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| Hamid Drake at Sant’Anna Arresi 2020. Photo by Petra Cvelbar |
Hamid Drake, who turns 70 on August 3, remains one of the busiest
drummers on the improvised / free jazz scene, ever on the road and with
album credits in excess of 500. Born in Louisiana and raised in
Chicago, he has played with everyone from Akira Sakata to Thurston
Moore, and recently payed tribute to trumpeter Don Cherry*, whom he
encountered and lived with early on in his itinerary. Drake also put up
a band together in celebration of Alice Coltrane, another major
influence. The master percussionist has forged a unique path, with a
deeply spiritual approach. His style is informed not only by US and
European jazz but also by traditions from Africa, India, Persia and
more. Hamid Drake can provide a monster groove, play abstract or
meditative and still sound like himself.
Your first credited recording – as Hank Drake – is with the Fred
Anderson Quintet, “Another Place” in 1978.
Hamid Drake – Yes, it was at the Moers Music festival, and the group also
had George Lewis on trombone. I later changed my name to Hamid, for
religious reasons. I grew up around Fred Anderson and his three sons,
Kevin, Eugene and Michael. I would see Fred play his saxophone when I was
very young.
Can you describe your first encounters with music and the years prior
to becoming a professional musician?
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| Foday Musa Suso, Joe Thomas, Adam Rudolph and Hamid Drake, 1977 |
My first encounter with music was probably in church. Although not from a
family of musicians, there was always music around me, at home and outside.
In school I joined the stage band. I had a snare drum and a bass drum. It
wasn’t a choice, I didn’t want to play drums, I wanted to play trombone.
Fortunately, there was a drum instructor who helped me develop a strong
liking then love for the drums. Later my parents bought me a small drum set
so I was able to shift to the drum set but in the stage band it was just
practicing the snare drum and the big bass drums. We were doing marching
music mostly, boom-kak, boom-kak, boom-kak, in the Chicago
area. I never went to music school per se but in my first year of college I
studied piano with one of the teachers for a while. I had private teachers
and learned on my own. I was never a resident of an established music
conservatory.
When did you first come to Europe?
That was with Fred Anderson at the Moers Festival where that first album
was recorded. The second time was with
[percussionist]
Adam Rudolph. We moved to Sweden to live with Don Cherry. Don had come to
Chicago to be on one of the first records I did, with Mandingo Griot
Society [Flying Fish, 1978]. Adam had brought Don
to Chicago to do the recording with us. After that, Don invited me and my
family and Adam Rudolph to Sweden to stay with him and his family which was
Moki Cherry, Neneh Cherry and Eagle-Eye Cherry. They had a place in the
countryside in the Skåne region, an old schoolhouse that they converted into
their home. A few months after he guested on our record, he just invited us.
I borrowed some money from my mother for the plane tickets on Icelandic
Air. It was a one-way ticket because we didn’t know when we would return.
We stayed there for about five months. It was an extraordinary experience,
being with Don every day and with Moki, who’s a very important figure also.
We were very young. Neneh was maybe 15 or 16 at the time and Eagle-Eye
probably 12 years old.
In January 2025, you opened the Sons d’Hiver festival with a tribute to
Don Cherry, bringing things full circle.
Yes. “Mu” First part and Second part [BYG-Actuel]
are very important recordings for me. I used to have those LPs as part of my
record collection. Those recordings are monumental because I was very much
into Ed Blackwell. Fred Anderson was the one who turned me on to Blackwell.
I liked how Ed combined the African rhythms with his approach to swing and
jazz, his polyrhythms and how he used the cowbell. When he would take
solos, he would incorporate the cowbell into his technique. I was also into
Max Roach, Art Taylor and Elvin Jones, and a lot of funk, R&B and rock
drummers too. But for the jazz world, I would say Ed Blackwell was my
greatest influence. The Don Cherry tribute in Paris was with Moor Mother,
the poet from the United States who’s a member of Irreversible
Entanglements, and my friend and associate Pasquale Mirra with whom we have
a new duo album out
[on the Italian label Parco della Musica]
. Don is now one of the ancestors. We chose to pay tribute to him because
of his music and because he’s one of the people who can inspire and help us
even though he’s not in the physical life anymore. Spiritually he’s still
very much alive and active.
