Roy Haynes
Jazz | 2010Roy Haynes was born in Roxbury near Boston in 1925 and has been playing steadily since his pro debut at age 17. He has had an impact on jazz from the swing era through the onset of bebop, hard bop, jazz fusion, and avante-garde explorations. He has played with an array of jazz masters such as Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughan, and John Coltrane. He received a Grammy Award in 1988 for his Blues for Coltrane album and the Danish Jazz Center’s “Jazzpar Award,” dubbed the jazz world’s Nobel Prize, and he was also inducted into the Jazz Hall of Fame. Haynes’ two most recent CDs, Fountain of Youth and Whereas, were both Grammy nominees. He was placed in the Downbeat Hall of Fame in 2004 and was the Downbeat drummer of the year in 1996. In January 2009, Columbia University’s radio station WKCR did a Roy Haynes career retrospective that lasted 301 hours, and he was honored by France with his naming as a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. To this day, Haynes maintains a light performing schedule, always returning to his home on Long Island to relax.