Paul Motian RIP

[Trumpet Guy]

What a sad loss Huge loss...

Edited November 22, 2011 by Trumpet Guy

[paul secor]

Is there a confirmation for this? Haven't been able to find one.

[Christiern]

I am very sorry to hear that—he was such a nice guy and an exceptional percussionist. A few years ago, he dropped by my apartment (he lived up the street) and left me a first draft of an autobiography. It needed work, but it had the elements of an absorbing story. I wonder if he did more with it. Anyone know?

[Pete C]

Nice guy indeed. I had the pleasure of chatting with him for a while when we ended up sharing a table at Birdland during a Kenny Wheeler big band gig.

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Paul Motian

Birth name Paul Motian

Born 25 March 1931 (1931-03-25) (age 80)

Origin Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Died November 22 2011

Stephen Paul Motian[1] (25 March 1931 - November 22 2011, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and raised in Providence, Rhode Island), is an American jazz drummer, percussionist and composer of Armenian extraction.

This page was last modified on 22 November 2011 at 15:52.

Edited November 22, 2011 by Pete C

[CJ Shearn]

damn.......... RIP

[clifford_thornton]

Called my guy in the business in NY to get confirmation. We'll see.

I have seen nothing other than Wikipedia reporting this... but a huge loss if so.

[JSngry]

Hate to see him gone, if he in fact has left...

[paul secor]

His passing wasn't noted on Wikipedia when I looked a half hour ago. I see it is now. Hope it's not true.

[clifford_thornton]

Yeah, it's all over the Facebook musicians' community so...

[skeith]

What a tremendous musician and composer and what a history!! He will be missed.

[mjzee]

Very sad. RIP.

[colinmce]

Wow, a shock. I am so sad. One of the undisputed masters of his instrument.

[MomsMobley]

Terrific drummer, sometimes ** HIGHLY ** questionable bandleader.

Granted, dude has to work but how you go from Charles Brackeen and David Izenzon to...

...effin' Lovano & Frisell (& speaking of Monk, that group's Monk album is TERRIBLE-- Paul included--

I dunno.

Besides the Brackeen sides, I'll put on some Bley or Liberation Music Orchectra to remember.

Yeah, it's all over the Facebook musicians' community so...

[Pete C]

Well, I'll have to disagree with MM. I think the Electric Bebop Band was a fine group, and the trio with Frisell & Lovano one of the great small groups of the last 20 years. Technically the trio with Bley & Peacock was a cooperative group, even if most people think of it as Bley's trio. And that, IMO, is THE great piano trio of the past 20 or so years.

[Joe]

Motian was among the most truly poetic of musicians; sad to hear he is gone, but what a recorded legacy he left...

[brownie]

Very sad to hear this!

He was on so many of very favorite records!

[colinmce]

I'm light on his leader dates, but I will certainly be spinning him with George Russell, Lee Konitz, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley and Geri Allen today. Links on a chain breaking each day ...

[John L]

RIP

[alocispepraluger102]

Terrific drummer, sometimes ** HIGHLY ** questionable bandleader.

Granted, dude has to work but how you go from Charles Brackeen and David Izenzon to...

...effin' Lovano & Frisell (& speaking of Monk, that group's Monk album is TERRIBLE-- Paul included--

I dunno.

Besides the Brackeen sides, I'll put on some Bley or Liberation Music Orchectra to remember.

Yeah, it's all over the Facebook musicians' community so...

my sentiments, exactly!!!! thanks.

[J.A.W.]

Whoa, that's bad news. I've just been listening to a few albums with him as a sideman. Very sad.

Edited November 22, 2011 by J.A.W.

[GA Russell]

RIP. A giant.

[alocispepraluger102]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/arts/music/20moti.html?pagewanted=all

By BEN RATLIFFPublished: January 20, 2006THE drummer Paul Motian doesn't get on airplanes anymore. Once, in the mid-90's, he took a three-week tour with 35 flights. By 2003 he was booking himself with three different bands all over Europe and Japan. He decided he was sick of traveling.

Enlarge This Image

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The jazz drummer Paul Motian, leader of three different ensembles, in his Central Park West apartment. After many decades on the road, he has decided to stay close to home.

Audio Clips: (mp3)

• 'Maryland' by Baby Dobbs

• 'Tom Tom Workout' by Baby Dobbs

• 'Carolina Moon' by Theolonious Monk

• 'Delilah' by Clifford Brown and Max Roach

Selected Paul Motian Recordings(January 20, 2006)

Forum: Jazz

It's not just long distances. "I don't even go to New Jersey or Brooklyn anymore, man," he said defiantly one recent rainy midday, looking west toward the Hudson River from the window of his Central Park West apartment. He is 74, and has lived in the same spot for nearly 37 years, most of that time alone.

Now, Mr. Motian wants only to hear his own drum sound clearly. He has found that at the Village Vanguard, where he will play next week, he can.

