Grady Tate, musician

Born: January 14, 1932;

Died: October 8, 2017

GRADY Tate, who has died aged 85, was one of the great jazz drummers of the past 60 years and a first-call session musician. The list of notable recordings he made – he played drums on both Simon & Garfunkel’s multi-million-selling Concert in Central Park and Paul Simon’s There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, as well as Billy Taylor’s I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free, the theme tune for Barry Norman’s long-running BBC film review programme – would fill the space allotted here.

His talent extended beyond the drum kit, however, as he was also a superb singer. He concentrated on singing latterly and might have made a career solely from singing much earlier if he had not been so much in demand as a player with stars including Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee and Lena Horne.

He also played with saxophonists Stan Getz and Stanley Turrentine, guitarist Grant Green, and organist Jimmy Smith and put the subtlest of beats into Roberta Flack’s Killing Me Softly and the theme from Twin Peaks.

He was born in Durham, North Carolina, and grew up in a house that overlooked the local university, which at the time was called North Carolina College for Negros. It was during one of the college’s amateur talent competitions that the five year old Grady first saw a drum kit. He was already singing in church and repeating whole songs he had heard on the radio, so when the announcer asked if there were any other contestants, Grady walked up to the stage and offered to sing. Despite having to stand on a chair to reach the microphone, he came third and won a case of cola.

As he told his father, he would have rather had the drum kit that was set up on stage. His father was paying more attention than Grady realised because a few months later, on Christmas morning, Grady went into the living room and found a set of Pearl drums.

Without any tuition, he was soon playing well enough to hold his own in local jazz and function bands with much older musicians and he might have become a professional musician straight from school if an encounter, when he was 13, with his hero, drummer Philly Jo Jones had not given him pause for thought. When Grady told Jones he wanted to be a drummer, Jones smacked him hard on the hands with his drumsticks and told him there would be plenty more knocks like that if he followed his dream.

After graduating from high school, and playing drums locally all the while, Grady joined the Air Force for four years, during which he played in a band with the trumpeter Bill Berry. He then moved back to North Carolina to study English literature and drama, after which he briefly became a postal worker in Washington and then joined organist Wild Bill Davidson’s touring band.

In his late twenties he decided to study to become an actor and moved to New York where in 1962 he was recommended as a replacement drummer to Quincy Jones. This eventually led to a six year gig with the house band in the hugely popular television programme The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson but not before Grady had made his first recordings with bassist-composer Charles Mingus and vibraphonist Gary McFarland. These sessions and a subsequent album with saxophonist Ben Webster resulted in regular work for the Blue Note, Verve and Impulse labels, with a particular specialism in soul-jazz.

Singers loved Grady’s clean, subtly buoyant style and he, in return, acknowledged how much he learned, as a singer, from working with Peggy Lee and Sarah Vaughan especially. He recorded his first album as a singer, Windmills of My Mind, in 1968 and followed this with a number of others between assignments in television, studio work – his services were in particular demand in Japan – and teaching drums and vocals at Howard University from 1989 to 2009.

His final album, From the Heart, was recorded live at the Blue Note jazz club in New York and released in 2012. He is survived by his wife, Vivian, and son, Grady Jnr.

ROB ADAMS