Chick’ Webb was born in Baltimore, Maryland on February 10th, 1905 to William and Mary Webb. From an early age he suffered from tuberculosis of the spine, after a fall downstairs which deformed his back making him short and hunchbacked. Unfortunately at the time, TB was scandalously endemic in Baltimore amongst black people. Having
It’s a fair cop, I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know as much about Gene Krupa as I did about many of his contemporaries whom I’ve already written of in Groovers and Shakers. That said, other than the obvious, my knowledge seems to have been gleaned from black and white photographs of him in magazines