It is an unusual sound. It does not limit any part of the drum set to a particular role. Mr. Motian has two ride cymbals, one of which he has been using since the 1950's; he gets a rich, dark, nuanced sound from it. He uses no padding or muffling in his 20-inch bass drum, and with it he can get a remarkable, deep, loud, loose noise, almost a splat - a reminder that a bass drum is an instrument of emphasis, not just timekeeping. And for timekeeping, he plays whatever moves into his imagination. Four beats could be marked by a few snare-drum hits, a few clenches of the high-hat and a couple of combinations; in the next bar, he might play small military rolls and one lone cymbal. He has a careful style, but he is free within it.

He works mostly with three of his own groups: his trio with the guitarist Bill Frisell and the saxophonist Joe Lovano, which has grown steadily more influential over 21 years; Trio 2000 + 1, with the bassist Larry Grenadier and the saxophonist Chris Potter, the plus-one being the enigmatic Japanese pianist Masabumi Kikuchi (or lately, the singer Rebecca Martin); and the group formerly known as the Electric Bebop Band, now called the Paul Motian Band, with the odd structure of three guitarists, two tenor saxophonists, bass and drums. That is the group that will play next week at the Vanguard; simultaneously, it will be releasing a new album, "Garden of Eden," on ECM.

Small and bald, with excellent posture - he runs a few miles in Central Park nearly every day - Mr. Motian practices rapid, streetwise self-deprecation, cussing constantly. That, and a nail-gun laugh, give him the demeanor of an old-school hipster. I have heard him call a room full of people, at one time, "man." (As in "Hey, thanks for coming, man!")

But he can't be reduced that easily. History has shaken him out as one of the greatest drummers in all of jazz - a select group that would include, say, Max Roach and Roy Haynes. These days, Mr. Motian's playing seems to get beyond styles particularly associated with any era of jazz. Spare and never facile, as natural as breathing, Mr. Motian's constant flow of improvisation can seem to get beyond thinking in general. At the moments of the highest abstraction in his playing, there is the greatest sensitivity, and always the implication of a pulse. Jazz, mostly, is about testing the integrity of a song's frame. Mr. Motian appears to feel that if you truly respect the frame, you can put anything inside it.

About half of one of his sets tends to be original compositions. An amateur pianist since the middle of his tenure as the drummer in Keith Jarrett's quartet during the late 1960's and 70's, he has written dozens of excellent melodies, flowing and terse. (The other half consists of tunes by jazz composers he admires, Thelonious Monk or Bud Powell or Charles Mingus, or popular standards.) He doesn't overcompose, likes hearing his music liberally interpreted, and lets his band members do what they want.

'I Know Your Secret'

Mr. Motian is not advancing any great theories about his style. One day during a recording session a few years ago, Hank Jones, the wise old pianist, took him aside. "I know your secret," he whispered. Mr. Motian told this story with a baffled shrug. "I wish I knew what he meant," he said. "Wow!"

Asked to listen to some recordings and talk about them, he came up with a fantastically judicious list. He kept claiming not to have an aptitude for thinking about music analytically. Then it was clear that he knew exactly what to talk about: he just wanted it to drift up on its own, without his having to point it out.

Mr. Motian grew up in Providence, R.I., hearing big bands at the Metropolitan Theater in downtown Providence and at Rhodes on the Pawtuxet, a dance space just outside the city. He entered the Navy in 1950 during the Korean War, as a better option than being drafted into the Army. It first enabled him to attend the Navy School of Music in Washington, which he attended briefly and remembers as "a farce."

He sailed around the Mediterranean for two and a half years in the admiral's band of the Seventh Fleet, and then was stationed in Brooklyn in the fall of 1953. Discharged a year later, he moved to Ninth Street in the East Village. His share of the rent was $12.50 a month. He collected unemployment, ate potato knishes and played at jam sessions.

The first piece Mr. Motian wanted to hear connected to the days of playing marches in the Navy. It is from Baby Dodds's "Talking and Drum Solos," a documentary record made for Folkways in 1946 by the jazz historian Fred Ramsey. Baby Dodds was the great New Orleans drummer of the 1920's and 30's who worked with <a href="http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=2289&inline=nyt-per" title="" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102); ">Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Johnny Dodds, his brother; he became celebrated a second time in New York during the 1940's Dixieland revival. The 10-inch record, on which Dodds discusses his history and technique, is a little primer on different rhythms for different drums. Cueing up the record on his turntable, Mr. Motian started with Dodds's solo version of the traditional New Orleans march tune "Maryland."

His point, in singling out "Maryland," was not about surface flash, technique or speed. It was much simpler. While playing a march rhythm on the snare drum all the way through, Dodds delineates the verse from the bridge by pumping a bass drum on the bridge but not on the verses. That's all. "I guess my point is that it makes a difference," he said. "He's in a different part of the song."

What about that cymbal sound, I asked, the one tap at the end of each section. Why is it so soft? Was Dodds, who worked during the earliest days of jazz recording, just respecting the sensitivity of the microphones? "No, I don't think so," Mr. Motian replied. "You know, the drummers in those days - I don't think they bashed the cymbals like they do now. It's delicate. It's a cymbal, man. It's not a jackhammer."

