See & Hear
Bay Area jazz stalwart Joe Warner invited giants or jazz to jam with him in Berkeley
Bernard Purdie and other top jazz drummers will be performing in Berkeley this month.
Joe Warner has a simple goal. He wants to play with the greatest musicians in the world. A blues-steeped jazz pianist (or a jazz-steeped blues pianist, depending on the tune), Warner has earned considerable respect around the Bay Area over the past decade for his versatility accompanying a bevy of excellent singers.
He’s best known as the constant musical companion of Faye Carol, a fiercely creative vocalist whose tough love on the bandstand has nurtured several generations of jazz masters, including pianist Benny Green, saxophonist Howard Wiley, and drummer Darrell Green (no relation to Benny).
Rather than waiting for some of his musical heroes to call, Warner devised the concert series Give the Drummer Some, which brings a spectacular roster of trap-set innovators to the California Jazz Conservatory on successive Saturdays in September.
“I’m always trying to play and get new experiences with the best of the best,” said Warner, who was raised in Martinez and lives in Oakland. “It was a no-brainer to call these cats. They’re people I’ve admired for a long time. The drummer makes or breaks the band and there’s a real affinity between piano and drums, as they’re both percussion instruments.”
Funded by a grant from the arts-centric Fleishhacker Foundation, the series opens Saturday with a trio featuring Warner, ace bassist Curtis Lundy and drummer Dennis Chambers, who earned early renown when he joined Parliament/ Funkadelic in 1978 at the age of 18. He’s been in constant demand since in situations that call for variable blends of jazz, funk, and rock, particularly with guitar stars such as John Scofield, Carlos Santana, John McLaughlin, and Mike Stern.
“He can play anything,” Warner said of Chambers. “I heard him first on the Maceo Parker album ‘Roots and Grooves’ where he’s playing really funky on one piece and then swinging hard on a Ray Charles tune. He handled all of it. That’s what Faye does, covering all the different bags.”
Much like the 62-year-old Chambers made his mark while still a teenager, Lenny White was 19 when he helped change the course of jazz on “Bitches Brew,” the seminal 1970 jazz/ rock fusion album by Miles Davis. On Sept. 11, White performs with Warner and bassist Essiet Essiet, a member of the last edition of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.
While White, 71, is rightly recognized as a rhythmic architect of fusion, he was equally effective in hard-bop settings with Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard and Woody Shaw (not to mention Pete and Coke Escovedo’s Latin rock juggernaut Azteca).
It takes nothing away from Chambers and White to recognize that the booking coup for Give the Drummer Some was Bernard “Pretty” Purdie, “a legend among legends,” Warner said, noting his five-year tenure with Aretha Franklin and his work on her classic 1971 album “Aretha Live at the Fillmore West.” Purdie joins Warner Sept. 18 for a concert that includes Faye Carol, Cuban percussionist Jesus Diaz, and bassist Rustee Allen, an Oakland R&B mainstay best known for his work in Sly and the Family Stone.
Purdie, 82, played on some of the 20th century’s most influential and beloved records as a top-shelf studio musician. As a jazz sideman his credits cover the length and breadth of the tradition, from Louis Armstrong to Dizzy Gillespie to Albert Ayler. But his most indelible contribution is the way he expanded the trap set’s rhythmic vocabulary with his trademark “Purdie shuffle,” which became the backbone groove on countless tunes (drummers can attend an Sept. 19 afternoon workshop with Purdie at Geoffrey’s Inner Circle in Oakland).
“The shuffle is the thread that runs through Black music and there’s so many ways of applying it,” said Oaklandreared Darrell Green, who returns to the East Bay from New York City to play the concluding Give the Drummer Some concert on Sept. 25. “Mr. Purdie’s way, lightening it up and putting it on the hi hat, that was so slick!”
In his early 40s, Green is the youngest drummer in the series by two decades, but he’s old enough to have absorbed essential knowledge first hand from masters like the late drummer Billy Higgins.
He’s toured internationally with jazz greats like Pharoah Sanders, Wallace Roney and Dr. Lonnie Smith. And when he was coming up in the Bay Area scene he paid dues with Lavay Smith and her Red Hot Skillet Lickers and Faye Carol, who’s on the bill with him at the Jazz Conservatory with bassist Essiet Essiet and rapper Rico Pabon.
Pleased to showcase a hometown hero in such august company, Warner is spotlighting “one of the underrecognized talents in this music,” he said, a drummer who represents the deepest values of the tradition. “Darrell is a monster.”