eJazzNews Archive

Elvin Jones Gravely Ill

Originally published on eJazzNews · · By Len Dobbin

On April 28, 2004, eJazzNews published a short report compiled by the Montreal jazz broadcaster Len Dobbin, drawn from accounts by people who had just seen drummer Elvin Jones perform with his band at Yoshi’s in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he was visibly very ill. Jones, then 76, died of heart failure three weeks later, on May 18, 2004, in a New Jersey hospital.

What the 2004 report said

Dobbin reproduced two eyewitness accounts that had been posted online. The first, circulated on a mailing list for jazz radio programmers on April 27, described a show the night before: Jones needed help from his wife to reach his drum stool and take his sticks, and while he struggled to strike the drums, the writer found his time and sound intact.

The second account, from a visiting physician posted to a Latin jazz email group, described a band of two saxophones, piano and bass carrying much of the load while Jones played sparingly, and a standing ovation as he was helped from the stage. Dobbin added only a brief personal note: that Jones was a wonderful person with whom he had spent time on a number of occasions. The report placed Yoshi’s in San Francisco; in 2004 the club was at Jack London Square in Oakland, and its San Francisco branch did not open until November 2007.

The drummer behind the Coltrane quartet

Jones was born on September 9, 1927, in Pontiac, Michigan, the younger brother of pianist Hank Jones and trumpeter and cornetist Thad Jones. After Army service from 1946 to 1949 he worked in Detroit and moved to New York in 1955, the year he recorded Blue Moods with Miles Davis and Charles Mingus for Debut, the label Mingus co-owned. In 1957 he played on most of Sonny Rollins’s A Night at the “Village Vanguard”.

He joined Coltrane in 1960 and played on My Favorite Things, recorded that October with Steve Davis on bass; by 1962 he, pianist McCoy Tyner and bassist Jimmy Garrison formed the quartet heard on Live at Birdland and A Love Supreme. He left in the mid-1960s, unhappy with Coltrane’s new direction and in particular with playing alongside a second drummer, Rashied Ali; the NEA dates his departure to 1965, Wikipedia to early 1966. He then led his own trios, recording for Blue Note with Garrison and saxophonist Joe Farrell, and from the early 1980s the Elvin Jones Jazz Machine, whose members included Sonny Fortune and Ravi Coltrane. In 2003 he was named an NEA Jazz Master. More drummers of his generation appear in our guide to jazz drummers.

What happened next

NPR reported his death on May 18, 2004, of heart failure in a New Jersey hospital. Later that year Half Note Records released The Truth: Heard Live at the Blue Note, recorded in 1999, his last album as a leader. Keiko Okuya Jones, who met him on a 1966 tour of Japan, married him in 1971 and served as his business partner and tour manager, died in New York on September 26, 2022, at 85. Len Dobbin died on July 9, 2009.

Where to start listening

  • A Night at the “Village Vanguard” (Blue Note, 1958): Sonny Rollins in a trio with Jones, recorded in November 1957.
  • A Love Supreme (Impulse!, 1965): the Coltrane quartet with Tyner and Garrison, recorded in a single session on December 9, 1964.
  • The Truth: Heard Live at the Blue Note (Half Note, 2004): an enlarged Jazz Machine with guest Michael Brecker.

Sources

This page is based on an article from the original eJazzNews archive (2001 to 2018), with background and sources added in 2026. The original text is not republished here. You can read the original as it appeared on eJazzNews via the Internet Archive.
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