![]() He sits with his legs crossed, and his hands crossed at his wrists above them. When I meet Watts in a Beverly Hills hotel’s small, comfortable conference room, he is dressed in a fine gray suit, a couple shades darker than his swept back hair. His most adventurous work, though, was a sweeping tribute to jazz drummers, in collaboration with drummer Jim Keltner - who has played with Eric Clapton, Ry Cooder, Delaney & Bonnie, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and Gábor Szabó, among numerous others. On the vocal albums, Watts muted his rhythms into a faded heartbeat, guiding songs of longing and loss. In addition, he has issued recordings with a tentet, a quintet, plus a big band (which played versions of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Paint It, Black”) has recorded two Charlie Parker tributes and has released two luxuriantly scored sets of American Songbook standards - Warm & Tender and Long Ago & Far Away, both featuring longtime Rolling Stones backing vocalist Bernard Fowler. It was abundantly arranged, and some of it - “Lester Leaps In,” with a massive tenor conflagration - was played at breakneck clips. Watts has recorded 10 jazz albums on his own, in a wide variety of styles, starting in 1986 with Live at Fulham Town Hall, by the Charlie Watts Orchestra - an oversized orchestra that included seven trumpeters, four trombones, three altoists, six tenors, a baritonist, a clarinetist, two vibraphonists, piano, two basses, Jack Bruce on cello, and three drummers. But he could play a New Orleans second line because he was from New Orleans.” Ed Blackwell was a revolutionary drummer with Ornette Coleman’s quartet, and he was what we would call a jazz player, that’s what he did, that’s what he was. He could play bebop but also could play second-line rhythms. Watts came to see how jazz and rock & roll emerged from similar backgrounds, sometimes played by the same players: “It’s quite a normal mixture in New Orleans for the drummers - somebody like Zigaboo. “Another New Orleans drummer, Earl Palmer, always thought of himself as a jazz player - and, in fact, he was he played for King Pleasure.” Earl Phillips kind of played like a jazz drummer,” he says. “Like Earl Phillips, Jimmy Reed’s drummer. Watts also began listening to New Orleans musicians who played rock & roll and R&B as well as jazz. Obviously, I’d heard ‘Hound Dog’ and all that, but to listen to him properly, Keith was the one who taught me.” ![]() Keith taught me to listen to Elvis Presley, because Elvis was someone I never bloody liked or listened to. That’s what I was into when I joined the Rolling Stones, that’s what I used to listen to. ![]() It was Richards, Watts tells me, who taught him new ways to hear rock & roll: “While they were all going on about John Lee Hooker and all these other marvelous people Muddy Waters, I’d be putting Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins in. (Much later, in 1992, he would record an album devoted to the late alto saxophonist, A Tribute to Charlie Parker With Strings.) Keith Richards has said he considers the Stones a jazz band - at least onstage - because of Watts. In 1965, he would publish an illustrated children’s book about bebop alto-saxophonist Charlie Parker, Ode to a High Flying Bird. He had drummed with bandleader Alexis Korner in London’s blues scene - which the Stones emerged from - but he always saw himself playing jazz. When he joined the Rolling Stones in 1963, in his early twenties, he had doubts about casting his lot with an outfit that - though a self-described blues ensemble - would quickly be identified as a teen-adored rock band, like the Beatles. Mikal GilmoreĬharlie Watts is a jazz drummer. He was absolutely central to the Rolling Stones’ history, sound, and identity. They have carried indelible ghosts before, but Watts’ passing is a crushing loss. The piece raises a question: Are the Rolling Stones still the Rolling Stones without Charlie Watts? There can be no doubt that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards feel this demise immensely, since they have loved the man and have appreciated - for well over half a century - what he meant to their sound and history. Now, on the heels of Watts’ death at age 80, I offer it in full. After I learned Watts would not be joining the Stones on tour this fall due to a health issue, I went back and reread the section, expanded it with some more passages from the interview.
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