James Ross Lovelace (February 6, 1940 – October 29, 2004) was an American
jazz drummer.
Biography
He was born in
Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City (abbreviated KC or KCMO) is the largest city in Missouri by population and area. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 508,090 in 2020, making it the 36th most-populous city in the United States. It is the central ...
. By the early 1960s, he had begun performing in
jazz clubs in New York City. From the mid-1960s to the 1980s, he was a
session musician
Session musicians, studio musicians, or backing musicians are musicians hired to perform in recording sessions or live performances. The term sideman is also used in the case of live performances, such as accompanying a recording artist on a ...
on albums by performers such as
Junior Mance,
Tony Scott,
George Benson, and
Wes Montgomery, with whom he also played regularly. In 1967 he played on
the debut album
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in ...
by singer-songwriter
Leonard Cohen.
[ Biography by Jason Ankeny, ''Allmusic'']
Retrieved October 16, 2022
Retrieved October 16, 2022
In later years, he regularly played at
Smalls Jazz Club in
West Village, with pianist
Frank Hewitt, and as a member of the band Across 7th Street, that also featured
Sacha Perry (piano), Chris Byars (saxophone), and Ari Roland (bass). They released an album, ''The Eternal Pyramid'', in 2004.
[
He died from ]pancreatic cancer
Pancreatic cancer arises when cell (biology), cells in the pancreas, a glandular organ behind the stomach, begin to multiply out of control and form a Neoplasm, mass. These cancerous cells have the malignant, ability to invade other parts of t ...
in Manhattan in 2004, at the age of 64.[
]
Playing style
Pianist Brad Mehldau described playing with Lovelace: "He had a swing
Swing or swinging may refer to:
Apparatus
* Swing (seat), a hanging seat that swings back and forth
* Pendulum, an object that swings
* Russian swing, a swing-like circus apparatus
* Sex swing, a type of harness for sexual intercourse
* Swing rid ...
that was right down the middle — maybe comparable to Art Taylor
Arthur S. Taylor Jr. (April 6, 1929 – February 6, 1995) was an American jazz drummer, who "helped define the sound of modern jazz drumming".Watrous, Peter (February 7, 1995)"Art Taylor, 65, Jazz Drummer Who Inspired Young Musicians" ''The Ne ...
, but all his own. Whereas Jimmy Cobb and others had pulled me, Lovelace ''held'' me in place with his beat, gently but absolutely."
References
External links
*
1940 births
2004 deaths
American jazz drummers
{{US-jazz-drummer-stub