Jazz: Buddy, the Drum Wonder

At 18 months, Bernard Rich was car ried onstage by the seat of his pants to play drums in his parents’ vaudeville act. At six, sporting a sailor suit and Lord Fauntleroy curls, he played the Tivoli theater circuit as “Traps, the Drum Wonder.” At seven, he toured Australia for $1,000 a week, and at eleven conducted his own band. Now a greying 49, Buddy Rich is still the Drum Wonder, still hanging on by the seat of his pants.

Only this time around he may have a real grip on something. When he an nounced six months ago that he was forming the new Buddy Rich Band, the boys in the business merely yawned. Cocky, flip, belligerent, Rich had drummed his way in and out of more orchestras, mismanaged more money than any ten musicians. The new Buddy Rich Band? “Another one of his fancies for the moment,” shrugged Bandleader Stan Kenton. But then, to everyone’s surprise, the band not only materialized but drew enthusiastic, sellout crowds in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Marveled Kenton: “Rich is serious!”

Whirring Propellers. Last week musicians of all stripes gathered at Manhattan’s Basin Street East to hear for themselves. Perched on a pyramid of risers, Rich set a blistering pace, insistently coaxing but never intruding. And when it came time for his solo, all 16 of his sidemen, like disciples at the feet of the master, craned in their chairs to watch and listen. Feet dancing, hands whirring like propellers, he sparked a kind of static electricity between cymbals and drums, tossing in an extra riff here, a random bass line there. His rolls were incredibly fast, his technique and rhythmic continuity flawless.

“He’s a freak,” said one bass player afterward. It was an expression of respect, for Rich has always been ranked by musicians as a drummer’s drummer. They marvel at the fact that he never practices, has none of the calluses and bumps on his hands that other drummers have. Among rival stickmen, the admiration extends from old guardists such as Gene Krupa (“Buddy is the Maury Wills of the drums”) to such new guardists as Elvin Jones (“His artistry is almost beyond belief”). But perhaps his most avid fans are symphony percussionists. “He’s the world’s greatest living natural jazz drummer,” says the Boston Symphony’s Howard Thompson. “He plays faster with one hand than most of us do with two. He is rhythmically original. He has no cliches.”

Everything ’67. That Rich is playing at all is remarkable. Seven years ago, he suffered a heart attack and was told by doctors that he would never play again. Though he has had three seizures since, he still keeps pounding away. “I’ve got to,” he exclaims. “What am I going to do? Sit around the house and bite my nails?” Not content to be just the highest-paid ($1,500 a week) sideman in music, he left Harry James’s band in March “to put music back in its perspective, to offer something else than just twang, twang, twang.” His new band, he says, has nothing to do with nostalgia. “Who the hell wants to hear the Glenn Miller sound? I dress ’67, I drive ’67, I think ’67, I play ’67. There is no such thing as the good old days.”

Rich’s good old days were often bad: one long round of run, Buddy, run from bill collectors and irate bandleaders. On and off, through romances and rifts, he played with Artie Shaw, Les Brown, Tommy Dorsey (four times) and Harry James (three times), once even took a fling at being a nightclub crooner. Trouble was, Rich had and still has a low regard for bandleaders. “The drummer is the real quarterback of a band,” he says. “Hell, Guy Lombardo might just as well be hailing a cab on the bandstand. None of the musicians look at him.” The compulsion to say what he thinks has led the stick-thin drummer (5 ft. 8 in., 125 Ibs.) into a lot of free-swinging battles. He has thrown punches at his sergeant in the Marine Corps, where he had been a judo instructor, and at Frank Sinatra, who is now one of his closest friends. Today, his heart condition keeps him limited to an occasional “one-or-two-punch thing in the parking lot.”

Yet, in his own toy-bulldog way, Rich is engaging, and fellow musicians are hoping that the band will make it big. If so, it will be another boost for the big-band business, which is enjoying a mild resurgence. If not, says Harry James, “I’m keeping his chair warm.”