To Swing is the Thing

Twenty-eight years ago, in March 1994, Mike Melito's fellow Rochesterian, Chuck Mangione, presented a traveling festival in upstate New York. He hired Roy McCurdy to play with Nat Adderley - with whom McCurdy had played on 7 leaders, plus another 19 with Cannonball Adderley, between 1966 and 1979 - in a band that included pianist Don Menza and Rochester guitar stalwart Bob Sneider. He assigned Melito to the other act, James Moody, in a unit including then up-and-coming pianist Danilo Pérez. Roy and I hit it off right away, Melito says. I'd obviously been checking him out for years. We played the same set of drums, same cymbals - and I learned a lot about sound. He didn't talk to me about anything. I watched him, and figured out what he was doing that I wasn't. I believe you're a student forever. I work a lot on my sound, on my hands, on my cymbal beat. My goal has always been to sound as authentic as possible as a player and strive for the same sound as my heroes. Melito offered this self-assessment after relating an encounter some thirty years ago with iconic drum conceptualist Max Roach, whom he'd studied closely since age 12, when Melito heard the 1947 Charlie Parker-Miles Davis-Roach classic Dewey Square on the first jazz record I ever bought on my own. Another Rochester friend, trumpeter John Sneider, had played Roach some tapes featuring Melito, and the maestro noticed. I met Max and he gave me one of the greatest compliments I've ever received, Melito recounts. He said, 'You really know how to phrase; the snare drum...' - and gave me a big hug. The 56-year-old master offers a highly personalized refraction of Roach's late 1950s investigations of the possibilities of 3/4 waltz time towards the end of his eighth self-released album, To Swing Is The Thing, a title that efficiently encapsulates the imperatives that have driven him through 40 years as a professional drummer.