Greer is also a wizard with wire brushes. His mallets sweep across the tom-toms on “Caravan” (1937), conjuring a misterioso journey across the desert sands of the Middle East. He has the timing of a magician, the touch of a pickpocket, the taste of a connoisseur. Greer punctuates arrangements with inspired rickey-ticks, rustles, rimshots, and rings. Photos from the 1930s and ’40s show Greer surrounded by a symphony orchestra’s worth of percussion: snare drum, multiple tom-toms, bass drum, hi-hat, myriad cymbals, timpani, temple blocks, cowbell, gongs, and tubular bells. If no jazz band can be better than its drummer, and the Ellington Orchestra remains the finest large ensemble in jazz history, then Greer and Woodyard rank among the most underrated drummers in jazz. He does it again eight bars later, and at the end of the next eight bars defies expectations with three syncopated baps on the offbeats to cap the section.
#Backbeat definition free
At the end of the 12-bar first chorus, he crashes his cymbal on beat 4 but grabs it with his free hand to dramatically stop the sound just before the introduction of new thematic material. Greer lays down a smoldering march beat, and the way he frames the arrangement and orchestrates key moments tells a story. The RCA recording of “Black and Tan Fantasy” (1927) offers an early illustration. “When he heard a ping, he responded with the most apropos pong.” “Greer was not the best reader of music, but he was the world’s best percussionist reactor,” Ellington wrote in Music Is My Mistress. By the mid-’20s Ellington was leading his own vanguard jazz orchestra in New York, with Greer as his anchorman. in 1919, where he met his destiny: Ellington. Greer started playing drums in vaudeville along the Jersey Shore as a teenager before moving to Washington, D.C. At the same time, their skills at underscoring the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of America’s greatest vernacular orchestra sometimes overshadow just how hard they each can flat-out swing.īottom line: If no jazz band can be better than its drummer, and the Duke Ellington Orchestra remains the finest large ensemble in the history of the idiom, then Greer and Woodyard rank among the most underrated drummers in jazz.
Greer and Woodyard are more than trap-set drummers. Perhaps the demands of playing drums with Ellington-the sheer variety of rhythm, groove, color, texture, mood, and dynamics embedded within his scores-require a subtle fealty to the ensemble that makes it difficult for a drummer to stand out. Nor do they appear as widely celebrated as others within the brethren of big-band drummers, including Chick Webb, Jo Jones, Gene Krupa, Cozy Cole, Sid Catlett, Dave Tough, Buddy Rich, Sonny Payne, and Mel Lewis. Yet neither enjoys a reputation today commensurate with their role in shaping the sound of the band. Innumerable masterpieces, from “Black and Tan Fantasy,” “Caravan,” and “Harlem Air Shaft” to Ellington at Newport, Such Sweet Thunder, and Afro-Bossa, simply would not sound the same without their profound contributions. The two longest-tenured drummers with Ellington, Sonny Greer (1924-51) and Sam Woodyard (1955-66), were defining voices of the maestro’s sound world.
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