Speaking of spirituality, the album you made with Adam Rudolph and
Pharoah Sanders is called “Spirits” [Meta, 2000].
I’m surprised that you know about that recording! That’s from Montreal, and
the three of us, Adam, Pharoah and myself, put the recording out ourselves.
We each contributed a certain amount of money to have it done. When Pharoah
listened to the recording of the concert, he wanted to release it. It
features some of his best playing in my opinion. He plays continuously on
it. The years I toured with Pharoah were a great learning experience. He
was a gracious person and musician. I first met him through Bill Laswell,
when Bill called me in to do the Pharoah album “Message from Home” in the
mid-90s. When we did that record, Pharoah was easygoing, we immediately hit
it off. I owe that to Bill, who brought us together.
Herbie Hancock guested on Mandingo’s 1984 album “Watto Sitta” and the
next year you were on Hancock’s electro-global record “Sound System”.
Those things came about because Herbie and Suso had been doing duet
concerts, piano and kora. That was all through Laswell because of his
connection with Herbie Hancock. I have a story about Bill. We were in a
taxi coming back from the studio or eating something, and Bill had this big
shoulder bag on him and said,
“man, you won’t believe what I have here in this bag”
– and he had the two-inch reels of Miles Davis’ music that he was getting
ready to remix. It was like gold and platinum in his shoulder bag. I like
the remixes he has done, Miles, Bob Marley and Alice Coltrane’s album with
Santana. Bill fueled my further esteem of Alice Coltrane, because there
were books she had written that I wasn’t familiar with, and Bill gave me
the complete collection. We were in the studio and he said
“hey Hamid, I want you to have these”
. It’s a several volumes set of her writings. It’s about her experiences
through meditation, her teachings and everything. Alice had personally
given these books to Bill.
You have worked with Bill Laswell a lot, live and in the studio.
The list of recordings and concerts that I’ve been involved with Bill is
very long, I only realized that recently. A lot of those things escape you.
You’re doing things and then only later realize the extent of it. Laswell
would call me and bring me from Chicago to New York to go into the studio,
just Bill, myself and keyboard player Bernie Worrell from
Parliament-Funkadelic, we would record a lot of rhythm tracks, make up all
these grooves and Bill would use them on different recordings. He is very
much like an alchemist.
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| Aiyb Dieng, Bill Laswell, Hamid Drake in 2000. Photo by Ziga Koritnik. |
Another key partnership is with Adam Rudolph.
My relationship with Adam goes back a long way. We met when we were 14 or
15 years old in a place called Frank’s Drum Shop in Chicago. Adam was
playing congas, and convinced me to buy a conga. I started studying congas
with the teacher that he was studying with. We were playing with a lot of
different musicians in and around Chicago and particularly with Fred
Anderson. After he graduated from college he went to Ghana to study
drumming with the Ewe people and there he met Foday Musa Suso, the kora
player from Gambia, who was part of a project at the University of Accra.
They were bringing young griots from different parts of Africa to teach.
Suso wanted to come to the United States, so they decided to go back to
Chicago and form a group together, playing traditional Mandingo music that
would include rhythms and grooves from the United States and the Caribbean.
On September 7th, 1977, Suso and Adam arrived in Chicago. I
remember the date somehow because I met Suso the day after they arrived.
Adam and I had been writing to each other all the time, me being in
Chicago, him in Ghana. That’s when people were writing letters. We started
Mandingo Griot Society. We began looking for a bass player and quickly
found the one we wanted to be in the group, Joe Thomas. The relationship
with Adam is one of my most important ones, it’s music and also discovery of
books, friendship, tai-chi, all sorts of things. Our families knew each
other, I knew his mom and dad and brothers, he knew my mother. I’ve learned
a lot from him. He’s a great composer and musician, teacher and writer too
– not only music but of literature. He’s also a great organizer who brings
musicians together to create and fulfill his vision.
How did you start playing the frame drum?
