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One of my favorite drummers of all time is Roy Haynes, and the method by which we jazz musicians learn this music is by copying the masters (like Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones, Max Roach, etc.) who came before us. For some reason, Roy's soloing style struck a chord with me (ha!) and I fell in love with his playing from the very beginning.

Sometimes it's extremely hard to figure out what one of the greats is doing on the recordings, but I always found Roy's style as crystal clear as the sound he gets from the instrument. I used to transcribe a bunch of his solos in order to learn and internalize his vocabulary on the drum set, and I recently came across a solo I transcribed back in the early '90's.

This Roy Hayne's solo (.pdf) on Thelonious Monk's composition, "Evidence," (download the MP3 here) appears on Monk's 1958 recording, Misterioso, which features Monk on piano, Roy on drums, Johnny Griffin on tenor sax, & Ahmed Abdul-Mali on bass. The solo takes place over two choruses, each of which consists of four sections - AABA (the "A" section is the main melody, and the "B" section, or "bridge," is a relief of sorts, taking us back to the original "A" section). Each section is 8 bars long, so one chorus is 8x4 bars = 32 total bars for one chorus. Since his solo occurs over two choruses, you could say that his solo is 64 bars long.

Check it out and tell me what you think!

By the way, Monk's "Evidence" is just a melody placed on top of the harmony of the original song by Jesse Greer. Can you name the original song?

Lastly, there is a new 3-disk set + DVD of Haynes' music, covering the entire career of this incredible musician. As Ben Ratliff recently commented in the NY Times, "Even great drummers usually don't get the box-set treatment, with tracks licensed from all the other people's records they played on. (There's still no career box set for Max Roach or Elvin Jones, for example."

Ratliff goes on to say, "For good stretches of their lives they work when and where they can, 'playing for the benefit of the band,' in the phrase of the New Orleans drummer Baby Dodds." From Haynes' playing with Louis Armstrong to John Coltrane and his many bands, it's all here in the box set. Don't miss it!

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