Louis Hayes

[Mark Stryker]

Detroit Free Press

August 25, 2002

Riding the rhythm

The ever-hip Louis Hayes, who made a name for himself during an era of great rummers, returns to his hometown to headline the Detroit jazz festival

BYLINE: MARK STRYKER FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

DATELINE: NEW YORK

It's almost impossible to look hip behind the wheel of a rented Ford Windstar. But nobody makes the scene quite like Louis Hayes, a leading drummer in jazz since arriving in New York 46 summers ago as a 19-year-old Detroiter with quick hands, sharp ears and a driving cymbal beat that would become his trademark.

On this sweltering July Fourth, Hayes wears a stylish muscle shirt, linen pants and oversized designer glasses. Riding shotgun is his wife, Nisha, a Manhattan real estate agent. Hayes performs in Atlantic City on the boardwalk in 9 hours. It's little more than a 2-hour trip from Manhattan, but Hayes has insisted on an early start because he follows a strict preperformance regimen of practice, rest and concentration. "He's always on a schedule," says Nisha. "I went to Paris with him, and he's been 50 times and had never seen the Eiffel Tower. I had to drag him there."

Hayes heads for the Lincoln Tunnel. Nisha points out the correct lane, but Hayes -- who is not as attentive a driver as he is a drummer -- comes within a few feet of merging into a bus. Nisha looks horrified: "Louis, he doesn't care that you play the drums!" Hayes barely raises an eyebrow.

At 65, Hayes returns home to Detroit this week -- fortunately, on an airplane -- as a headliner at the Ford Detroit International Jazz Festival. He'll appear Friday with a veteran quintet, the Legends of the Bandstand, with tenor saxophonist David (Fathead) Newman, pianist Cedar Walton, bassist Earl May and trombonist and native Detroiter Curtis Fuller, a running buddy of Hayes' since 1955.

Hayes' resume is a monument to his stature. He anchored two of the defining bands of East Coast hard bop, leaving Detroit in 1956 to join Horace Silver's Quintet, then jumping to the Cannonball Adderley Quintet in 1959. Hayes played with Oscar Peterson for three years in the mid-'60s and by the end of the decade was coleading a group with peers Freddie Hubbard and Joe Henderson. In the 1970s, Hayes led a series of artistically vital if financially challenged groups. In the '80s, with a daughter entering college, he returned to a sideman role with pianist McCoy Tyner. Since 1989, he has worked and recorded steadily with his own groups.

He has appeared on hundreds of records. The late '50s and early '60s, when independent labels like Blue Note, Riverside, Prestige and Savoy might call Hayes two or three times a week, were an especially fertile period. "I was so fortunate," Hayes says. "I came to New York with a job and worked straight through with a major group all the way up until 1968. I wasn't written about all that much, and I had some tricky times later on in the '70s. But the major thing is being creative and making history. That's still the way I look at things."

Hayes came of age in an era saturated with great drummers, but he quickly took his place near the top of the pecking order. He was a stylist who corralled his influences into a recognizable voice that married powerful swing with a graceful touch and a hipster's wit. Though not an innovator, Hayes has influenced drummers of several generations, including the late Tony Williams. Before he reshaped jazz drumming in the 1960s, Williams would take the train from Boston to New York just to hang out with Hayes on weekends.

The heart of Hayes' style is the unique way he phrases the ride cymbal beat -- the ding-dinga-ding rhythm at the core of modern jazz. The cymbal beat is like a drummer's DNA; no two will be exactly alike. Hayes plays with a crisp but elusive quality, like a hummingbird. He places his beat just ahead of the basic pulse, never committing the sin of rushing, but generating the forward momentum of a downhill skier. "Louis is the kind of a guy, even to this day, if you were to handcuff his left hand to the drum stool and just have him play time on the cymbal, it would swing just as much," says drummer Kenny Washington, 44, a Hayes protege.

Hayes also turned heads in New York with his quick reflexes and the clever way he would accent a melody or respond to a soloist with a sleight-of-hand rhythm. He mastered the art of "tippin' " -- swinging with fierce intensity but soft-shoe elegance. Washington notes that Hayes also was the first drummer to smooth out ultra-fast tempos into a continuous wave of rhythm.

The night before his Atlantic City gig, Hayes talked about his life at his home in Riverdale, a leafy neighborhood in the northwest corner of the Bronx. The Hayeses own a 10th-floor co-op with a spectacular view of the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge. The apartment is decorated with African masks and sculptures, vaguely Afro-centric paintings and photos of family and friends.

Hayes is a compact man, in good shape save a slight paunch, looking 15 years younger than he is. He walks with a streetwise gait and slight shoulder hunch that gives the impression of a coiled spring. To beat the heat on this sultry New York night, he wears shorts with no shirt; his forearms are as toned as a boxer's. In conversation, he stares at you intensely, with his eyes wide open and a blank expression on his face. He responds in discursive fragments, and if he agrees with you, he'll nod his head and exclaim, "That's mellow-D!" or "You're right on it!"

"Louis deals with everyone the same way," says Rick Germanson, a young pianist who often works with Hayes. "He doesn't put on an act around younger or older musicians or critics or record producers. He's always himself." Fuller warns not to be fooled by Hayes' laid-back demeanor: "He's very knowledgeable, even if he doesn't seem like it. He'll stand back in reserve and appraise the situation, and then make his comment."

