Time Is

(the liner notes from Time is. . . Robert G. O'Meally is director of the Center for Jazz Studies, Columbia University. All Night to Play This superb recording represents what might be called a gesture toward perfection. This is the case because the session's leader, Leroy Williams, put aside the commercial incentives typically driving today's musical productions and opted instead to do everything he could simply to create the best possible music. This is Williams first recording as a leader. For Leroy Williams is one of the most brilliant drummers in New York, and has recorded with some of the most famous names ever to play jazz: He has been Barry Harris's drummer of choice for over thirty years and has also made records with Buddy Tate, Sonny Stitt, Earl Coleman, Hank Mobley, Charles McPherson, Slide Hampton, Andrew Hill, Junior Cook, and Bill Hardman. Some of the great ones he played with but did not record with include Thelonious Monk, Johnny Griffin, Sonny Rollins, Jimmy Heath, and Ray Bryant. And there are many others including Elmollenium, a sparkling sextet created to play the music of Elmo Hope. What has made Williams such an appealing percussionist, I believe, is that he is such a highly musical player-one whose sound is rich and whose sense of time is perfect. 'There are so many drummers,' the composer Hale Smith once said to me as we listened to a young drummer slamming in and out of tempo, 'and so little time!' Williams's time is authoritative and relentlessly swinging--true to the music's dance-floor origins. Stanley Crouch: 'Leroy Williams's placement of the beat allows the other musicians to play in front of it or behind it without losing the flow. He always has that drive but never makes the drums an obstacle. And he can play brushes so smoothly, too, almost a lost art nowadays.' It's as if Leroy Williams always has in mind Baby Dodds's credo that the drummer's job is to keep the band in good spirits-to block evil spirits while keeping everybody, on the bandstand and out front, too, in a mood to enjoy themselves. As the master of the flow of time, Williams keeps the jazz train moving and opens the door for his comrades in a way that seems to say 'Man, I never heard you play that before. That's beautiful!' Furthermore, Williams is a complete drummer who uses all the various elements of this most American of instruments-tom-toms from China, cymbals from Turkey, snare drum from Europe, bells and blocks from Africa-as if they were keys and pedals on a piano. Note in particular his brush-work and uses of the bass drum-all part of the master-drummer's integrated music-kit: the dream machine that makes the sound of surprise. Williams makes the kit sing and sigh and dance in a coat of many colors. 'You need to see the beat,' he said to a group of students at Columbia University last year, encouraging them to attend 'live' music in concerts or clubs, to watch the music-makers in action. Even on record, Williams makes the beat so vivid that you not only feel it's power but also visualize it's lines and colors: you see the music. Williams's first gigs included work with bassist Wilbur Ware, who was his most important early mentor. When Williams came to New York in 1967, Ware was already there. It was Wilbur who hooked me up with Hank Mobley in New York. In the summer of 1970 Wilbur recommended Williams to play with Thelonious Monk, whose regular band had just broken up. 'Come on, man,' Wilbur had said, 'are you ready?!' With Monk, Williams played a week at the Village Vanguard, a week in Raleigh, and then a scattering of jobs around Manhattan. 'I learned a lot just watching Monk, and from the few things he would tell me directly,' said Williams. 'He dug my time, but one night, maybe I was trying to show too much technique, and he turned to me and said, 'We've got all night to play.' I learned from that to make everything I did play count for something.' 'I think that's the difference between the younger players and some of the older musicians,' Williams told me. 'I heard things directly from the source. I heard Pres