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Innovative jazz drummer who came to view music as just one aspect of the ‘rhythms of the self’
Drumming is a matter of doing several different and difficult things at the same time, and Milford Graves, who has died aged 79, extended that agility to just about everything he did in his polymathic life.
To the jazz world, Graves was the percussion trailblazer who had played popular Latin-jazz and accompanied the South African singing star Miriam Makeba in his youth, and then edgy free-improvisation with the New York Art Quartet and with the fiery saxophone original Albert Ayler in the 1960s – famously opening the proceedings with Ayler at John Coltrane’s epic New York funeral in July 1967. Graves’ tumultuous drum sound was often a polyrhythmic tidal wave with no obvious steady pulse, but unmistakably radiating a propulsive energy.
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