Sunny Murray, the bebop tradition, and Milford Graves
“Take it easy, now... there's no work in this shit, they're gonna jump on your ass...” — Sunny Murray to a young, interested, Hans Bennink Here's an interview by Dan Warburton, with one of the original free jazz drummers, Sunny Murray. It's most interesting to me as a piece of archeology into the attitudes of these players, who seemed at the time to be making such a large break with previous music, and who are often regarded as not maintaining, shall we say, traditional technical standards. But Murray clearly feels himself to be part of the same tradition as some more mainstream players (even if McCall and Blackwell were thought of as avant-garde at the time) and having less connection to another early free player, Milford Graves, who he felt had basically nothing to do with the jazz tradition: When I won the Downbeat New Star Talent Deserving Wider Recognition award in 1966, which I think I earned for creating something different on the jazz scene, Leroi [Jones, wri...