Hamid Drake Quartet: 70th Birthday celebration!!
Saturday, September 27
TIME: 3:15pm-4:15pm
VENUE: logan center performance hall. 915 east 60th st.
A photo of Hamid Drake wearing a red shirt while smiling with his eyes closed and his arm reaching towards the left bottom corner of the frame. Followed by a photo of Hamid Drake seated behind a drum set and smiling. Hamid is wearing a red long sleeve shirt, glasses, black vest, and a black and multi-colored hat.
Photos by Dawid Laskowski
hamid drake
Percussionist Hamid Drake is one of the most influential and beloved musicians to emerge from Chicago in the last 50 years. Born in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1955, Drake soon moved to Chicago with his family and connected with renowned saxophonist and club owner Fred Anderson, another Monroe native and family friend. The two formed a lifelong musical relationship that provided the backbone of Drake’s approach to music. Anderson also introduced Drake to countless influential members of the AACM, including composer and trombonist George Lewis, and encouraged him to study the music of drummer Ed Blackwell, who became a formative influence.
During these early years, Drake continued a series of focused studies into worldwide percussion traditions including Afro-Cuban, Indian, and African percussion, as well as standard jazz drum kit. In the late 70s, Drake joined Foday Musa Suso to form the Mandingo Griot Society, where he forged another lifelong musical relationship with percussionist Adam Rudolph. The two travelled to Europe with trumpeter Don Cherry in 1978 and shared deeply in Cherry‘s grasp of the spiritually infinite transformational possibilities of music. Drake continued to work extensively with Cherry until he passed in 1995. The spiritual aspects that so informed Cherry’s work remain a major focus of Drake’s approach to both life and music.
As the years progressed, Drake became a crucial part of the worldwide jazz and improvised music scene as a member of groups led by luminaries such as Archie Shepp, Yusef Lateef, Pharoah Sanders, David Murray, Peter Brötzmann, Herbie Hancock, Jim Pepper, and Bill Laswell. He also developed significant and long-term relationships with bassist and organizer William Parker, percussionist Michael Zerang, flautist Nicole Mitchell, and reedist Ken Vandermark. His own groups, including Bindu, Indigo Trio, and Hamid Drake’s Turiya: Honoring Alice Coltrane, have been featured in festivals internationally for many years. And although his touring schedule has been practically nonstop for decades, he still manages to maintain deep-rooted relationships across the entirety of the Chicago scene, where the model he forged as a profoundly thoughtful and engaged practitioner of music and spirituality has created a lasting foundation for the generations behind him.
For this concert, Drake reassembles a working quartet featuring three of his longtime Chicago collaborators, including elder statesman of the Chicago tenor tradition Ari Brown. The four will be celebrating Drake’s 70th birthday on August 3rd!
The musicians:
Ari Brown - tenor saxophone
Jason Adasiewicz - vibes
Joshua Abrams - bass
Hamid Drake - drums