Ed Shaughnessy: Performing a Rhythmic Service

Ed Shaughnessy, in 1995

It’s human nature to attempt to identify “the best” in every possible category. Buddy Rich was called the world’s fastest drummer. Now there’s actually a well-known contest for the world’s fastest drummer. The “Guinness Book of Records” has a category for the world’s loudest drummer. Both of these records are surely debatable and constantly challenged. One thing we can safely say is the world’s most frequently heard drummer was Ed Shaughnessy. Mr. Shaughnessy, who passed away on Friday, May 24, 2013, spent 29 years behind the drum set with “The Tonight Show” starring Johnny Carson, and in his own estimation that equaled some 5,000 appearances on national television. I can’t imagine that any other drummer was heard as often, and his trademark intro for “The Tonight Show” theme became its own musical signature. It’s no coincidence that he was also one of the best at his profession.

Ed Shaughnessy was born in New Jersey in 1929, and his first experience in music was with piano lessons, which he didn’t embrace. His life was changed in true storybook fashion due to a man who owed money to his father. In my first interview with Ed, he related the story:

MR:    Let me take you back. The story is about your first drum set.

ES:     Oh, my first drum set? Yeah I guess you know the story. My dad, who was a Teamster, he worked on the docks, he had loaned $20 to somebody, and the fellow was up against it, he couldn’t give him the $20, and he said to my dad, “doesn’t your son like music?” Because at the time I was playing piano. I played piano for like three or four years before drums. And he said “oh yeah, my kid, he just loves his music, he loves everything about music.” And he was a mellow guy, my dad. So the guy said “well look, I can’t give you the $20, but I’ve got these two drums, a bass drum and a snare drum with a stand and a little pedal” and I think a beat up old cymbal, and “would you take that in place of the 20 bucks.” And like I said my dad being a mellow dude, he said, “yeah, if you’re broke, my kid will probably have fun with these things.” So we never had a car. He brought them home from New York on the subway that went from New York to New Jersey. And you know I appreciated how he did that, he brought them home and on the bus, from the subway to home. That’s the way you did it in those days. You didn’t think twice about it. I guess they let you on with crazy things like that. And so he, to make a long story short, I’m 14, he brings these old beat up drums in, I mean really beat up, old, like from the 30’s or 20’s or something. And I can’t explain it to you, but something fascinating happened when I opened them up. It took me half a day to set the snare drum up on the stand right I think, and put the pedal on. You know I didn’t know anything about drums.

It didn’t take long before Ed became completely enamored with the drums and in his own words, “began to practice like a madman, four to six hours a day.” His practice paid off and led to his first break in the business:

ES:     Three years later I was on the road playing with professional bands. That’s a true story. George Shearing gave me my first job in New York when I was about 18. I was sitting in with Bud Powell and he played “Cherokee” for 25 minutes, and I stayed with it. And George Shearing said anyone that could play “Cherokee” at that tempo for twenty-five minutes, I’m going to give a gig to. This is just what he said. And his manager came over and said, “Mr. Shearing wants to talk to you.” And he says, “young man, anybody that can play ‘Cherokee’ for 25 minutes with Bud Powell, I’ve got to give a job to.” I thought it was so sweet the way he did it. And he says, “besides, my drummer is a little hung up” he said later. So he gave me two nights.

He continued to pay his dues with Jack Teagarden and Charlie Ventura, and in time he landed a studio job with CBS Television. His involvement in that world eventually led to his gig with “The Tonight Show.”

While Ed’s career blossomed after the big band era, he did get in some significant playing time with the legends of that time. His story about playing with Benny Goodman is classic. Ed was with Benny’s band for a 1950 European tour and fortunately he had been given some information about how to deal with the inevitable encounter with Benny’s irascible personality.

ES:     I liked working with Benny a lot because he was playing great at that time and I got along with Benny, who was hard to get along with, everybody knows that. Most people know that and don’t know what instrument he played. But when I used to sit in with Lionel Hampton’s band, he said to me one night “I hear you’re going with the old man.” I said, “yeah I’m going to go to Europe with Benny.” I was 21. And here’s what he said to me. He said, “now if he gets weird on you, get weirder.” I said, “this is the key?” He said, “this is the key.” He said, “didn’t I get along great with him?” I said, “yeah, you seemed to have a good relationship with him.” He said, “well if he gets a little out, go a little outer.” So when this happened and I was late at a rehearsal, and I walked through the thing and he looked at me and he put the glasses down with the famous ray, and he started in, I said, “Jesus, Benny, are we just here to jerk around or are we going to rehearse?” May God be my judge, that’s what I said. I tried to go as far out as I could. And he said, here’s what he said. He said “the kid’s right. Let’s play.” And he never said a word. And I was over 35, 40 minutes late. And this was Paris, his biggest concert. So you know he was going to chew my thing out real good, and I did a Hamp, and I went out on him. And I’ll tell you, I did it one other time in a lesser way, and he never bothered me. I think he thought the kid is definitely crazy but he’s a nice little drummer, leave him alone. But he picked on everybody else, see. He cut out Roy Eldridge’s solos in certain places because he was getting too much applause. He cut out Zoot Sims’ solos all through Scandinavia because Zoot was more popular than he was. And may God be my judge, this is the truth I’m telling you. You know he was a very strange man. But thank God for Hamp — Hamp straightened me out, just go a little further baby and it worked like a charm.