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| Photo by Petra Cvelbar |
I first heard the frame drum with a record from the oud master from Nubia,
Hamza El Din, “Escalay” [Nonesuch, 1971]. Side one
was him playing oud and singing, and side two was him playing the frame
drum and singing. When I first heard him playing the frame drum, I
immediately fell in love with it. I had become friends with a musician who
had moved back to Chicago, Raphael Donald Garrett. He played bass, but also
saxophone and clarinet. He’s featured on some of Coltrane’s recordings. On
those records his name is simply Donald Garrett. Later he changed it to
Raphael Donald Garrett. We had a trio with Raphael, myself, and multi-reeds
player Douglas Ewart. Raphael knew I was interested in the frame drum, so
he gave me my first one, that he had purchased when living in Turkey. I was
listening to recordings and just kind of messing around on it. But then I
met Hamza El Din at the Bear Mountain World Folk Music Festival in upstate
New York, and he showed me some of my first technique on the instrument. I
also met two musicians from Turkey, saxophone player Ismet Siral and ney
and oud player Haci Tekbilek. This was at the Creative Music Studios in
Woodstock where I was with Mandingo Griot Society. Ismet and Haci showed me
some further technique on the frame drum, and from there I started to
practice, practice more and develop my own way. But a lot of style that I
play comes out of Hamza El Din, and the Moroccan approach to bandir. What
also contributed to my learning was being involved in a mystical Sufi order
from Turkey called the Halveti-Jerrahi, as the frame drum was involved in
the order’s ceremonies.
Did you spend time in Africa and study music there?
Sure, I went to Africa several times. I didn’t study with teachers per se,
except for a few djembe players. I did study congas, that was more from the
Afro-Cuban tradition. Adam Rudolph was always studying different drumming
traditions, and we would listen to records of music from Africa and so
forth. Just by listening and experimenting, that approach kind of came into
my style of playing. I was around a lot of djembe players in Chicago
because there was a lot of music there: African dance ensembles, most
particularly one called Muntu. They were all African-Americans, and the
drummers had studied djembe with master Ladji Camara from Senegal. I would
listen to them a lot and listen to the phrasing. My style developed from
that. I studied Indian tablas, that later contributed to my approach of
rhythmic style and definition. The rhythm also comes from India.
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| Alexander Hawkins & Hamid Drake. Photo by Petra Cvelbar. |
Are you aware that you have around 530 record credits to this day?
Man, that’s a lot of recordings. There’s probably more because some guys
who come to concerts always record like archivists and then trade amongst
each other. Many of the records I did aren’t available anymore. I have
probably less than 100 of them. I used to collect my albums but moved
around so much they ended up away from me. I’m sure somebody has them all!
There was one recording I really wanted to get a copy of but the guy who
did it, Leo Krumpholz, moved to England. He had a venue in Chicago called
South End Music Works and he recorded it, that was a monumental concert
with Don Cherry and Raphael Donald Garrett on bass. I’m not sure how to get
a hold of Leo. Don also wanted a copy of that recording. It was in the late
80s, early 90s. Drummer Steve McCall had just moved back to Chicago and
came to that concert. I was a little nervous because he was in the
audience.
In 2022, you started a band to tour with in homage to Alice Coltrane.
I had long wanted to honor Alice Coltrane, Turiya. It was put together by
Ludmilla Faccenda [Drake’s manager] and myself
and we wanted to do it in a unique sort of way, not play the compositions
as she played them on her records. We wanted to expand on her art and
message. That’s why we included dance and spoken word, with Ndoho Ange from
Paris and originally from Guadeloupe, and Jan Bang, the electronic musician
from Norway, Pasquale Mirra on vibraphone and Jamie Saft on piano, organ
and Fender Rhodes. The first incarnation had Joshua Abrams on bass and
Thomas de Pourquery on sax and vocals. We wanted to dig deep into the
spirit of Alice Coltrane. We did some of her compositions in our own
improvisational way. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this to Pasquale,
but some of Alice Coltrane’s early recordings are with a vibraphone player.
We wanted to tap into what Turiya itself deals with, the Sanskrit
word which represents the fourth dimension of consciousness. Having met her
a few times, her spirit and vibration and musical outlook had a big impact
on me, I liked her whole philosophy. There’s a very good biography about
her called “Translinear light”.
Will there be a recording of that project?
It’s difficult to organize because there’s quite a few people involved.
Ludmilla has done almost a miracle, just the number of concerts that we
have done, bringing that many people on stage, some of them from the United
States. It’s a big expense moving around about seven people. We’ll see what
happens in the future. Turiya hasn’t been put to sleep yet!
You used samples of John Coltrane’s albums “Om” and “Cosmic Music”
which are seldom spoken of by critics.
