Performing Arts & Entertainment in Canada: Bill Graham: portrait of a jazz drummer

It's showtime at the Chez Paree nightclub in Montreal. The year is 1953, and several eager yet nervous musicians of the city's Jazz Workshop are getting ready to jam with the legendary Charlie "Bird" Parker. One of the group is a 24-year-old drummer by the name of Bill Graham. The tempo of that memorable evening has been vividly chronicled by Globe and Mail jazz critic Mark Miller in his book, Cool Blues.

At 65, Bill Graham is a sturdy veteran of the Winnipeg (his birthplace), Montreal, Vancourver and Toronto jazz scenes. Since that long-ago evening with "Bird" in Montreal, he has worked with symphony orchestras, show bands, club bands, and in concerts, playing with many big names in jazz and entertainment: Sonny Rollins, Billy Eckstine, Edith Piaf, Mel Torme, Sammy Davis Jr., Paul Bley, Tony Bennett, the list goes on. For the record, Graham's first commercial gig on drums was at Montreal's Latin Quarter in 1951.

In appearance, Bill Graham could easily pass for a blackjack dealer in a swank casino. He is dapper, darkhaired and gray-goateed, built like a middleweight, and wears wire-rimmed glasses "for reading sheet music only." His five-foot-eight frame, conditioned by decades of jazz drumming, is still surprisingly agile; and as a jazz drummer, he displays the reflexes of a cat. Another striking facet of his person is the way he articulates his feelings about his craft. "The best drummer knows instinctively how to beat the instruments into the key that the music is being played in at the particular time. The drum is a percussion ensemble unto itself. Once you find a way to play, you're stuck; and you become what you play." Listening to Graham's hard-edge bebop style of playing is like viewing a sonar graph of his psyche.

Bill Graham has been making bebop music since 1948, which, coincidentally, was around the time that bebop was born. Katie Malloch, who hosted the Bill Graham Quintet (with Mike Lewis on piano) on CBC Jazz Beat in 1992, said that "his bebop is bred in the bone." Graham's ride-cymbal patterns are his signature, and they are made even more fluid when he drops in offbeats on his bass drum. Also, his snare-drum accents colour and frame what he hears, sometimes exploding in wire-brush solos that are darkly poignant. Like drummer Kenny Clarke, Graham builds in his drum beats with cymbal work and ringing rimshots. One of his own tricks for sustaining the trill is to vibrate the ride cymbal between his index and middle fingers.

Bop can be brutal because of its complicated harmonies and "far out" chord structures; or "it can leave you for dead on the highway," as one aging hipster put it. Regarding the kind of music he plays, Graham states his case succinctly: "My style is to swing -- because everything else comes from that." When pressed to elaborate, he adds, "In the beginning was noise; and noise begat rhythm; and rhythm begat everything else." This is the kind of cosmology a drummer can live with.

A rather telling anecdote along that "bebop highway" concerns the time Graham visited the Village Vanguard in New York in 1964. "It was after hours. Max Roach, Elvin Jones and a few other black musicians were taking a breather. I had met Max two or three times in Montreal, but when Elvin asked him if he knew me, Max shook his head. Elvin was annoyed by Max's putdown of a white drummer, and when I asked Elvin how long he was staying, he said: "I'm staying here till Max goes home.'"

Besides playing modern jazz, Graham has composed scores for radio, television, film and theatre. He did the percussion segment in Gershwin's Strike Up the Band for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet; and he composed Reborn From Ruins, an original work for percussion and bass. His wide experience and musical versatility enable him to make arrangements of classic jazz standards, such as Monk's Evidence and Bud Powell's Un Poco Loco. Of Bill Graham, Toronto percussionist Geordie McDonald said, "He's a complete musician. He knows his materials inside out."

When queried about the present state of jazz, Graham remarks: "There's been nothing new since Elvin Jones worked with Coltrane. And Trane died in 1967." He pauses for effect, then continues. "Let me put it this way. In poetry, you have vision; in music, sound. The two are interchangeable. If neither one of these elements informs the creative expression of the experience, then you have something less than art. A genius, like Buddy Rich, is another matter. To some extent, rock-'n'-roll has brought about the gradual decline of jazz. It's the numbing sameness of rock that bores me."

As a teenager in Winnipeg in the Forties, Graham remembers not having enough money to buy music records. "But I was fortunate," he says, "in being exposed to a lot of live music. Bands came to town and stayed for ten days. That kind of gig is unheard-of now. I saw Red Norvo. I saw Sidney Catlett with Louis Armstrong at the Winnipeg Auditorium in 1941. I knew then that I wanted to be a musician."

Graham's recent activities as a jazzman include a live concert at the Ontario Science Centre in 1990. This concert was recorded for CJRT-FM Sound of Toronto Jazz Series, with announcer Ted Reilly. He also performed at Toronto's duMaurier Jazz Festival that year, and at the Montreal Jazz Festival in 1992. In July of this year, during the duMaurier Toronto Jazz Festival, he played with the Mike Lewis Trio at the Silver Rail. "I'd like to play all the time," he muses, "but nowadays jazz seems to be a part-time thing."

Bill resides in Toronto. He's been twice married and divorced, and has a daughter living in Hamilton, Ontario. "The standard of musicianship in Toronto is good," he says, "but there aren't enough venues for young musicians to work in and develop. Communication among humans is becoming increasingly electronic, hence less intimate. This is the age of the compact disk. What's next -- music on microchips? I miss reading the liner notes."

Speaking of records and such, Bill Graham has been a sideman on many. He can be heard playing his hi-hat on Canadian All Stars, (Discovery Records), New York. This record, incidentally, was a Canadian jazz first in 1953. He is also making drum music with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra in The Beginning and the End of the World, (Omni Records), and in Madeleyne, (RCA) and Jubalay.

In Swinging in Paradise, Canadian jazz historian John Gilmore pinpoints Graham's activity in the Montreal jazz scene during the early Fifties. "Montreal used to be the Paris of North America," says Graham, wistfully. "I was always working. The difference between that time and now is the lack of a nightclub scene. The scene has been marginalized by home entertainment. As well, technology has virtually dried up the studio business."

Despite the changes that affect his profession, Graham's enthusiasm and energy are still cooking. He remains as active as ever, always finding new things to play. His dynamic quintet will be recording for CBC Jazz Beat this fall. Canadian jazz drummer Bill Graham just keeps on drumming. [section]