A MAGICIAN WIELDING DRUMSTICKS

Jazz drummers are no more alike, or equal, than trumpeters or tenor men.

Given the nature of percussion, the drummer’s signature can be a little harder to make out, back there behind the reeds and the brasses. There is, you would think, only so much that can be made of a sock cymbal or a temple block, or even a platoon of snares and tom-toms.

But one of the large joys of discovery in jazz is that the longer you listen, the easier it becomes to distinguish the really good drummers: to separate the men from the metronomes, the artists from the noisemakers. One of the best, maybe the very best, Buddy Rich, died Thursday at the age of 69.

Jo Jones made musical instruments of his wire brushes and created art within art from those sounds of swinging and sandy sibilance. I came to think of the late Shelly Manne as an Impressionist among drummers, a tone colorist who never lost a light, crisp beat (think of him with Andre Previn and Leroy Vinnegar on that “My Fair Lady” album years ago). But Shelly was always looking for ways to make it sound fresh and different. He put dry rice on the drumhead now and again, I remember, and tapped with his fingers to produce a very satisfactory whispery sizzle.

There have been as well the all-stops-out driving forces, like Dave Tough and Gene Krupa, who generated so much of the excitement during Benny Goodman’s legendary Carnegie Hall concert in 1938. Louis Bellson carries on their grand tradition.

But Buddy Rich was somehow all of those men rolled into one--driving force and colorist and beyond that a melodist. I suspect you could blank out the label on any big-band side ever cut and still tell whether it was Rich at the drums.

Among drummers he was not just a percussionist; he made his drums a leading voice. Sustaining the beat with bass drum and cymbal, he used those extraordinarily quick hands of his to underline the accents in the melodic line note for note. The tempo more often than not was fast and furious, and the sharp punctuations from Rich’s snares became like the bottom notes of the chords.

I once said--with no claim that it was an original thought--that what Buddy Rich did was play C-melody drums. He played the drums as if they were meant to be heard and not just felt, as if they could sing and not just shout.

With it all, he was anything but a thumper. He did lightning, not thunder. He was a Grand Prix racer, not a semi on a down slope with its brakes gone. He was elegant Champagne, not mulligatawny soup. He created a joyful excitement--swinging, sophisticated, unabashedly assured. He knew he was good, and he took a kind of watch-me-now pride in showing you just how good, every time out.

To a jazz enthusiast growing up in the peak days of the big bands, it didn’t take long for the drum solo to become a dreaded bore.

During one set a night, at least, the drummer would get his specialty number. After an eight-bar intro, all the other sidemen would flee the bandstand with indecent haste and the drummer would do his interminable thing. The drum rolls would swell and fade like a demented tide, the array of cymbals would crash like crockery cabinets in an earthquake, the beat would hiccup like a cold engine and it would all lead, finally, to a wake-the-dead pounding finish.

But to remind myself again how different Rich was in his solos as in all else percussive, I listened a while ago to an extended chorus he took on a breakneck “Bugle Call Rag” in an old Pacific Jazz album called “Big Swing Face,” which was recorded live at The Chez, a departed Hollywood nightclub.

It is a breathtaking virtuoso display, a glossary of intricate rhythms riding above a light, amazingly quick underbeat. It is thrilling, it is witty, it is musical.

It is Rich.