At the age of 99, Roy Haynes, a prolific and skilled jazz drummer who recorded with Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Ray Charles, and Miles Davis, has away. Leslie Haynes-Gilmore, Haynes’ daughter, told the Guardian on Tuesday that her father had passed away after a brief illness. During a career that started in the early 1940s and ended when the drummer was in his mid-nineties, Haynes, a trailblazing pioneer in the genre, made appearances on innumerable jazz masterpieces. He was equally skilled in swing and bebop, avant-garde, and fusion.
The Boston native Haynes’ career started with appearances in ensembles led by pianist Bud Powell, Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, and Lester Young. Haynes was a member of the latter’s 1952 jazz hit, The Amazing Bud Powell. Haynes, known by his nickname “Snap Crackle,” performed with Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, fellow drummer Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Kenny Burrell, and George Shearing in the 1950s. He also began his own bandleader career with Busman’s Holiday in 1954. Quincy Jones, who passed away last week, collaborated with Haynes on the 1956 split LP Jazz Abroad. Haynes would later work with Jones on Ray Charles’ 1961 record Genius + Soul = Jazz.
In the decade that followed, Haynes performed three of the most well-known Eric Dolphy albums (Outward Bound, Out There, and Far Cry), as well as LPs by Chick Corea, Jack DeJohnette, McCoy Tyner, Archie Shepp, and Roland Kirk, as well as John Coltrane’s Impressions, Jackie McLean’s Destination… Out!, and Andrew Hill’s Black Fire.
Tyner’s Blues for Coltrane won Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Group at the 1989 Grammy Awards, giving Haynes his first Grammy. He also received the Jazz Foundation of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. A Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Instrumental Album was given to Haynes’ own album, Birds of a Feather: A Tribute to Charlie Parker, in 2001.
One of Haynes’ numerous colleagues, Pat Metheny, referred to the drummer as his “number one hero on earth” in an interview conducted in 2001. “Whatever the word ‘hip’ was meant to mean before it simply became a word, Roy is the human embodiment of it,” Metheny stated. “Eternal and timeless, yet completely unconcerned with it, always in the moment, always in this time.” Haynes discussed his resolve to constantly be one step ahead in a 2006 interview with Jazziz. “Now, they’re hip to that shit if I played rudiments and all that stuff,” he remarked. “Dude, I came up with the Roy Haynes shit, and it astounded them all.”
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