Today's post features a meeting of drummers of epic proportions!
This French concert, featured in its entirety, features the great Art Blakey and Tony Williams working together, backed up by Stanley Clarke on bass and a group of percussionists:
In particular check out their version of Ray Bryant's "Cubano Chant" which I quite enjoyed. This is a great example of two great jazz drummers from different generations making interesting music together. I did the math and Art is about 53 years old in this footage while Tony is around 27...almost half the age of Blakey!
Blakey was obviously a big fan of drummers playing together and gave us several albums on the Blue Note label that featured bands with multiple drummers and percussionists. We don't see jazz drummers collaborate like this very often (although Joe Lovano's "US FIVE" project comes to mind as does Joshua Redman's double trio) but it's certainly an interesting sonic texture worth exploring.