Ed Shaughnessy, in 1998

Among Ed’s fondest memories is Count Basie telling him that he “fit the band like a glove.” Ed appeared on five Basie LP’s in the 1960’s, an opportunity that occurred for the oddest reason. Ed stated:

ES:     Thank God for Sonny Payne’s marital problems, because when Sonny Payne (his regular drummer) couldn’t come into New York because his wife would throw him in jail, Basie would call me up.

In addition to the thrill of recording with Basie, he also got to witness one of the very few moments of the Count’s temper:

ES:     We come to this studio to make the first album, and we sit down and we had no dividers between any of the band. Basie did not like to record that way. Therefore he set the band up almost like real life. Almost the same as you would on a stage, almost. And we start running the first tune down and play it. Kind of a medium tempo tune, nothing real hot. And I’m playing and filling and doing the stuff that I normally would do. And we stop, and the engineer says over the thing “well, the producer wants to talk to you, Count.” So Count says, “well talk on the thing.” He says, “well do you want to talk over the mics?” Count says “yeah, what is it? Come on, let’s get going.” So the producer leans over the mic, he says, “we think the drums should probably be about half as loud as they are and we think that that would be a lot better for this recording.” And Basie, who very seldom does this, went [screams] “rahhhhhh,” and hit his fist on the piano. And all the band went like [screams] “rahhhhh” I swear to God, including me. It scared the crap out of us. Now after he does this, now he’s Mister Cool and he says “Mr. Shaughnessy’s here because I like the way he plays in a big band. Your job is to get it all down on record.” And he looked at me and he says “play your way.” And that was the last time we got a word about, in five record dates, never a word came from the booth. And you know something? They got it all down okay. I didn’t modify anything. But man, that scared the crap out of all of us. It was like, well, you know he made the point because we were going to make a couple of albums for this company. He made the point that this band is going to play the way it plays. We’re not going to play studio style, where we kind of don’t play or we modify everything. He wants the fire. The main thing is he wants the fire, and you need a certain amount of drumming intensity and energy for that, don’t you? You can’t lighten up and play, let the band play and you play like Mr. Wimpy, it’s going to sound awful, see? But boy he sure took care of it. But I’m telling you he scared the hell out of everybody. And the main thing I remember was the roar, like a lion [quiet roar] and everybody just froze, you know, just like this. Because you know he never did stuff like that. You know this was Mr. Quiet. It was a great experience.

Ed Shaughnessy was one of the first jazz musicians to sense the potential and worth of interacting with high school and college students. He stopped counting his appearances at 600. During the early years of the Jazz Archive I was able to bring Ed to Hamilton, where I witnessed his interaction with high school musicians. He had just the right amount of intensity, inspiring but not intimidating, and he had an answer for young drummers who didn’t feel the necessity of being able to read charts:

MR:    That’s a pretty old fashioned thing, like if I learn to read I’m going to lose my spontaneity.

ES:     Yes or will it hurt my jazz is the old line. I don’t want reading to hurt my jazz. But you’d be surprised, some kids love to catch on to that because they don’t want to have to want to bother. So you know what I say? ‘Cause the example that was given for years was Buddy Rich see. So I would go at clinics “well Buddy Rich doesn’t read, why should I read?” And my rejoinder is: “do you think you’re as talented as Buddy Rich? If you are, you shouldn’t be here you should be out earning like he did, at the age of four years of age.” A thousand dollars a week in 1921. You think you’re that talented? The second highest paid child star in the world? Do you think that you’re as talented as he was? He could get by without reading because he had way more talent than most of us. And I of course say “most of us” because I mean it. Natural gift. He was the second highest paid child star to Shirley Temple I think.

Ed not only affected youthful musicians, he stayed hip and current himself, embracing jazz/rock and African and Indian drum styles in his playing. And for all his technique and solo ability, he kept in mind a phrase that he attributed to the late, great bassist Milt Hinton: “the players in the rhythm section are providing a rhythmic service, and don’t ever forget it.”

