Rashied Ali: Into stellar space

Pioneering free jazz drummer and Coltrane sideman Rashied Ali talks to Howard Mandel in New York about the rudiments of life, music and rhythm

On guitarist Rudolph Grey’s 1990 album Mask Of Light, 55-year-old drummer Rashied Ali dukes it out with the leader’s raging conceptual noise, second electric guitar warrior Alan Licht’s wash and paint-blistering saxophonist Jim Sauter, whose over-the-top squeals and from-the-guts roar might as well be plugged-in and processed shock waves from a synthesizer. Ali’s forward-plunging rhythm, which alternates thunderous bass drum rolls with needle-pointed cymbal tattoos, gives backbone to both the live track and studio cuts “Implosion-73” and “Flaming Angels” produced by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Tom Surgal and Don Fleming. Ali’s drumming is, as John Coltrane said, multi-directional. Ali supplies Grey with momentum, vertical structure and a throbbing pulse that’s never explicitly pounded out.

On Coltrane’s Interstellar Space, the pre-eminent free jazz duet recorded in February 1967, Rashied Ali matches the incomparable tenor saxophonist with texture and depth of rhythm for heft and breadth of plane, as though they’re two titans splashing the cosmos with constellations. “Mars”, “Leo”, “Venus”, “Jupiter” and “Saturn” the cuts were titled. The music remains mythic.

Sometime after Coltrane allowed Ali to join his band, supplanting if not replacing Elvin Jones in the remarkable series of late explorations prior to Trane’s death in ’67 – the same Rashied Ali who turned up in Berlin last October to dominate the Free Music Production festival with a triple trio comprising saxists Evan Parker, Peter Brötzmann and Charles Gayle, bassists Fred Hopkins, William Parker and Peter Kowald, fellow drummers Tony Oxley and Andrew Cyrille exploring every imaginable combination, like some Sadian orgy; the same jack-of-all-trades Rashied Ali who operated his own Soho (Manhattan) club Ali’s Alley, the entrepreneur behind Survival Records, accompanist to Jorma Kaukonen in the guitarist’s post-Jefferson Airplane blues band Hot Tuna; the same Rashied Ali, who as a child sang for his mother, whose open pan-like face seems guileless, whose great dark eyes threaten to see everything, whose swift percussive impulses swirl like whirlpools that would sink less-than-hearty players – this same Rashied Ali found how to play timeless time, how to ride all the rhythms at once, how to create a beat of self-expression. This knowledge steels his patience while he recovers from the pneumonia he caught in a New York City hospital ward.

“I went in for a very simple operation, but there’s a new strain of tuberculosis that’s become rampant in the hospitals and there’s pneumonia and viruses everywhere. You heard about Beaver?” – Ali’s old friend the drummer William “Beaver” Harris, unexpectedly dead in his late 50s of prostate cancer – “and Junior Cook?” – another hard bop veteran, a fixture on the scene too often taken for granted, now gone, gone, gone, with intimations of mortality like waves in his wake.