He learned rhythm from a dry cleaner’s steam press, and by sixteen he was playing on one of the biggest records in America. Idris Muhammad was born Leo Morris in New Orleans on 13 November 1939, and he died on 29 July 2014, aged 74. Today he would have turned 87. His was a life lived behind the beat and inside it: a jazz drummer and bandleader whose career ran from Mardi Gras parades to Broadway, from Fats Domino to Pharoah Sanders, from the Prestige house band to the funk records that hip-hop would later sample into immortality. He played on more than 150 recordings for the Prestige, Blue Note and CTI labels. He was the drummer other musicians called when they needed the groove to be right. And he did it all with a style so distinctive that when he changed his name in the 1960s, nobody needed to be told who he was. “Everybody knew right away that it was me,” he said, “because of my style of playing.” In New Orleans, the drums never stop. They just change hands.
The steam presser next door
Idris Muhammad was born Leo Morris in New Orleans on 13 November 1939, and he grew up in the city’s 13th Ward, in a house next door to a dry cleaner’s shop. He later said the hiss of the shop’s steam presser shaped the way he played the hi-hat — the rhythm of the neighbourhood pressed into the rhythm of his hands. Growing up, he spent time with fellow New Orleanians the Neville Brothers, and he showed early talent as a percussionist, playing in a Mardi Gras parade at the age of nine. He asked the great New Orleans drummer Paul Barbarin to teach him to read music, but Barbarin declined — he thought the boy was already so talented that lessons would only get in the way.
At fourteen, Muhammad began his professional career, performing with the Hawketts on their recording of “Mardi Gras Mambo”, a song that has since become one of the anthems of Carnival in New Orleans. Two years later, in 1956, at sixteen years old, he played drums on Fats Domino’s recording of “Blueberry Hill”. Think about that for a moment: a sixteen-year-old from the 13th Ward, sitting behind the drums on a record that would become one of the most famous songs in the history of popular music. “Blueberry Hill” was already a standard — it had been written in 1940 and recorded by Glenn Miller, Louis Armstrong and others — but Domino’s version, with its rolling piano and its warm, unhurried swing, became the definitive one.
The song had already lived a whole life before Domino touched it. “Blueberry Hill” was published in 1940, with music by Vincent Rose and lyrics by Larry Stock and Al Lewis, and it was recorded six times in that year alone. The first version to be released came from Sammy Kaye and his orchestra, with Tommy Ryan singing, on 31 May 1940. The biggest hit of 1940 belonged to the Glenn Miller Orchestra, whose recording, with Ray Eberle on vocals, reached number two on the Billboard pop chart. Louis Armstrong recorded it in 1949 with Gordon Jenkins and his orchestra; that version reached number 29, and it was Armstrong’s record that inspired Domino to make his own. Domino’s version, released in 1956, reached number one on the rhythm and blues chart and number two on the pop chart, and it has since been named one of the 500 greatest songs of all time by Rolling Stone, at number 147. Sixteen years after it was written, a song about finding a thrill on a hill in the countryside had become a rock and roll standard — and the drums on the version everyone remembers were played by a sixteen-year-old from New Orleans.
And the drums underneath it, steady and swinging, were played by a teenager who had learned rhythm from a steam presser.
Sam Cooke and the road
After being introduced by the musician Joe Jones, Muhammad began touring with Sam Cooke, one of the greatest singers in American music. Later he played with Jerry Butler and Curtis Mayfield in Chicago, working largely in rhythm and blues, before moving to New York City in the mid-1960s. In New York, Muhammad became embedded in the jazz scene, playing with Kenny Dorham, Horace Silver, Lou Donaldson and Betty Carter, and playing in the Apollo Theatre’s house band. The Apollo, in Harlem, was the most famous stage in black American music, and its house band was a finishing school for musicians: you had to be able to play anything, with anyone, at a moment’s notice, and Muhammad could.
In 1967, he accepted a job in the orchestra for the initial off-Broadway production of Hair, the rock musical that would become one of the defining shows of its era, and he stayed with the production when it moved to Broadway. He spent four years with Hair — four years of eight shows a week, of playing the same score night after night and finding something new in it every time. It was steady work, and it was disciplined work, and it taught him things that jazz clubs could not: how to play for a story, how to serve a song rather than yourself, how to be the engine of a production that was bigger than any one musician.
Four years with the tribe
Hair was not just a show. It was a cultural event. Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, with a book and lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado and music by Galt MacDermot, told the story of the “tribe” — a group of politically active, long-haired hippies of the “Age of Aquarius” living a bohemian life in New York City and fighting against conscription into the Vietnam War. Its songs became anthems of the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the show broke new ground in musical theatre: it defined the genre of the rock musical, it used a racially integrated cast, and it invited the audience onstage for a “Be-In” finale. Its profanity, its depiction of illegal drugs, its treatment of sexuality, its irreverence for the American flag and its nude scene caused controversy wherever it went.
