Richmond, Dannie
[Charles D.
]
- Gareth Dylan Smith
Extract
[Charles D. ]
(b New York, NY, Dec 15, 1931; d New York, NY, March 16, 1988). American jazz drummer. He is widely acknowledged as one of the great, if underappreciated, jazz drummers, developing a new vocabulary on the instrument in the early 1960s along with Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell. He came to fame in the explorative, pioneering, and avant-garde band of bassist Charles Mingus, which he joined in 1956 after upstaging Mingus’s then-drummer Willie Jones at a jam session. The new vitality and energy that he brought to the band was evident from his recording debut, The Clown (1957), and is perhaps exemplified on Mingus’s most popular album, Mingus Ah Um (1959). Prior to joining Mingus on drums, Richmond had studied reeds, piano, and percussion at the Music Center Conservatory in Brooklyn, and had worked as a tenor saxophonist on tour with Paul Williams, among others....
