Louis Hayes’s syncopated ride-cymbal beat helped harden hard bop in the late 1950s and early ’60s. It was heard most widely on records by Horace Silver and Cannonball Adderley, and it survives as a classic mid-century American product, heavy and stylized and confident, a sound that can’t be easily whisked away.
Louis Hayes performing at the Jazz Standard on Friday.
Mr. Hayes, who recently turned 70, has been playing this beat nonstop as a bandleader for more than 30 years. Last week at the Jazz Standard he led three groups. The middle one was Louis Hayes’ Rising Stars, which played on Thursday and Friday. Mr. Hayes and the trombonist Curtis Fuller — a slightly older contemporary, and like Mr. Hayes, from Detroit — were the elders; the younger players included the pianist Jonathan Batiste, the bassist Richie Goods, the trumpeter Duane Eubanks, and the saxophonist Javon Jackson. Most of these musicians, except for the very young Mr. Batiste, have been around New York for a decade or more. But even if they’d all been 20 and full of vinegar, it would be hard to overturn this music. Mr. Hayes keeps too tight a grip on it.
His swing rhythm on the cymbal was the spinal cord of the music, and he kept it going almost continuously, pushing the band, at fixed volume for almost a whole tune. Where other drummers might change their patterns, he just kept his intact and moved it to another cymbal. And while he subtly changed the rhythm’s accents here and there, his basic device was driving continuity, a bullet train that wouldn’t stop.
Most straight-ahead jazz sets include at least one ballad, and in this one, after all that barreling forward motion, you really noticed the shift in mood. The other horn players left the stage, and Mr. Eubanks played Horace Silver’s “Peace,” with serenity and focus, and an even tone. Outside of that moment, the sideman who turned the most heads was Mr. Batiste. He climbed outside of hard bop’s relentless, high-impact style simply by finding a way to keep momentum and surprise with fewer notes, making them jagged and teasing.
The set’s closer was one of the most famous songs Mr. Hayes ever worked with at the ground level: “Work Song,” recorded by Nat Adderley and his brother, Cannonball, during Mr. Hayes’s time with them. It was fascinating to watch how he made the piece matter. The two big beats that close each line of the melody were loud and sharp, and he played almost the whole song with his upper body, only using the bass drum to mark the start of a new chorus or to complicate the story at the ending of someone else’s solo. The performance wasn’t showy, but it was imposing, worked out down to the deepest levels; it made room for variations, but it was a system.
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