Hayes grew up on Detroit's west side. Both parents were avocational musicians; His father, an autoworker, played drums, while his mother, who waited tables and eventually owned her own diner, played piano. Hayes started on the piano at 5 and the drums at 10. The key influence in Hayes' early development was his cousin Clarence Stamps, an accomplished drummer who grounded Hayes in technical fundamentals and taught him lessons that have stuck for life.

Hayes remembers, "He'd say, 'If anything in the band goes wrong, it's your fault. When you're playing and you look out into the audience and you don't see anyone pattin' their feet, then you're not playing (expletive). And you can't just play the drums and not know where you are in the tune. You have to be in control of the band, and you have to make music out of the drums.' "

By the time he was 15, Hayes was spending all day in the basement practicing, memorizing Charlie Parker solos and dabbling on piano and vibes. At 18, in 1955, he leapt into Detroit's major leagues, joining Yusef Lateef's quintet, along with Fuller, at Klein's Show Bar. At the same time, bassist Ernie Farrow introduced Hayes to the records of Kenny Clarke, the bebop pioneer who first moved the pulse from the bass drum to the ride cymbal. Hayes would spend hours listening to Clarke's pristine cymbal beat and hours more practicing his own version.

Meanwhile, in New York, gutsy hard bop -- an alliance of bebop and bluesy roots influences -- was brewing in the seminal bands of Art Blakey and Horace Silver. When the latter needed a drummer, the Detroit-born bassist Doug Watkins had a recommendation: "Get the baby boy out of Detroit," he told Silver. Hayes was now working with one of the most influential pianists, composers and bandleaders in jazz. Silver's formally sophisticated compositions were girded by a finger-poppin' beat, a combination ideally suited to Hayes' strengths. The money wasn't great -- $125 a week. But Hayes was young, with no responsibilities other than music.

Hayes made five classic albums with Silver before leaving in 1959 to join alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley's newly formed quintet, which mixed soul-jazz hits like "Work Song" and "Jive Samba" with more substantial hard bop. The combination proved as audience-friendly as a backyard barbecue. Hayes and bassist Sam Jones formed a dynamic duo at the heart of Adderley's band, and as their reputation soared, the pair began to show up on countless record dates together as sidemen. "Sam and I had this great rapport on and off stage," says Hayes.

"We were so similar in the way we thought about time and the way we felt the beat. He was Mr. Dependable. The sound of Sam and I playing together just laid out this red carpet for anyone who played with us."

Hayes left Adderley in 1965 when the band took a more commercial turn. In retrospect, Hayes says that he and Jones should have started their own group. Instead, both ended up joining Oscar Peterson's trio. Hayes liked Peterson personally, and the pianist's celebrity meant that Hayes' salary nearly doubled. But Peterson's scripted concept was like a train that ran on just one track, and Hayes felt stifled. He chafed under the restrictions, and Peterson often had to lecture him. Sometimes Hayes would go to a party, have a couple of drinks and lecture Peterson, who would respond by firing him -- for a day. This happened a dozen times, Hayes recalls. Since then, Hayes has generally led his own bands.

Around 2 p.m., Hayes navigates the Windstar down Atlantic Avenue to the Trump Taj Mahal, a 1,250-room hotel roughly the size of Rhode Island, with an Ali Baba decor that redefines the meaning of kitsch. A few hours later, Hayes is deep into his preconcert routine. He sits in an overstuffed purple chair with a practice pad propped up in front of him. His right hand is a blur of motion, and it takes a moment to realize that he is playing his cymbal beat at a racehorse tempo. The TV is tuned to CNN, and Hayes also answers questions as the calisthenics continue. He plays nonstop for 20 minutes, takes a 30-second break for water and then goes back to work.

Hayes practices far more today than when he was on the road 40 years ago. "The older you get, the harder things get," he says. "I could do things when I was younger that now I really have to practice to even attempt to be able to do. My peak was when I was about 40 -- I was liable to do anything. "

A few hours later, Hayes is setting up his drums at the amphitheater at the south end of the boardwalk near Chicken Bone Beach, a once-segregated playground frequented by the African-American elite before the civil rights movement. Hayes has changed into loose-fitting pale-yellow pants and shirt and a necklace adorned by a large earth-colored stone. "Wow, he sure looks good," a middle-aged woman says as she watches nearby. "How old is he?"

"Sixty-five."

"Mmm. Mmm."

The group is Hayes' Cannonball Adderley Legacy Band, a relatively new venture for him, devoted to the saxophonist's repertoire. Hayes enjoys the old tunes and is mindful that he is the sole survivor of Adderley's original 1959 group. The other members of the Legacy band, including the exciting alto saxophonist Vincent Herring, are about 30 years younger than Hayes. The group tears through a 75-minute set, with Hayes firing on all cylinders, playing with greater precision than he sometimes reveals in other settings these days; his style grew splashier during the '70s and '80s.

Hayes' right hand swarms over the cymbal; his left-hand pops snare drum accents like a pistol. As fiercely as he plays, Hayes is not flashy. His limbs stay close to his body. His head sways a little, but there are no histrionics. Hayes solos sparingly, and he doesn't even trade phrases with the horns until the fourth tune. After the set, he fields congratulations while packing his gear, stopping to shake hands, pose for pictures and chat when older fans tell tales of hearing him as a kid in Philly or New York. As the line winds down, the journalists who have been tailing him step in to say farewell.

"We're sure looking forward to hearing you at the Detroit festival," says one.

Hayes pauses before breaking into a wide grin. "OK, that's mellow-D!"

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