Totally seldom spoken of! I find them incredible. There’s a segment on
“Cosmic Music”, where Jan recorded the first vocal portion of John Coltrane
reciting,
«May there be peace and love and perfection throughout all creation, O
God”
. And then we felt it was really important that Jamie do his own rendition
of the composition “The Sun”. The album “Cosmic Music”, was very
influential for me, especially that piece, “The Sun”, because it featured
Alice Coltrane in a whole other way. She’s playing totally solo, but John
Coltrane starts it off with this invocation. And Alice comes in with the
solo playing. It’s a beautiful composition. The way that Jamie handles that
composition is profound and shows his extreme understanding of not only
jazz but also Western classical music. Ludmilla was the one who coined the
project “Honoring Alice Coltrane”. Something of the people you honor has
come inside of you, and you want to express your gratitude. Before the
Turiya tribute, there was Indigenous Mind, a trio with Josh Abrams on bass
and Jason Adasiewicz on vibraphone. We did a few Alice Coltrane songs as a
trio.
Another pianist you played with was Irène Schweizer. You took part in
the series of duos with drummers that she did.
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| Irene Schweizer and Hamid Drake in Nickelsdorf 2019. Photo by Petra Cvelbar |
Yes, I feel very honored by that. A few months ago, there was a tribute to
Irène Schweizer in Zürich. I was invited along with some of the other
drummers that she had recorded with. She was a drummer who moved to piano.
You can really hear that in her playing. We played together a few times and
one of the most memorable is probably the trio we had with Fred Anderson. I
think it was at Willisau, and it got released. The last concert in
Nickelsdorf was also really special. I spoke with her partner and she
communicated to me how special that concert in Nickelsdorf was for Irène.
She was starting to decline a little bit then, but once she got on stage she
was fantastic. I’m very happy that it was released. The first time we met,
she was one of the organizers of the Taktlos festival in Switzerland.
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But I
have to say, a lot of the European musicians that I was able to meet and
eventually play with, came through Peter Brötzmann. He’s the one who
introduced me to a lot of them. I was playing around Europe with him,
William Parker and Kondo and then in a trio with William and in other
settings, the Chicago Tentet and so on. Through Peter I had the opportunity
to meet a lot of the European improvisers. There was a German festival
which name slips my mind now, that Jost Gebers used to do, where Peter and
I played almost every year. Our relationship started in late 1987, early
‘88. “The Dried Rat-Dog” recording happened after he had already been
coming to Chicago for a couple of years. We were doing duet concerts. Bill
Laswell and Peter were very close too. They did a lot of things together
and had that group Last Exit with Sonny Sharrock and Ronald Shannon Jackson
which I got to see once in Chicago.
You’re an associate of some of the hardest blowing musicians, but the
way you play has a warmth and benevolence to it.
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In a way, that’s true. Brötzmann, when we first played together, allowed me
to play a lot of different ways, not just hard and strong. For me, that
approach wouldn’t have taken the music to other dimensions. The way he
played was so open, he allowed me to bring the things that I had studied
into the situation. Instead of me just playing free all the time, I could
do grooves, I could swing, play reggae, play open, do many different
things. And that also gave another bent to his playing because he had maybe
a wider palette to work with. He was throwing a lot of different things my
way. I could have played just hard all the time, but that’s not what moved
me. When you play with Peter and you really listen to him, there’s a lot of
subtlety to his playing. Sometimes when you first listen you think it’s just
really hard playing but no, there’s a lot of subtlety there. Peter loved
ballads and standards and he found a way to incorporate that into his
approach and the results are beautiful and mysterious. He did it in a way
that only he could have done. A lot of saxophonists are trying to sound
like him but they don’t feel like him and they don’t think like him. Peter
was a big thinker and he had very deep emotions. And he was just trying to
be himself.
The “Soldier of the Road” documentary about Brötzmann explains that a
lot of what he projects in his playing comes from being German and the
whole history and trauma comes through.
He would talk about that a lot. Him and Peter Kowald, they were similar in
that way. The last time that Brötzmann went to Israel and played at Assif
Tsahar’s venue, he gave a talk after the concert, like a huge apology to
the people there about what happened with the Holocaust. I think that’s a
difficult thing to do. His father, as you probably know, was conscripted
into the German army during World War II, kind of forced to be a member of
the Nazi army, and was captured by the Russians and put in a prisoner of
war camp. When he came back home from the war, it was very difficult. Peter
told stories about him and his mother having to walk a long distance in
cold weather just to get bread and a couple pieces of slabs of bacon to eat.
