How Milford Graves Reawakened the Spirit of the Drum
How Milford Graves Reawakened the Spirit of the Drum
Late percussionist s radical approach galvanized everyone from Lou Reed to Albert Ayler, and built a bridge between music and the healing arts
Hank Shteamer, provided by
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In September of 2008, an unusual performance took place at downtown New York club Le Poisson Rouge. At stage right, opposite fellow six-string adventurer Marc Ribot, sat Lou Reed, conjuring clouds of free-rock energy from his guitar. Behind them, avant-garde mainstay John Zorn sent forth piercing, impassioned blasts of alto sax. And at the center of it all, churning with the fury of a whirlpool and dancing across his hand-painted drum kit with the control and flair of a flamenco master, was Milford Graves the percussionist, healer, and interdisciplinary seeker who Zorn had once called “basically a 20th-century shaman,” and who died on Friday at 79 after a battle with amyloid cardi
Milford Graves (1941–2021)
Groundbreaking free-jazz percussionist and polymath Milford Graves died today of congestive heart failure at the age of seventy-nine, as reported by NPR’s Lars Gotrich. Described by composer and saxophonist John Zorn as “basically a twentieth-century shaman,” Graves possessed an astounding intellect that was matched only by his curiosity: Apart from contributing heavily to the emergence of free jazz, he was an accomplished martial artist, herbalist, inventor, and visual artist who for decades recorded his own heartbeats in order to study and manipulate them to various ends, including his own art and a patented medical procedure. Only two weeks ago did “Milford Graves: A Mind-Body Deal,” a major exhibition of his work at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, draw to a close after a five-month run.
Milford Graves, the pioneering jazz drummer, professor, inventor, herbalist, visual and martial artist, has died, as NPR Music’s Lars Gotrich reports. He was 79. In 2018, Graves was diagnosed with amyloid cardiomyopathy colloquially known as stiff heart syndrome and got told he had six months to live.
Born in Queens in 1941, Graves was a pioneer of free jazz, making dozens of recordings over the span of his life (including
The Giuseppi Logan Quartet, Albert Ayler’s
Love Cry, and Sonny Sharrock’s
Black Woman) along with various television and film projects. He was a Professor Emeritus of Music at Bennington College, where he taught from 1973-2012. Known for drawing music influences from around the world, he mastered African polyrhythms and studied the Indian tabla and Latin-jazz timbalas. He helped found the the New York Art Quartet in the 1960s with saxophonist John Tchicai, trombonist Roswell Rudd, and bassist Lewis Worrell, and is credited with helping to liberate jazz
In
Soundworks Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958–1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially.
Soundwork is Reed’s term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. Through analyses of Langston Hughes’s collaboration with Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka’s work with the New York Art Quartet, Jayne Cortez’s albums with the Firespitters, and the multimedia projects of Archie Shepp, Matana Roberts, Cecil Taylor, and Jeanne Lee, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requires attending to it as the