Roy Haynes was a Grammy Award-winning drummer whose career spanned more than 70 years and covered most major forms of jazz.
- Died: November 12, 2024 (Who else died on November 12?)
- Details of death: Died on Long Island in New York at the age of 99 after a brief illness.
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Roy Haynes’ legacy
Haynes began drumming professionally in the 1940s and was still drumming on stage in the 2020s. Over the course of his 70 years of performance, he played almost every major permutation of jazz music, from bebop to swing, cool jazz, fusion, avant garde, and more, doing so alongside a laundry list of legends of the genre.
Born in Boston to immigrants from Barbados, Haynes briefly studied violin before embracing the drums. He began playing around the Boston area as a teen in 1942, and in 1945 moved to New York to play with bandleader Luis Russell. This kicked off a series of stints with jazz greats, including the legendary Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Stan Getz, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Sarah Vaughan, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Dave Brubeck, and many others. Between his artistic collaborations and his own dynamic records, Haynes appeared on dozens of albums over the course of his long career.
He earned the nickname Snap Crackle in the 1950s for his tight, focused approach, and began leading his own bands at around the same time. His dozens of LPs include “Out of the Afternoon,” “Cymbalism,” and “Thank You Thank You.” He released his final album, “Roy-Alty,” in 2011.
Haynes was nominated for eight Grammy Awards, winning twice – in 1988, for his contributions to McCoy Tyner’s “Blues for Coltrane: A Tribute to John Coltrane,” then in 2000 for “Like Minds” by Gary Burton – and he also received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys in 2011. This was followed by a Lifetime Achievement Award given to him by the Jazz Foundation of America in 2019. He is also in the DownBeat Critics Poll Hall of Fame and has won the magazine’s readers and critics polls multiple times, among his many honors. In 1995, he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Notable quote
“I have had a feeling ever since I could remember to want to play drums. I was always [playing] with my hands in school. In fact, they pulled me out of school once for playing on the desk. I had the whole class in the palm of my hands and the teacher didn’t like that at all.” — interview with Jazz Times, 2019
Tributes to Roy Haynes
Full obituary: NPR