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| Ken Vandermark, Chad Taylor, Hamid Drake, Peter Brötzmann. Cankarjev Dom, Slovenia 2013. Photo by Petra Cvelbar |
Some of his last recordings are with you and one was live in Berlin.
Yeah, live in Berlin with Majid Bekkas. Mokhtar Ghania couldn’t make it so
we asked Majid. We did another one with Mokhtar before, and with Mahmoud
also, Mokhtar’s brother. Peter loved Gnawa music, he loved the guembri. We
toured Morocco with Majid. For the most part the response from the audience
was very good. Some of the Moroccans didn’t quite understand where Peter
was coming from but they appreciated him and his artistry and his attempt
to do something with a sound they were more familiar with.
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| Jazzfest Berlin 2022. Photo by Dawid Laskowski |
You were the first artist to release an album on French label RogueArt,
and are featured on 15 of their releases. The three Bindu albums have
you as the leader. You’re heard with a wide variety of musicians on the
label, from Nicole Mitchell to Steve Swell.
The first record is called “Bindu”, it’s compositions that the musicians
could freely improvise with, we had some established introductions but then
we would develop from there. Another one was “Reggaeology”
[after “Blissful” that came out in 2008 and was the second of three
Bindu albums]
which was jazz reggae, or reggae as played by jazzmen. I used to be in a
group in Chicago called Third Eye, another one called Birds of a Feather,
and they were both jazz reggae groups.
You are a regular presence at the Sons d’Hiver festival, with 32 sets
since 2002. Each time with a different band or project, from the
Pyramid Trio to Material, Indigo Trio, Kidd Jordan, Ernest Dawkins,
Michel Portal and so on.
I had no idea there had been so many. Each concert was different and each
was important. Playing with Michel Portal was amazing. The duet was one of
Ludmilla’s illuminations. Portal is unique and I’m grateful that happened.
He’s a genius in his own way, an ustad
[master]
. He moves through many different worlds, performing classical music, being
on the improvised music scene, the straight-ahead jazz world, folk music
too. In addition to saxophone and clarinet, he’s a bandoneon player. He’s
from the Basque region and there’s a lot from that tradition that he brings
into his music.
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| William Parker and Hamid Drake. Vision Festival 2013. Photo by Petra Cvelbar. |
You have other connections to French musicians – flute player/singer
Naïssam Jalal, bagpipe player Erwan Keravec, clarinet player Sylvain
Kassap, pianist Eve Risser…
Eve Risser is an extraordinary musician. That big group she has with
musicians from Africa is fantastic. She has a couple different versions of
it [Red Desert Orchestra & Kogoba Basigui].
The percussionists, except for the drummer, are all women. The djembe
player, the balafon player, all women. She chose the right pool together. I
participated in a version of that group years ago, but not in the current
one. I love the trio she has with drummer Edward Perraud who was in Thomas
de Pourquery’s Supersonic.
What project would you like to set up if you had an unlimited budget
and all the people you wanted?
Oh, wow [laughs, and pauses to think]! I would like to find a way
to musically bring together all of these mystical traditions: Sufism,
Tibetan Buddhism, mystical Christianity, mystical Judaism, shamanic… These
ancient traditions that people have, and do a unified musical form with all
of them, where they could blend together but also represent their own
thing. There are people who practice several different mystical traditions
and they hold multiple citizenships in those various sacred traditions. I’d
like to do something like that with music, and that would have to also
include dance and visual arts and spoken word.
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| Skopje Jazz Festival 2022. Photo by Petra Cvelbar |
What are your sources of inspiration, do you get ideas from what you
see around the world, and other artforms?
One of our biggest senses is visual, right? My music teacher Eric Evans
taught me about the principles of the arts, showed me that the same
principles govern all artforms, whether it’s music, painting, poetry.
There’s depth, space, color, negative and positive space. Eric taught music
through the medium of visual arts, by demonstrating those principles on the
visual palette and then relating it to music and sound. To me all the arts
are related, they’re just different modalities of the one creative
expression. A lot of musicians speak about synesthesia, the ability to see
the sounds as shapes and colors. William Parker speaks about that in
relationship with what might relate to the four strings on the acoustic
bass, for instance. Max Roach talked about that in his relationship to
sound on the drums, and I’m sure a lot of musicians see and feel that way.
