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130 THE INSTRUMENTS, THE SOUNDS, THE PERFORMERS
bass drum pedal twice or four times in every measure, had taken up the new technique. Notable among them were Stan Levey; the volatile and brilliant Art Blakey; the late but unforgotten Dave Tough; Shelly Mamie, a Kenton and Herman alumnus who became the West Coast's most popular and flexible percussion artist; and the influential Tiny Kahn, who died at 29 in 1953.
Less influenced by the bop approach to drumming and more concerned with a continuance of the more straightforwardly rhythmic Gene Krupa tradition were Buddy Rich, a member of the Tommy Dorsey band off and on from 1939, and Louis Bellson. The latter, winner of a Krupa contest for young drummers, joined Benny Goodman in 1943, later galvanizing the Ellington orchestra for two unprecedently swinging years (1951-2) and demonstrating his phenomenal footwork through the novel device of using two bass drums.
The late 1940s saw the emergence of a new school of drummers who combined many influences. Afro-Cuban and Latin rhythms, imported into the Gillespie band by the late Chano Pozo in 1948, were rapidly taken up, and within a few years their use, previously a rarity and often regarded as detracting from the authenticity of jazz, could be detected at one point or another in almost every set of performances by a modern jazz group. The infusion of Latin rhythms drew to the periphery of jazz a wealth of previously unfamiliar percussive sounds. New names are constantly arising to denote dance styles, rhythm patterns or both; fundamentally the whole family of Latin-American and Afro-Cuban rhythms such as rhumba, mambo, merengue, cha-cha-cha, constitutes a diversity of accentuations, applied to the subdivision of a four-four measure into eighth notes. For example, the rhumba consists simply of accents on the first, fourth and seventh of these eight notes. The mambo is founded on a two-measure rhythm pattern, one of which (usually the first, though the pattern can be reversed) is identical with that of the rhumba; the other measure simply accents the second and third quarter notes. This two-measure formula, played on a pair of thick hardwood sticks known as the claves, is the continuum of all Cuban music. Authentic mambo melodies are "in clave"; that is, their |
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