Ronald Shannon Jackson obituary

Ronald Shannon Jackson performing at the Barbican, London, in 2006. Photograph: Philip Ryalls/Redferns

John Fordham
The Guardian, Sunday 3 November 2013 13.59 GMT
For any jazz fan raised on 1950s caricatures about drummers – that jazz players were cool, Italian-suited and swung with no more effort than if they were dealing cards, while rock drummers were loud, theatrical and obvious – the arrival of Ronald Shannon Jackson was a rude shock. Jackson, who has died from leukaemia aged 73, was a dramatically exciting drummer and one of the most uncompromisingly fearsome exponents of the post-1960s fusion sometimes called "punk jazz" or "no wave", a loose amalgam of free-jazz, world-music rhythmic inspirations and rock. The antithesis of the tastefully discreet accompanist, he was a force of nature at the kit.

Jackson's often thunderous directness appealed to such pioneering leaders as Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, the vocalist Betty Carter, and the pianists Cecil Taylor and McCoy Tyner. From 1979, he took to running his own groundbreaking groups (including the long-running Decoding Society) and performing with European radicals including Peter Brötzmann and Albert Mangelsdorff, as well as such uncategorisable American originals as John Zorn and Bill Frisell. His style was his own and it gave every band he played in an exuberant, dishevelled and liberating drive.

Jackson was born in Fort Worth, Texas. His mother, Ella Mae, was a church organist, and his father, William, sold records and jukeboxes from Fort Worth's only black-owned record shop. Jackson learned drums from childhood, went to the same school as the Coleman saxophonist Dewey Redman and by his mid-teens was playing with the saxophonist James Clay – a key figure in the Texas jazz scene of the 1950s and an early influence on Coleman.

In 1966, Jackson moved to New York, becoming a university student as well as a sideman with Mingus, Carter and Jackie McLean. For much of that year, Jackson worked with the soulful and sublimely intense saxophonist Ayler, participating in the famous May Day 1966 session at Slug's Saloon.

Drug problems led Jackson to withdraw from playing from 1970 to 1975, but he regained his health, discovered Buddhism and returned as part of the engine-room of Coleman's Prime Time. This controversial band was Coleman's typically distinctive take on jazz-rock fusion, which frequently sustained long, high-energy, multilayered rhythmic trances (Jackson often played drums in tandem with Coleman's son Denardo) rather than offering conventional themes and variations. Ornette Coleman favoured an approach to group improvisation he dubbed "harmolodics" – in which rhythm, melody and harmony could all be varied on the fly by players sufficiently attuned to the method; this influenced Jackson's own work.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/nov/03/ronald-shannon-jackson