Roy Haynes (1925 - 2024)
There at the beginning of Modern Jazz...
The Open Door was a dive bar on West 3rd Street during the heyday of bebop jazz. On Sunday, Sepember 13, 1953, promoter Bob Reisner booked the Thelonious Monk Trio, comprising Monk, bassist Charles Mingus, and drummer, the 28-year-old Roy Haynes. That alone would have been reason enough to venture out on an unseasonably cool summer evening. There was a rumor that Charlie Parker would show up to sit in with the band. Although no recording exists of this performance, photographer Bob Parent, who had a day job working media at the United Nations, went to his night job and captured this famous photograph.
Until this week, one of the individuals pictured was still living.
Roy Haynes passed away on Tuesday, November 12, 2024, just short of his 100th birthday. He began his professional career supporting tenor saxophonist Lester Young, before becoming the lynchpin in over 50 recordings having played his way through bebop, hard bop, post bop, and free jazz. He was there when jazz began its commercial flowering and never left. Haynes contributed to some of the most important recordings in jazz: The Amazing Bud Powell (Blue Note, 1951), Sonny Rollins’s The Sound of Sonny (Riverside, 1957), We Three (New Jazz, 1959), Wardell Gray’s Memorial Album (Prestige, 1964), Like Minds (Concord Jazz, 1998). Birds of a Feather: A Tribute to Charlie Parker (Dreyfus Jazz, 2001), among many others. Roy Haynes' last live performance was at the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York City on November 2019.
Let’s celebrate a long life well lived.