As the 2020s dawned, drummer Phil Haynes should have been looking forward to the fifth decade of an adventurous recording career. Instead, he was contemplating an unwelcome retirement – a combination of lockdown, a degenerative joint malady affecting his hands and a struggle with depression. But the months of isolation afforded Haynes the opportunity to look – and more importantly, to listen – back over the wealth of music he’d created during those decades. What he discovered was not only reassuring but inspiring, spurring a frenzy of new activity that promises to hold retirement at bay for the foreseeable future.Haynes laid out a three-year plan for a series of releases revisiting many of the key projects from his catalogue, including collaborations with the likes of David Liebman, Drew Gress, Ben Monder, Hank Roberts, Ellery Eskelin, David Kikoski, Mark Feldman, Kermit Driscoll, Herb Robertson, and lost greats including Paul Smoker and John Tchicai.
It all kicked off on his 62nd birthday, June 15, 2023, with Coda(s), the third album from No Fast Food, his exploratory trio with legendary saxophonist David Liebman and renowned bassist Drew Gress. He’ll also recount the story of his life and creative process in his compelling autobiography Chasing the Masters, due out November 15, 2023, accompanied by a career-spanning 62-track audio compilation, A Life Improvised.
2024 will begin with a 3-CD/digital set compiling the complete American recordings of 4 Horns & What(?), Haynes’ quintet variously featuring Paul Smoker, Ellery Eskelin, Andy Laster, John Tchicai, Herb Robertson and Joe Daley, including the group’s previously unreleased final concert. That’s followed by a 4-CD set by Free Country, combining the quartet’s American Trilogy of Popular Music with Our Music, a new set of original works by Haynes and bandmates Hank Roberts, Jim Yanda and Drew Gress.
Two electric-oriented new projects usher in 2025: Transition pairs Haynes with guitarist Ben Monder on an extended exploration of the classic John Coltrane tune, and Return to Electric delves into the icons of jazz fusion with guitarist Steve Salerno and bassist Kermit Driscoll. That fall the project comes full circle with an audiophile remaster of The Passing, the 1991 debut of The Phil Haynes Continuum – Haynes’ first outing as a leader and the jazz debut of violinist Mark Feldman, alongside Gress and pianist David Kikoski.
Available via Bandcamp and through Haynes’ Corner Store Jazz website, Coda(s) reunites the drummer with one of his most formative influences and mentors. “I realized when we were recording last year that I’d first ‘met’ Dave Liebman exactly 50 years ago,” he says with a laugh. To be exact, it was December 1972, when young Phil received Elvin Jones' Merry-Go-Round as a Christmas gift. “From then on, Lieb was a huge part of my listening. That record continued to be mysterious to me for more than a decade, until I got to college and all of a sudden it clicked and became an all-time favorite.”
Their first actual meeting came a few years later, as Haynes was leaving Coe College in Iowa for a final semester in New York City. He happened to be passing through Chicago when Liebman was playing with a local rhythm section and introduced himself. The saxophonist agreed to a lesson when they were both back in NYC. Hearing the Elvin influence but sensing something missing, Liebman encouraged Haynes to catch the iconic drummer live for the first time – which he was able to do the following night at the Village Vanguard. “The rest, as they say, is history,” Haynes says. “It really was a life changing experience.”
Haynes and Liebman would not record together until 2012’s duet outing The Code. The next year Gress joined to form No Fast Food, whose debut was the 2014 live set In Concert, followed by the 2018 studio date Settings for Three. Coda(s) returns the trio to the studio for a double album of absorbing and nuanced acts of communion, spurred by free improvisation and Haynes’ spare but illuminating compositions. As the title suggests, it serves as a bookend for the trio, a farewell that never for one moment dwells on the past.
“Once we started to play again there was a huge amount of satisfaction because the band had grown,” Haynes says. “We've expanded our aesthetics – we touch on free playing, we touch on harmony, we touch on abstraction, we touch on burning jazz. It was all in play. I’ve never liked cutting the jazz tradition into pieces.”
While the trio refuses to look back, doing just that led Haynes to renew his dedication to his craft. As he prepared his past recordings for Bandcamp, he took the opportunity to listen back to music he hadn’t heard, in some cases, for decades. That included his early work with trumpeter Paul Smoker, who passed away in 2016. “The more I listened to the power of Paul’s playing, the more I realized that I had played with one of the great trumpet innovators,” Haynes says, still somewhat awestruck. “It made me reassess my own work, and I realized that through my creative life, despite the challenges, I’ve managed to consistently make music that lasts.”
The notion of telling Smoker’s story as well as his own, along with encouragement from Liebman, led Haynes to write the memoir Chasing the Masters, scheduled for release in November 2023 along with the career-spanning compilation A Life Improvised. Haynes’ current plans center on new, recently unearthed and/or reissued music with his bands 4 Horns & What(?), Free Country and The Phil Haynes Continuum, as well as projects with Ben Monder (exploring John Coltrane’s “Transition”) and Steve Salerno and Kermit Driscoll (reimagining fusion classics).
“For a long time I felt like I hadn't quite achieved my dreams,” Haynes concludes. “My models were Elvin and Tony Williams and Jack DeJohnette – innovators. Maybe I never managed become an innovator like Elvin, but I did my own thing. I have an identifiable sound, and I did play with masters. I saw that I’d gotten a lot closer to my potential than I’d realized. And there’s still more to do.”
Veteran drummer/composer Phil Haynes is featured on more than 85 releases from numerous American and European record labels. His collaborations include many of the seminal musicians of this generation: saxophonists Anthony Braxton, Ellery Eskelin and David Liebman; trumpeters Thomas Heberer, Herb Robertson and Paul Smoker; bassists Mark Dresser, Ken Filiano and Drew Gress; keyboard artists David Kikoski, Denman Maroney and Michelle Rosewoman; vocalists Theo Bleckmann, Nicholas Horner and Hank Roberts; violinist Mark Feldman; and the composers collective Joint Venture. His outlets include the romantic “jazz-grass” string band, Free Country; the saxophone trio No Fast Food; the classic piano trio Day Dream featuring Steve Rudolph; and his breathtaking solo project, Sanctuary.