I would assume that even people who are blind, they might experience colors
with their inner vision. It’s difficult for us to imagine. All the arts are
reflective of each other, they all have a part of the other arts in their
thing – dancers experience rhythm, sound, colors too, space division just
like we have in the visual arts, music and writing. I don’t think about
those things consciously when I’m playing, it just comes intuitively.
Thinking about them consciously would get in the way of the natural
creative process. But those things are always bouncing in front of me
somehow. I’m not trying to determine whether this should be here, that
should be there. That goes into the thought creation part of the music, but
during the actual playing those things come naturally on their own.
How about the Heart Trio [Aum Fidelity, 2024]?
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William Parker introduced me to Cooper-Moore. And of course, it was Peter
Brötzmann who brought William and I together. William and I knew about each
other before meeting, but had never met or played together. When Peter
wanted to form Die like a Dog he brought William and I together with
Toshinori Kondo on trumpet. That’s when my relationship with William
started and it continued from there. William introduced me to a lot of the
New York musicians on the particular scene that he was involved in.
Cooper-Moore was one of those people. He’s an incredible guy, instrument
maker, piano player, historian, storyteller, the whole gamut, he’s got it.
We had quartets and trios together. He’s a scholar on the banjo and other
folk instruments from the Southern part of the United States, which also
have origins in Africa. Last quartet tour we did was William, Cooper-Moore,
James Brandon Lewis and myself. Cooper-Moore and William are kind of
responsible for guiding James Brandon Lewis into the music. The Heart Trio
is special because we’re playing all kinds of acoustic instruments. I play
some drum set and frame drum. William is playing the guembri and reeds, and
Cooper-Moore is playing his own self-created banjo, harp and so forth. It
is different from In Order to Survive, another group the three of us play
in together. In the Heart Trio Cooper-Moore is not playing any piano. Same
guy, completely different music.
How did the album with Jamie Saft around the music of Thelonious Monk
happen?
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With bass player Brad Jones, we had played together in Jamie Saft’ New Zion
Trio, and both were also part of the tribute to Alice Coltrane. I met Jamie
when I was working with Bill Laswell and Jamie was working with John Zorn.
Laswell and Zorn have a long relationship – they’re like two opponents in a
way but always come back together. I played in PainKiller with Mike Patton,
Bill and Zorn for a minute. I had known Zorn for a few years before playing
with him. Jamie had a very thorough relationship with Zorn. I think it’s
been some time since they’ve done something together, but they used to be
like brothers from another mother, always together doing stuff. Jamie
probably helped to develop Zorn’s music to some extent and Zorn helped to
develop Jamie’s music. The Monk album was Jamie’s idea. He wanted to do a
tribute to Monk as a trio. And he wanted to do it without saxophone because
he felt that could give it more openness and brevity. We’re playing the
tunes but it’s Jamie’s arrangement of the tunes and there’s a very open
dimension to how we approach the music. We went to a very good studio in
Milano and the engineer really took his time the way he set up every
microphone and everything. We would do several takes and listen back. He
had a real precision to how he recorded it.
You swing pretty hard on it.
My foundation is in more straight-ahead music and it was later that I moved
into the more free-flowing stuff. But on this recording, you don’t just
keep the beat, you’re always pushing the music forward. A lot of the jazz
drummers I admire, that’s what they did too. They would keep time, of
course, they believed in supporting the music but they also had the melodic
approach, and the way they supported the music was by being true to
themselves. They were playing in a melodic way when supporting the other
musicians. Roy Haynes was great at that, Art Taylor and Max Roach as well
but Max had a different approach because of his position as a leader. Elvin
Jones was always doing that as well. When you listen to them, you see how
perhaps they’re the ones that are really in control of the music. It’s like
the drums are singing. You can just focus on them and listen to what they
do. There are a few records with Fred Anderson that I recently re-released.
One’s called “The Milwaukee Tapes”. That’s a very early recording, I think
the second one I did with Fred. Me and the bass player are playing pretty
much straight-ahead… There’s another recording with Harrison Bankhead on
bass and Jim Baker, a pianist from Chicago, “Birdhouse”. We’re taking
Fred’s tunes and playing them in a straight-ahead way, very strong
swinging. But Pharoah Sanders, his music was swinging, you know. The years
that I played with David Murray involved a lot of swinging and funk. Those
were the things I was doing before I entered the so-called improvised music
world. I say so-called because most musicians improvise in their own way.