The show premiered off-Broadway on 17 October 1967 at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in the East Village, then moved to the Cheetah nightclub, where it ran from December 1967 through January 1968. It opened on Broadway in April 1968 and ran for 1,750 performances. A London production ran for 1,997 performances. The original Broadway cast recording sold three million copies, songs from the show became Top 10 hits, and a film adaptation was released in 1979. A Broadway revival opened in 2009 and won the Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award for Best Revival of a Musical.
For four years, Muhammad sat in the orchestra pit of that revolution, eight shows a week. He was not a star of the show; he was its engine, the pulse underneath the tribe’s singing. Night after night he played the same score — MacDermot’s music, written in three weeks, including “Aquarius”, which the composer first wrote as an unconventional art piece before rewriting it as an uplifting anthem — and found something new in it every time. It was a different discipline from the jazz club: in a club, a drummer follows the soloist; in a theatre, the whole company follows the drummer. The show’s story was about young people refusing a war; the band’s job was to make that refusal sing. When Muhammad finally left Hair, he carried that discipline with him for the rest of his career: the knowledge that a groove is not just a rhythm, it is a promise you keep to the people on stage with you, night after night.
During this time, Muhammad was also in the Prestige label’s house band and made more than 150 recordings for the Prestige, Blue Note and CTI labels, among others. He recorded with artists such as Lou Donaldson and Charles Earland, who had begun merging jazz with sounds from funk, soul and rock. He appeared as a sideman with artists such as Gene Ammons, Nat Adderley and George Benson. The recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder often worked with Muhammad and had a special relationship with him; Van Gelder, whose studio in New Jersey produced some of the most famous jazz recordings ever made, greatly assisted with fine-tuning Muhammad’s recorded drum sound. To be trusted by Van Gelder — a man famous for his exacting ear — was a mark of respect that few drummers earned.
The name change
In the 1960s, Muhammad changed his name to Idris Muhammad upon his conversion to Islam. Speaking about the change later, in an interview with Modern Drummer magazine, he said: “One guy told me that if I changed my name, I was going to have a problem because no one would know that Leo Morris and Idris Muhammad were the same guy… But I thought, well, if I stay the same person, then people will know it’s me. And it worked like that. Everybody knew right away that it was me, because of my style of playing.”
It was a remarkable thing to say, and a remarkable thing to be true. Most musicians are known by their names; Muhammad was known by his hands. His style — that hi-hat shaped by a steam presser, that New Orleans parade beat running underneath everything, that ability to make a funk groove feel like jazz and a jazz tune feel like funk — was unmistakable. In 1966 he married the singer Dolores “LaLa” Brooks, a former member of the Crystals. She converted to Islam with him and went for a time by the name Sakinah Muhammad. They separated in 1999. Together they had two sons and two daughters, and he also had a daughter from his first marriage to Gracie Lee Edwards. One son, also named Idris Muhammed, became a professional chef who has appeared on several cooking competition shows, including Beat Bobby Flay and Chopped. Muhammad endorsed Istanbul Agop Cymbals, the Turkish cymbal makers whose instruments carry the sound of the old world into the new.
Bandleader: from jazz to funk
After four years with Hair, Muhammad left the production to tour with Roberta Flack, whom he worked with for much of the next decade. But he was also becoming a bandleader in his own right. His first recording as a leader, Black Rhythm Revolution!, was recorded on 2 November 1970 at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, and released by Prestige. The band was a statement of intent: Virgil Jones on trumpet, Clarence Thomas on tenor and soprano saxophone, Harold Mabern on electric piano, Melvin Sparks on guitar, Jimmy Lewis on bass and Buddy Caldwell on congas, with Muhammad’s drums at the centre. It was followed by Peace and Rhythm in 1971. Both albums explored a range of styles and traditions found in jazz and New Orleans rhythms — the parade beats of his childhood, the soul jazz of his New York years, the funk that was beginning to take over black American music.
The New York years had already made him the drummer for a whole movement. In the early 1960s he gigged with Roland Kirk, Kenny Dorham, Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan, and his meeting with the saxophonist Lou Donaldson was a game changer: Donaldson’s Alligator Bogaloo, recorded in 1967 with Muhammad on drums, set a trend for funky jazz with a hip, solid beat. Muhammad went on to appear on Donaldson’s Midnight Creeper and Everything I Play Is Funky, on Rusty Bryant’s Soul Liberation, Grant Green’s Carryin’ On, Charles Earland’s Black Talk! and Lonnie Smith’s Turning Point — a run of records that made the merger of jazz and funk commercially and artistically viable, with Muhammad’s drums as the common thread.