You can check out Ed’s take on the meaning of swing in a previous blog. You may also read the full transcripts of Ed Shaughnessy archived at Hamilton College. Part I was conducted on 9/1/95 in Los Angeles; and Part II was conducted at Hamilton on 4/25/98.

But Does It Swing?

The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz is one of the prime sources for facts about jazz and its artists. They also scored well with an opinion. Their lengthy definition of “swing,” starts as follows:

Swing -- a quality attributed to jazz performance. Although basic to the perception and performance of jazz, swing has resisted concise definition or description.

We shouldn’t be surprised that it’s hard to define the magic of an artistic concept. It’s true in any art form that what makes a work stand out is, in the end, undefinable. We can look at the parts and discover some truisms about them. Jazz musicians know that when they see a series of eighth notes, which normally divide a beat into two equal parts, they play the first one longer than the second. This is a clearly definable part of swing. We know that swing music is almost always in 4/4 time, that it involves a combination of instruments working together, and that it is the basis for a whole genre of music that employs the name. Nonetheless we still try to specifically define the concept, and it’s been a favorite question of mine in gathering interviews for the Jazz Archive.

It is a logical question to ask of jazz drummers, who along with the bassists are most responsible for making things swing.

Drummer Ed Shaughnessy, who drove Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show big band, stated the following about swing. He had a certain affinity for the word “infectious.”

MR: Are you able, in talking to students or anybody in fact, to put what swing is into words?

ES: I finally think I can do it. I struggled with it for a long time. But I really think I can do it. The thing is before I do it I want to say to you how often swing is used as a noun representing the type of music. Right? They’ll say the swing bands of the 30’s and 40’s, right? And they played swing. We’re going to deal with it as — really how would you describe it if I’m going to go about swing as a feeling? Would we say it’s still a noun but it’s... I mean if I say “it swings” that’s like an adjective, isn’t it? Okay. Well I just want to make this clear to anybody who watches this tape. Because what I find the problem is sometimes is that youngsters, and even oldsters, they mix up the terms “to swing” and lock it in exclusively to jazz music. Now I think bluegrass music swing like hell. It swings. Now what is that swinging I’m talking about? Without drums, right? It’s infectious. The main thing I think that swing means, for me, is that it’s an infectious beat that makes you want to move, whether it’s to dance or to sit and tap your foot or to tap your hands, but it makes you want to move in a sense, and in a response to it. It brings something out in you. It gets into you. Maybe it makes you happy. But mostly it makes you want to get with it. Infectious is the best word I can use. That’s why I don’t like the fact that someone, who is very hard-headed about anything other than jazz, like if I say to them sometimes, well you know some of James Brown’s funk rhythms would swing you out into bad health. “Well I don’t like rock & roll.” I say look man [scats] — I say if you could hear that and you can’t move yourself, you are dead, they should embalm you see? But that’s a form of swing, do you know what I’m saying? If you hear a bunch of Africans playing [scats] and they’re playing that twelve-eight stuff like the Watusi people do, and even if you don’t see them dancing, if you hear that it’s infectious. It gets you going too. So to me, any music, like bluegrass, or jazz, or funk music or Watusi music, it’s infectious and communicates to you rhythmically, and gets a visceral thing going. That’s what I think swing is about. And I don’t think it’s an exclusive property of jazz. I really don’t. However, some people will play jazz and it doesn’t swing. That’s the part that I think people should understand. To be swinging is a certain feeling. You can have jazz people playing but it ain’t swinging too good see. So I think — I’m not going to say the mistake — but I think the error sometimes is to feel that if you’re playing jazz it’s necessarily swinging. No it’s not necessarily swinging. You know? It might be a little cerebral, a little abstract, and you don’t feel very much of that visceral communication. It might be very good, it might be very technical, but it isn’t kind of getting to you. That’s the absence of swing. That doesn’t mean other things can’t be there. Improvisation can be there. Imagination can be there. And feeling can be there. But I’ve heard for instance a bass and a drummer, both of whom were very good well known, and they don’t play good together. They are not compatible. It never settles into a good, unified pulse. So it isn’t swinging too good. That’s a good definition, don’t you think?

MR: I like it, I love the word infectious.

ES: I’m not saying because it’s mine, but I mean infectious is really what swing is about. Hey, yes. [snaps fingers] When I see audience, and I’m playing and I see some of that, it doesn’t have to be everybody, if I see just a smattering of that, I think we’re getting it across. And if I see nobody moving, I don’t think we’re getting it across.

I often have had the enjoyable task of booking highly respected jazz artists to perform at the college, sometimes grouping them together in unrehearsed ensembles. It’s interesting to hear the musicians talk afterwards in private about how things felt. You might assume that musicians at the top of their game can make things swing at will, no matter who the personnel may be. This is definitely not the case and I often overhear talk about which bassist and drummer don’t work well together, or which bassist, drummer and guitar player really lock in and make things swing.