He took the needle off the record. "The first drum set I had was made during World War II. It didn't even have metal. It had wooden rims. My drum sound was closer to that than it is to my sound now. I wasn't that aware of sound. Not like I am now."

Piano Trio

In 1955 Mr. Motian met the pianist Bill Evans. A few years later Evans formed his own trio, with Mr. Motian and eventually Scott LaFaro on bass, which destabilized the pyramid structure of the normal piano trio, increasing the mobility of the bassist and drummer around the leader. Mr. Motian loved it, especially when LaFaro was in the group, and it was steady work: his diaries from 1962 show that he played 251/2 weeks with Evans that year. Among their recordings was a genuine 20th-century landmark, "Sunday at the Village Vanguard."

That period, the late 50's and early 60's, was the busiest of his life. Mr. Motian played often with other bandleaders too - Stan Getz, Lee Konitz, Lennie Tristano, Martial Solal, Zoot Sims, Eddie Costa, Johnny Griffin. For one week in Boston, in 1960, he got to play with Thelonious Monk. (Elvin Jones was supposed to be the drummer, but he went missing.)

Mr. Motian chose Monk's version of "Carolina Moon," an old waltz commonly understood as cornpone. Monk rethought it when he recorded it in 1952. He plays the end of the waltz melody as a short piano introduction, and then bass and drums crash in, playing a speedy four-four. In the middle of the tune the drummer, Max Roach, slows down to midtempo four-four, but the soloists, Lou Donaldson, Kenny Dorham and Lucky Thompson, continue to play in three. Listening to it, Mr. Motian turned on like a lamp. He didn't have much to say; instead, he clapped and counted all the way through, laughing.

Monk was an easy boss. He paid Mr. Motian $200 for the week, good wages, and didn't demand much. One night he asked Mr. Motian to sing him his cymbal beat. He did, and Monk thought about it and sang a corrected version back to him, with a tiny bit more emphasis on the last stroke of the triplet.

One of His Idols

Max Roach used to live a few blocks away from Mr. Motian on Central Park West, and has long been one of his idols. (Mr. Roach is seven years older.) When Mr. Motian finally joined the New York jazz scene, in 1955, Mr. Roach, who was the great drummer of bebop's first wave, was already taking that music into a new territory with the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet.

Mr. Motian saw the band play a lot. "I went to hear them once," Mr. Motian said of that group, "and I think Sonny Rollins was on tenor. I was with this bass player I used to play with a lot, Al Cotton, and he said: 'Look at Max. Watch: when he's playing he uses his whole body. He's exercising when he's playing. He's moving around. He's not just sitting there. It's not just in the wrist, in the hands. It's the whole body.' It was the mid-50's when I got turned on to that: the drums and me should be one thing, you know. It's part of me. From head to fingernails to the end of my toes, man. The drums, it's all me."

He wanted to hear the Victor Young movie theme "Delilah," a midtempo minor-key ballad, from the Brown-Roach band's first album, recorded in 1954. It has incredible clarity: the definition of each section makes it shine like a hit pop song. "It's so organized, man," Mr. Motian said. "Arranged so beautiful. Simple, but great."

There's a Max Roach solo in the middle, for an entire chorus. Just as Baby Dodds did - and just as Sid Catlett did on another tune Mr. Motian played for me that day, an out-of-print recording of "I Found a New Baby" - the drummer indicates the structure of the composition in his solo, changing his patterns to mark its divisions. I suggested that a thread was emerging here, kind of an unusual one. He smiled a little bit, and raised one eyebrow, and kept talking about Max Roach. "He plays different sections of a song, he points it out to you. No confusion at all. You know what I mean?"

Kenny Clarke and Mr. Roach were the first great drummers of bebop, lining out the pulse on the ride cymbal rather than the bass drum; suddenly jazz drumming became higher-pitched, and more flexible. Mr. Motian idolized Clarke, too, and got to know him in Paris in the 1980's, a few years before Clarke died. Clarke played with a Miles Davis group for the 1957 soundtrack to the Louis Malle film noir "Ascenseur Pour l'Échafaud," and Mr. Motian is partial to the album. We listened to "Motel," a fast trio improvisation with trumpet, bass and drums, based on the chords of "Sweet Georgia Brown." Clarke plays with brushes on a snare drum, varying his patterns within the same rhythm all the way through. There's not one cymbal crash, no bass drum, but Clarke is dazzling. For a musician who likes to boil things down, it is justification.

"Just to get so much music and so much feeling and so much swing from the minimum amount of drums, man: that's incredible," Mr. Motian said. "There's so much music there, just on a snare drum. It's like a symphony to me."

[RDK]

Terrible news. RIP

[jeffcrom]

A sad day.

[Guy Berger]

Very sad, though I was worried given his recent absence from the Vanguard where in recent years he seemed to play every month.

I first got into Paul's playing via Keith Jarrett's American quartet, then began investigating his work as a leader. I saw him with Lovano and Frisell a bunch of times, but also with a few other lineups. He was also an interesting composer.

RIP.

Guy