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| Moor Mother and Hamid Drake. Sons D’Hivers 2025. Photo © m.rodrigues |
Do you play in a lot of contexts where the music is written?
Sure. You follow that. But people always gave me the freedom to do my own
personal interpretation.
When playing, you seem to be entering a state of trance, closing your
eyes and connecting to the pulse or heart of the music. Can you make
that work with something that is pre-planned?
The intention is always the same, that is to try and serve the music to the
best of my ability. There’s not much difference whether it’s scripted or
improvised. In whatever situation, you still have to be yourself. And if
you’re doing something that’s scripted, even though you might think there’s
no room for you to add your own thing, you can’t help but putting your spin
on it, maybe only just little things here and there – always in service of
the music.
Among your latest recordings we also find “Cosmic Waves” on the No
Business label.
It’s with Albert Beger, Ziv Taubenfeld and Shay Hazan. I’ve had an
extensive relationship with Albert, met him through Assif Tsahar. The first
recording I did with Albert was with William Parker. Ziv is originally from
Israel but lives in Portugal. Bass player Shay was living in Amsterdam but
had moved back to Israel. For a long time, Albert had wanted to bring the
four of us together and do something. Albert knew that we were all going to
be in Israel at that particular time so he brought us together and we did
the recording, and also a concert at Assif Tsahar’s venue. There should be
another record coming out soon.
* at the Sons d’Hiver festival near Paris, with Moor Mother, Pasquale Mirra
and Cosmic Ear.
Latest albums
- Pasquale Mirra/Hamid Drake “Lhasa” (Parco della musica, 2025)
-
Jamie Saft trio “Plays Monk” (Oystertones, 2024)
-
William Parker “Heart Trio” (Aum Fidelity, 2024)
-
Beger/Taubenfeld/Hazan/Drake “Cosmic Waves” (No Business, 2024)
-
Natural Information Society “Since Time is Gravity” (Eremite, 2024)
-
Amaro Freitas “Y’Y” (Psychic Hotline, 2024)
Hamid Drake on RogueArt
https://roguart.com/artist/hamid-drake/1
Hamid Drake on Aum Fidelity
https://aumfidelity.com/collections/hamid-drake
Live
10 May
Luis Vicente & Hamid Drake
Amadora Jazz, Portugal
21 May
William Parker Circular Pyramid feat. Hamid Drake & Ava Mendoza with
Celeste Dalla Porta “In the name of Rosa Parks”
Vicenza Jazz, Italy
22 May
William Parker Circular Pyramid feat. Hamid Drake & Ava Mendoza
Bologna, Italy
23 May
William Parker Circular Pyramid feat. Hamid Drake & Ava Mendoza
Jazz Cerkno, Slovenia
4 June
Indigenous Mind (Hamid Drake, Daniel Carter, Cooper-Moore, Alfredo Colón,
Melanie Dyer, William Parker)
Vision Festival, New York, USA
7 June
Healing Message from Time & Space (William Parker, Hamid Drake,
Selendis, Aakash Mittal, Sula Spirit, Mixashawn, Frank London)
Vision Festival, New York, USA
13 June
Michiyo Yagi and Hamid Drake Duo with Wacław Zimpel
Jazztopad @ Lincoln Center
, New York, USA
21 June
Percfestival, Laigueglia, Italy
29 June
Hamid Drake “Turiya: Honoring Alice Coltrane” with special guest James
Brandon Lewis
“The night of the spiritual jazz”, Ravenna, Italy
6 July
Ava Mendoza/Brad Jones/Hamid Drake
Galeria Zé dos Bois, Lisbon, Portugal
1 August
Heart Trio
Jazz em Agosto, Lisbon, Portugal
14 August
Andreas Røysum/Joshua Abrams/Hamid Drake
Oslo Jazz Festival, Norway
17 August
Duet with Pasquale Mirra
Musica sulle bocche, Jazz in Sardegna, Italy
3 October
Duet with Shabaka Hutchings
Riga, Latvia
1 November
With Kalle Kallima
Tampere Jazz Happening, Finland
