Roy Haynes
*Roy Haynes was born on this date in 1925. He is a Black jazz drummer.
Roy Owen Haynes was born in the Roxbury section of Boston, Massachusetts. His parents were from Barbados. His younger brother, Michael E. Haynes, was a leader in the black community of Massachusetts.
Haynes made his professional debut in 1942 in his native Boston and began his full-time professional career in 1945. From 1947 to 1949, he worked with saxophonist Lester Young, and from 1949 to 1952 was a member of saxophonist Charlie Parker's quintet. Haynes also recorded with pianist Bud Powell and saxophonists Wardell Gray and Stan Getz. From 1953 to 1958, he toured with singer Sarah Vaughan and recorded with her.
Haynes is among the most recorded drummers in jazz. In a career lasting over 80 years, he has played swing, bebop, jazz fusion, and avant-garde jazz and is considered a pioneer of jazz drumming. "Snap Crackle" was a nickname given to him in the 1950s. He has led bands such as the Hip Ensemble. His albums Fountain of Youth and Whereas were nominated for a Grammy Award. He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1999. His son Graham Haynes is a cornetist; another son Craig Holiday Haynes and grandson Marcus Gilmore are both drummers. Esquire named Roy Haynes one of the best-dressed men in America in 1960, along with Fred Astaire, Miles Davis, Clark Gable, and Cary Grant.
In 1994, Haynes was awarded the Danish Jazzpar prize, and in 1996 the French government knighted him with the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France's top literary and artistic honor. Haynes received honorary doctorates from the Berklee College of Music (1991) and the New England Conservatory (2004), as well as a Peabody Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, in 2012. He was inducted into the DownBeat magazine Hall of Fame in 2004. On October 9, 2010, he was awarded the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation's B.N.Y. Mellon Jazz Living Legacy Award at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In 2001, Haynes's album Birds of a Feather: A Tribute to Charlie Parker was nominated for the 44th Annual Grammy Awards as Best Jazz Instrumental Album.
A tribute song was recorded by Jim Keltner and Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones, and he appeared on stage with the Allman Brothers Band in 2006 and Page McConnell of Phish in 2008. "Age seems to have just passed him by," Watts observed. "He's eighty-three, and in 2006, he was voted Best Contemporary Jazz Drummer [in Modern Drummer magazine's readers' poll]. He's amazing." In 2010, he was named a recipient of a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.
He received the award at the Special Merit Awards Ceremony & Nominees Reception of the 54th Annual Grammy Awards in 2012. In 2019, Haynes was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Jazz Foundation of America at the 28th Annual Loft Party. Haynes recently celebrated his birthday at the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York City. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, his 95th birthday celebration was canceled.
