Милфорд Грейвс: Джазовый барабанщик и новатор авангарда

American jazz drummer and percussionist (1941–2021)

Milford Graves (August 20, 1941 – February 12, 2021) was an American jazz drummer, percussionist, Professor Emeritus of Music, researcher/inventor, visual artist/sculptor, gardener/herbalist, and martial artist. Graves was noteworthy for his early avant garde contributions in the 1960s with Paul Bley, Albert Ayler, and the New York Art Quartet, and is considered to be a free jazz pioneer, liberating percussion from its timekeeping role. The composer and saxophonist John Zorn referred to Graves as "basically a 20th century shaman."

Graves was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, on August 20, 1941. He began playing drums when he was three years old, and was introduced to the congas at age eight. His group, the Milford Graves Latino Quintet, included saxophonist Pete Yellin, pianist Chick Corea, bassist Lisle Atkinson, and conga player Bill Fitch.

In 1962, Graves heard the John Coltrane quartet with Elvin Jones, whose drumming made a strong impression. The following year, Graves acquired a standard drum set from pianist Hal Galper and began using it regularly. During a visit to New York in 1964, Logan introduced Graves to trombonist Roswell Rudd and saxophonist John Tchicai. Graves "wound up playing with them for half an hour, astonishing Rudd and Tchicai, who promptly invited him to join what became The New York Art Quartet." Tchicai also stated that Don Moore, the original New York Art Quartet bassist, "became so frightened of this wizard of a percussionist that he decided that this couldn't be true or possible and therefore refused to play with us." That same year, Graves also participated in the "October Revolution in Jazz" organized by Bill Dixon, and appeared on a number of recordings, including the New York Art Quartet's self titled debut album, Giuseppi Logan's debut album, which also featured pianist Don Pullen and bassist Eddie Gómez, Paul Bley's Barrage, Montego Joe's Arriba! Con Montego Joe (which also featured Chick Corea and Gómez), and the Jazz Composer's Orchestra's Communication. Graves also briefly played with Albert Ayler's trio, which included bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray, as a second drummer. This combination of musicians inspired John Coltrane to add Rashied Ali as a second drummer the following year. In 1965, Graves continued to expand his horizons, studying the tabla with Wasantha Singh and recording with Miriam Makeba on Makeba Sings!. He also recorded and released a percussion album titled Percussion Ensemble, which featured drummer Sonny Morgan. Val Wilmer wrote that the recording "remains just about the most brilliantly conceived and executed percussion album to date." That year, Graves also recorded on the New York Art Quartet's second album Mohawk, on Montego Joe's second album, Wild & Warm, on Lowell Davidson's sole release, and on a second album with Giuseppi Logan, again working with Don Pullen. Graves and Pullen soon formed a duo, and in 1966 they recorded and released In Concert at Yale University, at the Newport Jazz Festival, (Recordings of this performance were released in 2004 on the compilation Holy Ghost.) Later that year, the group recorded Love Cry. Graves left Ayler's band when Impulse! began pushing Ayler in a more commercial direction. Graves recorded Black Woman with Sonny Sharrock in the late 1960s and began playing with drummers Andrew Cyrille and Rashied Ali on a series of concerts titled "Dialogue of the Drums." Graves and Cyrille also recorded and released an album without Ali and with the title "Dialogue of the Drums" in 1974. During this time, Graves studied to become a medical technician and managed a lab for a veterinarian. In 1977, Graves released two albums under his own name: Bäbi, which featured reed players Arthur Doyle and Hugh Glover, and Meditation Among Us, with a Japanese jazz quartet composed of Kaoru Abe, Toshinori Kondo, Mototeru Takagi, and Toshiyuki Tsuchitori. During the early 1980s, Graves also began working with dancer Min Tanaka.

In the years that followed, Graves toured and recorded in a quartet setting with drummers Cyrille, Kenny Clarke, and Famoudou Don Moye, recorded a duo album with David Murray, and performed and recorded with the New York Art Quartet in celebration of their 35th anniversary. He also recorded two solo albums, Grand Unification (1998) and Stories (2000), as well as albums with John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, William Parker, and Bill Laswell. In 2008 and 2012, Graves performed with Lou Reed. as well as the release of the documentary Milford Graves Full Mantis, directed by Graves's former student, Jake Meginsky, along with Neil Cloaca Young. In 2019, Graves played in a duo setting with pianist Jason Moran. Alice in Chains vocalist William DuVall also directed a documentary about Graves titled Ancient to Future: The Wisdom of Milford Graves. However, the film has been in post production status since 2013 and has not been released as of 2020. In 2022, Black Editions Group announced that their Black Editions Archive imprint would focus on releasing previously unheard recordings by Graves.

