Jazz
drummer vibrant on the stage and in the classroom
by John Fordham From
the Guardian
Clifford Jarvis, the powerful and inspirational
American drummer who has died aged 58,
was a
player whose public profile did not match
the
respect in which he was held. He was regarded
by
many observers of the legendary Sun Ra
Arkestra
in the 1960s and 1970s as the best drummer
the
band ever had; on a level of more personal
influence, his many drum students in his
adopted
London will react to his early death as
a light gone
out of their lives.
Jarvis's period with the Arkestra - whose
leader,
Sun Ra, maintained he had been born on
Saturn,
and whose behaviour sometimes made this
claim
seem all too real - was an education for
life in
every respect. The band's mixture of surrealism,
swing, performance art, free jazz and
electronics
bubbled from 1956 to the early 1990s,
but
beneath the exotic presentation were simple
musical priorities of honesty, originality,
passion
and spontaneity. Jarvis always played
like a man
who put those qualities at the top of
his list.
Like Elvin Jones and Roy Haynes, he was
a
musician who approached the drumkit as
a whole,
rather than a collection of separate implements
with conveniently divisible functions.
Even in the
straight-ahead, song-based boppish modern
jazz
that he mostly played and taught from
his arrival
in Britain in the 1980s, Jarvis never
contented
himself with the familiar tickety-tick
of the
cymbal or the routine snare-drum rattles.
He could fill a room with the intensity
of his
sound -rather than its volume alone -
and hold an
audience's attention while playing alone.
Some
said this ferocity and sheer force of
musical
personality made him hard to play with.
But he
was the kind of performer to make good
musicians
play above what they thought they knew.
He listed
as his influences the expected postwar
drum stars
- Max Roach, Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones
and
Elvin Jones among them - but also pioneers
of
early jazz percussion like Big Sid Catlett.
Jarvis was deeply involved in every aspect
of jazz
music, in particular its cultural and
political
history. This breadth, coupled with immense
technical skill, made him a fascinating
teacher.
Both his grandfather and his father were
trumpeters, and the latter encouraged
Jarvis to
take up drums at the age of 10. He went
professional after studying with Dave
Brubeck's
drummer, Alan Dawson, at Berklee College
of
Music, in his native Boston, in the late
1950s.
Though able to fit into all kinds of jazz
circumstances - he appeared on a 1959
Chet
Baker record playing Lerner and Loewe
songs - it
was the increasingly experimental New
York and
Chicago scenes of the 1960s that appealed
to him.
He worked with major creative figures,
such as
Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane, and
was a
powerful presence on trumpeter Freddie
Hubbard's celebrated album, Hub Tones.
Jarvis joined Sun Ra in 1961 and stayed
for most
of the decade. Sun Ra's biographer, John
Szwed,
describes one of the bandleader's demanding
rehearsals, during which he berated other
drummers for not having the Jarvis spark
- or,
for that matter, his explosive temper.
Jarvis was both a reflective and an impulsive
man, and he liked to make things happen
onstage
and off. When the Arkestra's band-bus
crashed in
Nevada in 1969, and they were forced to
hire a
motel near the small town of Lovelock,
he
wandered off to amiably shout "Howdy,
pardners"
at the locals. He was being held at gunpoint
when
Sun Ra found him, and they had to escape
the motel
by the back door when rifle-toting townsfolk
turned up outside.
It was symptomatic of Clifford Jarvis's
playing
that he stretched sensibilities and techniques
and
broke habits. He lit fires in the bands
of Pharoah
Sanders and Archie Shepp through the 1970s,
and
worked again with Sun Ra in 1983 on a
tour that
included Lester Bowie, Shepp and Don Cherry.
After his arrival in England he led a band
called
the Prophets Of Jazz for a while. He had
started
teaching history in the United States,
and
continued in Britain until the onset of
his recent
illness.
Impatience with the paperwork of fundraising
and
tour organisation hampered Jarvis's career
as a
bandleader, and his highly indi vidual
style could
not always be fitted into the ensembles
of others.
But many local musicians, and musical
education
in Hackney, where he taught, benefited
immensely
from his example
Jazz as a whole is the poorer without him
and
plans are already afoot for possible jazz
educational schemes bearing his name.
* Clifford Osbourne Jarvis, jazz musician,
born
August 26 1941; died November 26, 1999
