Everything about Elvin Jones is big - his talent, his stature, the volcanic energy with which, at 73, he still attacks the drums. A great bear of a man, warm and friendly, sometimes volatile, he ranks with the very best on his instrument in jazz, up there with such trailblazers as Sid Catlett, Jo Jones, Philly Joe Jones (neither is a relation), Kenny Clarke, Art Blakey, Paul Motian and Tony Williams. In saxophonist John Coltrane's celebrated 1960s period, Jones was part of Coltrane's ground-breaking quartet, three of whom - Coltrane, pianist McCoy Tyner and Jones - became major influences on their instruments.
The drummer is also one of a trinity of brothers who have carved significant careers in jazz. One is the late Thad Jones, who played trumpet and flugelhorn, composed, arranged and, with drummer Mel Lewis, established the exceptional Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Big Band; the other is Hank Jones who, at 81, remains one of the finest pianists in the idiom, as energetically creative as his brother. They grew up together in Pontiac, Michigan, where Elvin was born in 1927, the youngest of 10 children.
"I made up my mind when I was 13," he says, "that I wouldn't be a doctor or a fireman. I would be a drummer." By then, he was practising eight to 10 hours a day, self-taught from a method book and by listening to the drummers he was eventually to surpass as an innovator. And, as was so often the case with children who are passionate about music, it was a high-school band director who helped to channel his commitment.
"He made me realise," Jones acknowledges, "that the drum is not something to bang on, that it is not a round disc to be pounded. He told me you can hear incoherent sound in a traffic jam and that music should go far beyond the reproduction of traffic jams."
The advice stuck. By the early 1950s, he was working in the burgeoning Detroit jazz scene, among such notables as pianists Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris, guitarist Kenny Burrell and the late Milt Jackson, who found fame playing vibes with the Modern Jazz Quartet. And Jones began to be noticed. Visitors such as Charlie Parker and Miles Davis spread the word about his abilities. Eventually, what seemed like a big break materialised - a ticket to New York and an audition for a new Benny Goodman band.
If, in retrospect, a partnership between a forward-looking, bop-saturated drummer and the rear-facing Swing Era of Goodman seemed the least likely of musical nuptials, the marriage was never consummated. In fact, it never happened at all. The band, with Goodman, had him start with Sing, Sing, Sing, a chart indelibly associated with Goodman's drummer, Gene Krupa, and the 1938 Carnegie Hall concert at which it was played. Jones had always disliked the showy piece and, patently honest, probably didn't conceal his feelings too well. The audition went rapidly downhill. There were encouraging words but no job.
Perhaps it was naive of the drummer to think he would suit that band. However, he stayed in New York and found more congenial colleagues in Charlie Mingus, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Art Farmer and J.J. Johnson - the names are like a rollcall of musicians at the cutting edge of jazz in the Big Apple at that time. Finally, Coltrane called. Jones had first played with the great saxophonist in Philadelphia about two years earlier, when the group's regular drummer, Philly Joe Jones, was not allowed to play there because he had a drugs-related police record. Jones later recalled, with some amusement, that Coltrane had to explain to the waiting police at the club that his replacement drummer was not the man they wanted.
He joined Coltrane's quartet in September 1960. It was, for the most part, a marriage made in heaven. He and Coltrane had two attributes in common - great physical stamina and an over-riding interest in complex rhythms. While Jones would imply a basic pulse, he would seldom, if ever, state it explicitly; instead, he would lay over it a complex of polyrhythms that somehow swung ferociously, while at the same time managing to anticipate, react to and complement Coltrane's and Tyner's work in the quartet. "I guess you could say he has the ability to be in three places at the same time," Coltrane, who once also called him "a genius", told critic Nat Hentoff.
Jones was vital to the saxophonist, whose penchant for marathon, densely-structured solos needed his stamina and imagination for support. But the musical marriage ended in divorce in January 1966, after Coltrane added another drummer, Rashied Ali, to the group. Jones didn't see eye to eye with Ali, either musically or personally; he was gone in little more than two months. "I couldn't hear what anybody was doing," he told the jazz magazine downbeat. "All I could hear was a lot of noise."
His subsequent groups - generally quintets under the generic Jazz Machine title - have certainly been less "out" than Coltrane's later ones, but he has remained an inventive and dynamic force in jazz, with a personal credo to match. "I set a very high standard for myself and the musicians I choose to play with. I always believed that anything worth doing is worth doing well." It's perhaps a trifle severely put. Closer, probably, to the personal warmth musicians associate with him is what he once told a downbeat correspondent. "I want to enjoy life and I enjoy myself then. I think it's an honest kind of effort I have put forth to function as a musician and an artist."
The Elvin Jones Jazz Machine, with Stefano di Batista (alto/soprano), Delfeayo Marsalis (trombone), Eric Lewis (piano), Steve Kirby (bass) and the leader on drums, opens the Dublin Jazz Week at Vicar Street on Monday, September 18th. Jones holds a masterclass, the Master Drummer, at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre on Tuesday 19th September, at 2 p.m.