The Wire

Rashied Ali: Into stellar space

Pioneering free jazz drummer and Coltrane sideman Rashied Ali talks to Howard Mandel in New York about the rudiments of life, music and rhythm


On guitarist Rudolph Grey’s 1990 album Mask Of Light, 55-year-old drummer Rashied Ali dukes it out with the leader’s raging conceptual noise, second electric guitar warrior Alan Licht’s wash and paint-blistering saxophonist Jim Sauter, whose over-the-top squeals and from-the-guts roar might as well be plugged-in and processed shock waves from a synthesizer. Ali’s forward-plunging rhythm, which alternates thunderous bass drum rolls with needle-pointed cymbal tattoos, gives backbone to both the live track and studio cuts “Implosion-73” and “Flaming Angels” produced by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Tom Surgal and Don Fleming. Ali’s drumming is, as John Coltrane said, multi-directional. Ali supplies Grey with momentum, vertical structure and a throbbing pulse that’s never explicitly pounded out.

On Coltrane’s Interstellar Space, the pre-eminent free jazz duet recorded in February 1967, Rashied Ali matches the incomparable tenor saxophonist with texture and depth of rhythm for heft and breadth of plane, as though they’re two titans splashing the cosmos with constellations. “Mars”, “Leo”, “Venus”, “Jupiter” and “Saturn” the cuts were titled. The music remains mythic.

Sometime after Coltrane allowed Ali to join his band, supplanting if not replacing Elvin Jones in the remarkable series of late explorations prior to Trane’s death in ’67 – the same Rashied Ali who turned up in Berlin last October to dominate the Free Music Production festival with a triple trio comprising saxists Evan Parker, Peter Brötzmann and Charles Gayle, bassists Fred Hopkins, William Parker and Peter Kowald, fellow drummers Tony Oxley and Andrew Cyrille exploring every imaginable combination, like some Sadian orgy; the same jack-of-all-trades Rashied Ali who operated his own Soho (Manhattan) club Ali’s Alley, the entrepreneur behind Survival Records, accompanist to Jorma Kaukonen in the guitarist’s post-Jefferson Airplane blues band Hot Tuna; the same Rashied Ali, who as a child sang for his mother, whose open pan-like face seems guileless, whose great dark eyes threaten to see everything, whose swift percussive impulses swirl like whirlpools that would sink less-than-hearty players – this same Rashied Ali found how to play timeless time, how to ride all the rhythms at once, how to create a beat of self-expression. This knowledge steels his patience while he recovers from the pneumonia he caught in a New York City hospital ward.

“I went in for a very simple operation, but there’s a new strain of tuberculosis that’s become rampant in the hospitals and there’s pneumonia and viruses everywhere. You heard about Beaver?” – Ali’s old friend the drummer William “Beaver” Harris, unexpectedly dead in his late 50s of prostate cancer – “and Junior Cook?” – another hard bop veteran, a fixture on the scene too often taken for granted, now gone, gone, gone, with intimations of mortality like waves in his wake.
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“Man, you got to take care of yourself,” Rashied says. “I’m not going to take a gig for a few weeks, ‘cause I don’t want to play anything less than my best, less than what I can. I want to be 100 per cent.”


He’s given up a date in Philadelphia – city of his birth – with tenorist Dewey Redman, but not much else. Ali’s gigs are not so frequent (not that he’s desperate) nowadays. Why? Hell, who knows. Through the 80s he worked with the original black rock guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer, ran George Adams and bassist Sirone (who now lives in Berlin) as Phalanx, recording two albums for the Japanese DIW label. In the 70s he produced his own matte-covered albums, featuring singers Joe Lee Wilson and Royal Blue, violinist Leroy Jenkins and his own combos with altoist Carlos Ward, pianist Fred Simmons and bassist Stafford James, among others. Things were different then – not necessarily better.