His subsequent albums, released on the Kudu imprint, took a turn towards funk: Power of Soul in 1974, House of the Rising Sun in 1976 and Turn This Mutha Out in 1977. These albums have since become favourites of funk enthusiasts and have been heavily sampled by hip-hop artists — so a beat Muhammad laid down in the seventies is still moving dance floors today. His later albums as a leader included Boogie to the Top and You Ain’t No Friend of Mine in 1978, Foxhuntin’ in 1979, Make It Count and Kabsha in 1980, My Turn in 1992 and Right Now in 1998. As a sideman, his discography runs to dozens of records: with Nat Adderley, Gene Ammons, George Benson, Donald Byrd, Hank Crawford, Paul Desmond, Lou Donaldson — with whom he made more than a dozen albums, including Alligator Bogaloo in 1967, Mr. Shing-A-Ling in 1967, Midnight Creeper in 1968 and Everything I Play Is Funky in 1970 — Charles Earland, Grant Green, Ahmad Jamal, Bob James, Joe Lovano, Harold Mabern and many more.
Towards the end of the 1970s, Muhammad joined Johnny Griffin’s band and also spent time playing with Pharoah Sanders, the saxophonist whose spiritual jazz had pushed the music to its furthest edges. By the 1980s, Muhammad had moved to Europe. He continued to play and record regularly, collaborating with Ahmad Jamal, Chico Freeman and Sonny Rollins — three of the most respected names in jazz, each of whom wanted Muhammad’s groove behind them. He was, by then, a musician’s musician in the truest sense: the drummer other great musicians called when they wanted the foundation to be right.
The most sampled drummer alive
Muhammad’s own records were only half the story. The other half began after he had finished them, in studios he never visited, in the hands of producers he never met. In 1973 he signed to Kudu, the jazz-funk imprint of CTI Records, and the following year he released Power of Soul, his signature recording. It was made of four long pieces, arranged by Bob James, with a band that included the trumpeter Randy Brecker, the percussionist Ralph MacDonald, the guitarist Joe Beck and the saxophonist Grover Washington Jr. Its final track was “Loran’s Dance”, a silky, hypnotic groove built on Muhammad’s drums and James’s electric piano.
Fifteen years later, that groove opened one of the most celebrated albums in hip-hop history. The Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, released in 1989 and produced by the Dust Brothers, begins with “To All the Girls”, in which Adam Yauch dedicates the album to the girls over a lengthy sample of “Loran’s Dance” — the only sample used in the whole track. The Dust Brothers sampled 105 records across Paul’s Boutique, from the Beatles to Muhammad, but the album’s opening sound, the first thing a listener hears, is Idris Muhammad’s drums.
He became, in AllMusic’s words, “one of contemporary music’s most sampled drummers”. His beats have been sampled by Tupac Shakur, the Notorious B.I.G., Eminem, Lupe Fiasco, Drake, Nas, LL Cool J, Kool G Rap and Fatboy Slim, among many others. The records that started it all were the mid-1970s trio of Power of Soul, House of the Rising Sun and Turn This Mutha Out — the last of which contained “Could Heaven Ever Be Like This”, a funk classic in its own right. To Muhammad’s own astonishment, the Kudu records even made him a disco king in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
He was, in the words of one tribute, “among the first drummers — perhaps the very first — to bring funk beats to jazz”, and by extension a building block in the edifice of hip-hop and modern music. He insisted on the distinction himself: he was, he said, a funk drummer, not a jazz drummer. And he was generous about what the samplers did with his work. Asked how he felt about other people using his music, he told Wax Poetics magazine: “It don’t really belong to me, man. The gift the Creator has given me, I can’t be selfish with. If I keep it in my pocket, it’s not going to go anyplace.” A drummer who learned rhythm from a steam presser understood, better than anyone, that a beat is only alive when it is moving — from a parade to a stage, from a record to a sample, from one generation’s hands to the next.
Home, and the beat that outlived him
In 2011, Muhammad moved back to New Orleans, the city where he had learned rhythm from a steam presser and played his first parade at nine. He died of kidney failure in 2014, aged 74, and was buried according to Islamic burial traditions in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He was seventy-four years old, and he had spent sixty of those years behind a drum kit.
His legacy is not a single famous song, though he played on one of the most famous songs ever recorded. It is something larger and stranger: a beat that outlived the hands that played it. The grooves he laid down in the 1970s — on Power of Soul, on House of the Rising Sun, on Turn This Mutha Out — were sampled by hip-hop producers again and again, so that a generation that never heard his name dances to his drumming every day. The more than 150 recordings he made for Prestige, Blue Note and CTI are a library of American rhythm, from the parade beats of New Orleans to the funk of New York to the spiritual jazz of Pharoah Sanders. And the sixteen-year-old who played on “Blueberry Hill” never really stopped: the drums of New Orleans never stop. They just change hands.
You have felt his drumming even if you never knew his name. It is in the songs you danced to, the samples behind your favourite hip-hop tracks, the pulse under a jazz record you love. That is the secret life of a drummer: invisible until you listen for him, and then suddenly everywhere. Next time a groove makes you move without thinking, ask yourself whose hands are really playing. Eighty-seven years on from his birth, the drums of New Orleans still never stop — they just change hands. Which drummer’s groove do you recognise in a single beat?
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