Swing of course is not just rhythmic — there’s a harmonic component to the music that was developed in the mid-1930’s. Pianist and composer Steve Allen (yes, that Steve Allen) addressed this part of the definition of swing:

MR: Can you define for me when you hear something that’s really swinging, why? Why does one thing swing and the next thing doesn’t?

SA: The dominant factor is rhythm I think. Well people would think of that right out of the barn, but that isn’t all there is to it. There are certain ways of voicing instruments, if you’re talking now let’s say about a big band, 14, 15, 16 pieces, there are certain kinds of harmonies sometimes, now it’s so common we don’t even notice it or comment on it, but sometime in the late 30’s you began to hear more chords. Even if it’s a simple chord, a C chord let’s say, where they added the sixth note of the scale instead of the tonic. [scats]. Let’s see C-E-G, to those three notes they added the A which is the sixth note in the group. And why that sounds hipper, or cooler as they would say today, it’s not easy to explain in purely scientific terms, but that’s the way it is. That had probably happened first, even before it happened with instruments it happened with voices. If you listen to trios or quartets, there were no five group singing groups that I know about in the old days, until the Hi Lo’s and a group like that came along, they didn’t get that complex with their harmonies. But we all remember the term “Barber Shop Quartet” [sings] down by the ol’ mill stream. That’s nice stuff, but the harmonies are as simple as possible. Only the necessary notes are there. There’s no enrichment or adornment. But then about 1937ish or so a group called The Merrimacks, if you can find any of their old recording, play them sometime with this comment, you’ll see what I’m talking about. They were the first people to add the sixth and to add other harmonic enrichments — where they got them I don’t know, you’ll have to dig them out of the grave and ask them I guess. But you can hear it in their old recordings. Then from The Merrimacks, that opened the window of opportunity, I’m very big with clichés today, and you had groups like the Pied Pipers, the Mellowlarks, Mel Torme had a great group, the Meltones I think they were called, in which the harmonies were more typical of what was also happening at that time in voicing the reed sections, the saxophone sections, of orchestras. When they only had four notes, they could still put in the sixth and some enrichments, but when they added a fifth saxophone, which now all the big bands had had for years, somehow that enlarged the harmonic possibilities and we associated that kind of harmonic hipness, with big band with jazz, with swing.

If you want to go to the piano to see what Steve was talking about with the sixth chord, simply play a C-E-G and add the A, the sixth tone in the key of C. For a more authentic swing voicing, put the C on top (play E-G-A-C in your right hand from the bottom up). Play a single low C on the bass end. That’s a good swing chord.

In addition to being a feeling, swing was the popular music of the day from the mid-30’s to the late 40’s. But in the mid-50’s instead of swinging, kids wanted to rock. Rock music straightened the swing eighth notes out, as saxophonist Jerry Dodgion so succinctly stated, in an almost off-hand remark:

JD: In those days [the late 40’s] the pop music was still jazz oriented more so. Then later on it became more rock & roll, even eighth note oriented. So it changes, it’s changing all the time. I

MR: Can I just back up? You just said “even note oriented.”

JD: Even eighth note.

MR: Yes. See I never heard anybody quite describe ... we know how swing eighth notes go and how rock & roll eighth notes go, but no one ever exactly said the music became even note oriented. That’s very interesting to me.

JD: Well some drummers, if you talk to some drummers, they might tell you that. Because that’s a basic thing. It’s an even eighth note as opposed to the twelve eight, smooth flowing.

My own two cents about swinging, or establishing any infectious groove, is that when instruments are in balance you have a much better chance of success. The All-American Rhythm Section of the Count Basie Band of the 1930’s and 40’s, is often held up as the standard bearer of the swing rhythm section. I’m convinced that one thing they did that made them so successful was balancing their own volume. This was in the days before amplification, where the drummer played in a volume to match the acoustic bass and the acoustic guitar and the acoustic piano. That self-imposed balancing transformed four instruments into one unit. The rhythm section itself was one instrument. Call it what you will.

My personal concept about this was reinforced in 1996 when on an archive trip I was able to hear, on successive nights, the Capp/Pierce Juggernaut Big Band and the Count Basie Orchestra, at the time directed by Grover Mitchell. The Juggernaut bought into the concept of “mic everything” (make the big band bigger). Powerful indeed, but in my opinion this band did not swing unless you call swinging getting beat over the head. The next night, on the same stage, the Count Basie Orchestra, in the original Count Basie tradition, swung their butts off. With a mic for the soloist only and the rest of the band providing their own balance. They used their experience and musicality to create the groove. The sound man had little to do.

Does this blog entry provide a definitive description of swing? Of course not. Swing is magic.