“At this point where I’m now in life,” Ali says without undue modesty, “I can play what I think of. If I think of something I can do it. Just spontaneously, just like that, it just comes. It’s not like I’m groping or reaching for something. Whatever comes to my mind I can play.” He adds, “It took me years to get to that point.”

Rashied Ali’s years of playing began with youthful listening to the records of Bird, Charlie Ventura and Jazz at the Philharmonic with Illinois Jacquet and Coleman Hawkins his father brought home, and the voices of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine which his mother, a singer, loved.

“All those old records were what we played every day except Sundays, because my grand mother was a very religious lady and she didn’t want to hear no jazz on Sundays.” Ali recalls. “On Sundays I’d rather hear gospel music. And I had an aunt called Queen Esther who was a phenomenal self-taught pianist. Her husband was a drummer. As a kid I’d sit and listen to them rehearse with saxophone players. I was around music all the time.

“I started playing bongos and congas when I was ten or 11. I started playing drums when I was in the Army, which I went into when I was 16. I had a choice of being a soldier-soldier or a musician-soldier. I was really lucky. One day they called out, ‘Anybody got any musical experience?’ Here I was, knee deep in mud, doing bivouac which I hated…

“So I put up my hand, and his master sergeant gave me drum sticks and some stuff to read. I didn’t’ know what the hell it was so I asked him, ‘Could you maybe run this down for me so I get the idea?’ He looked at me, but he did it anyway. And I had good ears, I heard everything he did, so I played back what he’d played. He realized that I couldn’t read but he liked my style. I was in the Army band, the drum corps, for two years; that’s where I got my experience. After Army hours I’d play with German musicians in clubs in Nuremburg. When I got out of the service I was really into playing.

“I went home to Philly and worked with local groups, with Big Maybelle, Dick Hart and the Heartaches, a baritone sax player named Lynn Bailey, and Habibila, kind of an Earl Bostic-Louis Jordan-type sax and R&B bandleader. I found out later Trane played with him. I played with Hassan ibn Ali, a Monkish type of piano player. In ’63 I moved to New York.

“I had an ear for music, and I could remember things. When I was little my mother used to give quizzes to me and my brother Muhammad – he’s a drummer, too, lived in Europe a long time, now he’s in New York but I haven’t seen him for a year or two. We’d be at breakfast and she’d whistle a few bars of a tune and ask us. ‘What is that?’ She had fun whistling tunes, and I became a great whistler. Then I’d try to sing everything like Eddie Jefferson and those guys – ‘There I go, there I go there I go there I go…’ My mother would be very impressed, because to her that was the new music. I had a good ear for that – and if somebody played something on the drums I could tap it out to the minute.”
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“In the Army we played rudiments all day long. Cadence, they called it. We’d mix up all these different rudiments to make cadence. I knew that was the basis for drumming. And listening to Max Roach with Bird on records got me into jazz right away. I studied from Buddy Rich’s book – he was the master rudiments drummer, he had those rudiments down! He didn’t thrill me as a creative drummer, he didn’t have the hip playing Bird needed, but he had that forceful rudimentary playing every drummer needs. You gotta have a parradiddle, a drag, a triple drag, a flam-tap. It’s like playing the scales on piano.”

“Buddy Rich played a very old style beat, with that hard four-four – dum-dum-dum-dum – on the bass drum through everything. He didn’t use a ride cymbal – ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling with the sock cymbal going chim-daling, chim-daling. He played everything on the snare. But Bird required a different kind of drumming, with intermittent bass licks, like bip, ba-bip and a very soft lead, with accents on the bass drum. Kenny Clarke did this. He also moved from playing rhythms on the snare to playing a four-four on the cymbal with a one-two beat on the sock, on the two and the four: ying, da-ding, da-ding. And he improvised beats with his left hand. That was the bebop sound, the hip groove. Actually, Kenny Clarke and Max Roach and Philly Joe Jones and myself still play four-four on the bass drum, just keep us into where it is. But it’s not pronounced. It’s light, you don’t hear it, all you hear is the accents. You can kick the soloist and get him into different grooves this way. You can build, weave in and out of situations.”


