Philly Joe Jones

Drums · born 15 July 1923 – died 30 August 1985

▸ Click for Richard Cook Bio

Joe Jones from Philadelphia had plenty of local experience before he moved to New York in 1947. Although he didn't really get on to record in this period, he played behind many of the leading boppers, then worked with Joe Morris and Ben Webster before building up a wider book of associations which eventually led to work with Miles Davis, who liked having Jones behind him but on otherwise indifferent local jobs. This led to the trumpeter engaging him full-time when he put together his famous 1955 quintet. He stayed, aside from one spell away, until 1958, when his unreliability due to drug problems caused the hitherto tolerant Davis to finally cry enough. But Jones was by now enough of a major player to find work easily enough, and he was a prolific studio artist all through the early 60s; in 1958, he had made Blues For Dracula for Riverside, the title piece a steal from a Lennie Bruce routine (Jones and Herb Geller had often worked with Bruce on the West Coast). He went to Europe during a brief spell with the Bill Evans trio and stayed in London for two years from 1967, then spent three years in Paris before finally returning to Philadelphia. Jones's career was regularly interrupted by personal difficulties, but as a musician there were few players who could have bettered his work in any of the many groups he played with. Though he could drum with tremendous force and aggression, he was also one of the great brush-players in jazz, and the toughest of horn players out front could find themselves in a direct dialogue with what was coming out from the kit: leaders as different from each other as Davis, Evans and Dexter Gordon each found him an inspiration. In his last years, he worked with the Tadd Dameron tribute group Dameronia, and in the percussion quartet Pieces Of Time. His own records as a leader were mostly only so-so affairs, but there are scores of albums where he can be found playing outstanding jazz drums.

Biography from Richard Cook's Jazz Encyclopedia (2005).

If you'd like more information, check out The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (2002) or The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz (2007), both of which are still in print.

Plays on

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Liner notes

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Mentioned in text

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