In 2000 I was tasked with ringing the great drummer Roy Haynes to extract some quotes from him about his latest album. The Roy Haynes Trio Featuring Danilo Perez And John Patitucci was released on Verve during the last gasp when major labels took jazz seriously. A setlist – including material by Bud Powell, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk – had been cooked up to reveal the longevity and depth of Haynes’s career. I asked why he’d included “Dear Old Stockholm” and was taken aback when he replied he had played it with Stan Getz, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane and Miles Davis, so why not. Haynes hadn’t minded me catching him on the hop at home. He was friendly and welcoming, and wore that history lightly – but there could be no denying its head-spinning trajectory.

Haynes died on 12 November aged 99. He began playing with the big band led by pianist Luis Russell in 1945 and, until the pandemic shut things down in 2020, his 95th year, was still celebrating his birthday with an annual gig at the Blue Note in Manhattan.

To put that history in context: Luis Russell had played with Joe ‘King’ Oliver, and one of Haynes’s predecessors in the drum chair of the Russell orchestra, Paul Barbarin, had played with Freddie Keppard, which pretty much rewinds jazz history back to the birth of the music and Buddy Bolden himself.

After Russell, Haynes spent two years working with Lester Young’s trio between 1947-49, after which he played with Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. If the lineage from Keppard to Parker might be history enough for most people, Haynes’s 2000 trio album revived compositions from his collaborations with later generations, Pat Metheny and Chick Corea included. He had sat in with Ornette Coleman, was regular dep for Elvin Jones in the Coltrane Quartet, and played on two classic Andrew Hill Blue Note dates, Black Fire and Smoke Stack. In 1962 he produced a classic Impulse! record of his own, Out Of The Afternoon, a quartet session that featured Roland Kirk. And Esquire magazine voted Haynes one of their Best Dressed Men of 1960, him and Fred Astaire.

The key to understanding his playing lies inside a curious paradox: as integral as Haynes was to jazz history, he also stood outside that history. Earthed in swing era drumming more than his friends Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, and certainly more than Elvin Jones, Haynes thought rhythm first, history second. The furious tumult of “Boogie In The Basement”, Haynes captured with the Russell group shortly after he joined in 1945, has echoes of the rhythmic lash with which Chick Webb famously whipped “Liza” into shape. A decade later, the balletic choreography of his brushwork accompanying Sarah Vaughan on “Shulie-A-Bop”, was just as rhythmically insistent, but a soft-shoe shuffle in comparison.

“I’ve always conceived of the drums in a different way,” Haynes was keen to stress when we spoke. “My first love on drums were Papa Jo Jones, Chick Webb and Big Sid Catlett. Never did I think of them as ‘swing’ drummers. Yeah, they swung. Like crazy! But for me they were advanced already and that’s always been my thing too – trying to advance myself and think ahead.

“I already knew Kenny Clarke before I left my hometown of Boston to come to New York. He’d been in Boston, playing with Henry ‘Red’ Allen, the trumpeter. I loved Kenny’s playing. He was in the army by the time I came to New York, but he’d come see me play on 52nd Street, and told me then that he heard different shit in my playing to most other drummers. The guys in the Luis Russell band told me later that I’d changed the style of the band. Which came as a big surprise to me. That was not something I’d intended. But playing the Savoy Ballroom with Luis’s band, playing time for a big band with people dancing, taught me valuable lessons – you feel the bounce.”

Could Haynes, all these years later, put his finger on why his playing stood out from the crowd? “Man, that’s a tough question. There are certain notes I need to hear in my mind and if they’re not there, I’m uncomfortable. So I spend time tuning and adjusting to get that right, searching for melodic sounds on my kit. I came up during the swing era and then this word ‘bop’ appeared, and I find those words kind of meaningless. I played with Louis Armstrong for one week in 1946 at the same time I was playing in bop groups. Swing, bop, playing with Stephane Grappelli or Roland Kirk, the idea is to know how to swing and try to have a conversation with people you’re playing with. It was not about reinventing myself.

“Playing with Coltrane and then Pat, Chick, Stanley Clarke, it’s never the same each night so the music tells you what to do. Even with musicians I’ve played with a lot, the music never breathes the same way twice, and that’s the way I like to express my music – it’s like breathing.”

I asked him about the session he played in 1974 with Dave Brubeck, Anthony Braxton and Lee Konitz, released in 1976 under the title All The Things We Are, and he remembered having to rely on a studio drum kit which, hard as he tried, resisted being tuned to his specification. “I felt I couldn’t play my best because of that, but I heard that record a few years ago and, have to say, it sounded pretty good.”

Appearing on two official Coltrane albums, Impressions and Newport 63, Haynes not so much replaced Elvin Jones as made Coltrane’s music inhale and exhale in other ways. Whereas Jones’s tendency was to keep the pot stirring, circling around the pulse as deeply as he asserted beats, Haynes pushed forward inexorably, and with a lighter touch to Jones’s all-conquering tornadoes.

“I’ve often said that Coltrane had his own built-in drummer,” Haynes explained. “He could play without a drummer; he would make the drummer sound good. His exploratory mind elevated everyone who worked with him. I felt like anything I could imagine in my head would fit with his music, things that I wouldn’t have chanced with other musicians. I’d sat in with him many times, at gigs and in the studio, and I’d get the call whenever Elvin was sick or couldn’t make the gig. Coltrane was always pulling in different directions to the extent that you were forced to think again about structure. Charlie Parker really understood rhythm, and could play back and forth off the drums, but would say everything he had to within a few choruses. Trane, though, would reach a peak then keep pushing, find a way of hitting another climax, then keep going some more. The way he soloed opened up my perceptions of time.”

Haynes especially valued the work he did subsequently with Chick Corea and bassist Miroslav Vitouš on the classic 1968 album Now He Sings, Now He Sobs and its 1981 follow up Trio Music and wasn’t surprised, he told me, to see Corea kept a drum kit in his studio at home. “You know Thelonious Monk, who used to say many things, once told me he thought that most drummers only had three favourite tempos that they could or would play. And if a pianist or saxophonist started a tune at any other tempo the drummer would gradually change it to one of those three tempos. To some extent he may have been right. I’ve grown more since I was with Monk in the late 1950s, but he called me a “bitchin’ drummer” which, coming from him, was a real compliment.”

The highpoint of Haynes’s 2000 trio album was its final track: a stampede through Thelonious Monk’s “Green Chimneys”, an extended drum solo introduction morphing abruptly into Monk’s teasing theme. His new trio was clearly a source of considerable joy for Haynes and I wrapped up our brief conversation by asking him about the future of the group.

“There could be no greater joy than playing with Danilo and John,” he gleamed. “The level of their musicianship and their imagination; I can’t wait to get to work. So the future is to keep playing engagements, to keep developing the group – to keep enjoying it while I still can.”