Graves was diagnosed with amyloid cardiomyopathy in 2018, and was informed he had half a year more to live. He died on February 12, 2021. He was 79, and suffered from congestive heart failure prior to his death.

Graves, along with Sunny Murray and Rashied Ali, was one of the first jazz musicians to free the drums from their traditional time keeping role, having developed "a conception of music that went beyond jazz and the ching a ding of the ride cymbal." Val Wilmer described Graves as

a percussionist with an amazing technique. Graves moved around his drumset with astonishing speed, beating rapid two handed tattoos on every surface. Each stroke was clearly defined so that there were no rolls in the conventional sense; the emphasis was on clarity. He used his cymbals in the way another drummer might use a gong or another drum. With the NYAQ, Graves's snare drum was tuned high as was the norm, but already his tom toms were producing a deeper sound than usual. By the end of the 'sixties, though, he had dispensed with the snare and his three tom toms were tuned as loosely as is common in rock today Graves was probably the first American drummer to remove all of his bottom heads because of their tendency to absorb sound. John Szwed wrote that Graves "did not use a standard drum setup and sometimes hit the bass drum with a stick or kicked it instead of using a pedal, or he played the snare with a tree branch with the leaves still intact." Graves believed that "most drummers are over occupied with the playing of rhythms and insufficiently with the actual sound," and that it is "important for drummers to study the actual membrane, to try for different sounds or a different feeling by playing on every part of the skin and not merely the same area over and over again " He stated that "[i]f you know how to manipulate your skins, you can make that dispersed sound slides, portamento style, sustained tone. Instead of letting your stick free rebound, you can mute it, slide it on there. It calls for greater physicality." Graves told Aakash Mittal: "when I play, I do more than vertical strokes. I’m not just bah bop bah bop. My thing is moving around, touching the skins, knowing about momentum and position at the same time." In an interview with Paul Burwell, Graves stated: "I relate the drum skin to a body of water As a musician, you are schooling yourself to deal with some of the most sensitive things in the universe: emotion, frequency, life, the vital force we're involved with one of the most subtle things in life. Sounds that's it!" Graves was also very outspoken about his feelings concerning the role of the drummer: "I couldn't understand how a guy would sit and play a basic beat all the time. In African drumming, the drum is in the forefront. Timekeeping for the drummer? I said no way." Writing in Artforum, Christoph Cox stated: "Graves has thrown himself into a massive multidisciplinary project that straddles the arts and sciences, traditional healing practices and the frontiers of cardiology and stem cell research." (According to Graves, Yara means "nimbleness" in the Yoruba language.) Graves stated that certain aspects of Yara came about as a result of inquiries into the history of martial arts having led him to its roots in nature: "What is martial arts? What's Kung Fu? Where did it come from ? I started reading books on Chinese martial arts, the history of this art There was many times when I was reading about this so called grandmaster he'd be up in the mountains meditating, and he saw this and he saw that. I said, 'wow I could do the same thing, man. I'll just go out in nature 'cause that's where they got it from ' So I went to the best teacher. I went to the praying mantis himself It goes back to hanging out with nature." and "was astonished by the similarities between cardiac arrhythmias and Afro Cuban drumming patterns. Beyond the simple da DUM of the heartbeat, he heard polyrhythmic pulsations, variable duration between beats, and a whole spectrum of frequencies. All this strengthened his conviction that true rhythm isn't metronomic and that the tone of the beat is as important as its duration." The work also resulted in a patent entitled "Method and device for preparing non embryonic stem cells." Dr. Baruch Krauss, who teaches at Harvard Medical School, is a physician at Boston Children's Hospital, and who studied acupuncture with Graves and followed his research, has described Graves as "what a Renaissance man looks like today Milford is right on the cutting edge of this stuff. He brings to it what doctors can't, because he approaches it as a musician." Graves stated that regular rhythms are "not natural. You have to go against all the rules of nature, use a metronome, inhibit your true ability to sense the rhythms and vibrations of nature. In a pure metric sense, that means that your inhalation and exhalation would always be the same, because when you inhale your beats per minute increases. If you exhale, it decreases. No one breathes that way. Breath varies, so cardiac rhythm never has that tempo. It's always changing." and later exhibited sculptures which tie together his interests in music and martial arts, writing: "I've been thinking about sculpture as a teaching tool. There's a saying I used to always hear: 'sculpture is frozen music.' I want something with some kind of movement to it. I'm adding elements that are not static, like transducers. I also use my years and years of experience in music and my training in martial arts to understand sculpture. There were movements I used to do that would be very quiet, maybe something from aikido or tai chi. Very slow, very slow then all of a sudden you would burst out with this explosive, passive aggressive energy. I wondered how I would put that into a piece of sculpture. I thought the explosion would be to put together some unorthodox elements and have contradictions set in. If a person were to look at it, it would provoke a kind of psychological motion inside of them."