But Ali, who studied with Philly Joe, went further. Discussing it he’s simply honest, candid, frank.

“Playing free is what I love to do. I was an all-around drummer, but after I got with Coltrane, well, Coltrane recognized what I was doing on the free side of playing drums, and he gave me a chance to expand on that. I play very free, but I always keep in mind where I’m at, and what kind of tempo I’m at. A layman might say, ‘hey, this stuff is out.’ But somebody who’s into music can hear the time when I play, ‘cause it’s there.

“See, I hate to repeat myself in any way; I’ll do anything to keep from repeating a phrase. So I play open, but I’m a very melodic drummer. I try to stay within the context of the song I’m playing. And I work closely with whoever I’m playing with.”

“Like Coltrane – he was an outside player but everybody knows he was also a very melodic player. He liked chords, and he liked to experiment with chords. And me – being a frustrated saxophone player, always liking piano, having a strong melodic sense maybe because when I was young I was a singer – I approach drums that way. This is my forte. When I mix the rhythm and the melody together, I get songs from my drums. A lot of what I write is from a rhythmic-melodic concept of the drums.”

Yet Ali is nothing if not spontaneous; his rhythmic free flow is organic, unforced, less as though he’s trying to play a song then as if a song just emerges.

“Yeah, well, I want to create as I go, and it just happens in the music. It’s not something I plan. It takes years of being to become that. You have to study your instrument and know what music is about to create like that. It’s the epitome of all the practicing and training. After a while, you don’t have to rely on what you know. You just rely on what you create.”
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“Because what you know, you know. It’s what you create that you don’t know. So I’m into the unknown. I’d rather jump into deep water and create than call on something I already know. And that’s the way my music comes out, ‘cause I try hard to do something different. If I find myself doing the same thing I will play anything to stop! what I already know. I want to play something that surprises even me.”

“I wasn’t always that way because I wasn’t always an experienced musician. I was learning, and there were points where I had to deal with what I knew and heard from others. But since Coltrane, I’ve been on my own. Coltrane taught me the value of being able to create.”

“Coltrane called what I do multi-directional rhythms, and called what Elvin was playing polyrhythms. When I was playing, the soloist could play whatever he felt. Slow, or fast, or middle speed as he wanted. What I played embellished the soloist, cushioned him. You can just play and don’t have to worry about where the tempo is at. It’s not a fixed tempo, it’s an open thing, and you can play wherever you want on it. Trane always felt I complimented whatever he did – he could take any avenue, and I was right there. Dynamically, too. That’s the openness I play – that’s the stuff I like doing.”

“I very seldom get to play like that. After all these years the general public is still not quite on it. I have to camouflage it in a straightforward venture, but I can play a regular jazz tune and then alter it without being obvious. A person might go, ‘Hey, what is that?’ but before they know it, they’ve got it. They’re into it, groovin’ on it. It’s too late – I pulled it off. Everybody is happy, and I’m playing the way I want to.”

“Philly Joe was the first person I heard do that, but he did it in spurts – I take it into longevity, make it happen through the whole tune. I open up and stay there. I step through a door into open time, but I’m still playing that time I started in. That’s what Trane noticed about me – when he went out, I went out, and we’d stay out until he was going back to the tune. Then I could wind down, and hit right on the one!” He slaps his hands. “We’d start the regular one-two-three-four, and end like we started.”

Twenty-five years since Coltrane’s death, the world still isn’t quite with it. Rashied Ali doesn’t think he’s the only drummer who does this – “but I certainly do believe I was one of the first;” Among the others are the Americans Ed Blackwell, Andrew Cyrille, Milford Graves, Billy Higgins and Sunny Murray. A surprisingly large number of European drummers play this way. Free rhythm as Ali has created it is applicable to quests of the spirit, the conquest of noise and the imperatives of survival. Hear it? Everywhere, always, rhythm is free.


© The Wire 2010