For reasons that he can’t quite explain, Michael Carvin hasn’t performed in San Francisco for more than four decades. But his absence doesn’t mean that his presence hasn’t been felt.
A mentor to many of jazz’s most prominent drummers who’ve come of age since the mid-1970s, Carvin has profoundly shaped the sound of the contemporary jazz scene. If you believe, like I do, that we’re in the midst of a golden age when it comes to trap-set practitioners, Carvin deserves a considerable share of the credit.
Based in Los Angeles since 2019, he returns to San Francisco for four shows at Black Cat April 9–10 with his Michael Carvin Experience trio featuring bassist Mike Gurrola and pianist Peter Smith. They’re top players on the L.A. scene, and Carvin loves the way their contrasting personalities play out onstage, with Smith’s carefree ebullience leavened by Gurrola’s intense virtuosity.
“It’s a combination I can really use,” said Carvin, 80. “And I don’t allow no sheet music on my bandstand. How would you like to go to the dentist office and have him reading a manual about how to fill a cavity?”
The other week, in a candid, often rollicking telephone conversation that lasted more than two hours, Carvin traced the wending path that took him to the center of the jazz scene. The journey started in Houston, where he came up under the tutelage of his father, one of the Gulf Coast’s top drummers. In 1963 at the age of 18, Carvin made the move to L.A., and by the end of the decade, he’d achieved just about every career goal that had brought him to California.
A relatively brief stint in San Francisco in 1971 led Carvin to join the bands of vibraphone great Bobby Hutcherson and trumpet star Freddie Hubbard. But the young drummer had his eye on the Big Apple, where he moved in 1973 and became one of the most durable and resourceful players on the ever-changing New York scene.
Carvin’s dedication to education surfaced early. He established his School of Drumming in 1970, and the list of alumni is chock-full of consequential accompanists and bandleaders, including Ralph Peterson Jr., Eric McPherson, Allison Miller, Rodney Green, Tyshawn Sorey, Billy Martin (of Medeski Martin & Wood), and San Francisco-reared Jaz Sawyer. Beyond jazz, Santana’s Michael Shrieve and Beyoncé drummer Kimberly Thompson also studied with Carvin.
In some cases, he was much more than a teacher. Nasheet Waits was 18 and studying at Morehouse College when his father, the eminent jazz drummer Freddie Waits, died suddenly in 1989. The younger Waits had lost his mother at 13, and returning to New York City, he was adrift until childhood friends Eric McPherson and saxophonist Abraham Burton “hooked me up with Michael,” said Waits, who performs at SFJAZZ on April 12 as part of East Bay pianist Joe Warner’s Give the Drummer Some series with bassist Tarus Mateen. (The four-night lineup also features NEA Jazz Master Billy Hart on April 10, New Orleans stalwart Herlin Riley on April 11, and L.A. great Marvin “Smitty” Smith on April 13.)
Carvin wasn’t the only one who stepped up to support his late drum-mate’s son. Nasheet Waits’s godfather, trap-set legend Max Roach, made sure his rent was covered. But it was Carvin who took charge of the young drummer’s musical education.
“I owe him a lot, I really do,” said Waits, whose long-running role in pianist Jason Moran’s The Bandwagon has made him one of the most widely admired drummers of the past two decades. “He taught me for free basically. I was going to Long Island University, and he was really gracious with his time.”
Though Carvin is a stickler for rudiments, he doesn’t teach by a system. He tailors his instruction to the particular needs of each student, which means his school produces players who’ve worked to refine their own approaches.
“From Ralph Peterson and Rodney Green to Eric McPherson and myself, we all have a different way to connecting to the music,” Waits said. “He encourages you to find your own voice. Lessons aren’t centered around the drums but expressed in the drums.”
For Waits, that meant “life lessons, information about family life that I had to take into account,” he said. “And within the music he talked about a lot of auxiliary topics: how to be on the road, how to handle your money. And most importantly, he was very ethical and attached to the culture.”
In 2020, Waits joined the faculty at New England Conservatory. Teaching is another pursuit he credits Carvin with encouraging. By the time Waits was ready to leave the School of Drumming, younger students had started to ask him for lessons. He wasn’t sure about what he had to offer them and asked Carvin for advice.
“He said, ‘Go ahead and start where I started with you,’” Waits recalled. “That demystified it. He said, ‘That’s a way for you to supplement your income and inform you about yourself. It makes you sharp to articulate certain concepts.’ I’ve been [teaching] for 20 years in different permutations, but NEC is the first professorship.”
When Carvin needed advice about his career, he always turned to his father.
Arriving in L.A. in the 1960s, he was determined to break into the studio scene. Putting his sight-reading skills and musical flexibility to work, he quickly found gainful employment recording 45s for rising pop and R&B combos. After a two-year stint serving in Vietnam with the U.S. Army (1966–1968), he was back in L.A., living with his buddy, pianist Clarence McDonald, and playing a series of lucrative gigs backing rising comics, namely Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor.
Early on, Carvin’s ambitions were modest. “I wanted my name on a record,” he remembered. “I wanted my name on one record. Just one record. I’d stare at records in the store, wanting to see my name: ‘Michael Carvin on drums.’”
His ardent desire came to fruition in spades. Carvin has appeared on more than 250 albums, starting with a series of cult classics for the Oakland-based label Black Jazz Records, including bassist Henry Franklin’s The Skipper and organist Doug Carn’s Infant Eyes. The drummer went on to record with a panoply of jazz giants, such as saxophonists Pharoah Sanders, Jackie McLean, and Hamiet Bluiett; pianist Hampton Hawes; keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith; bassists Cecil McBee and Reggie Workman; and vocalists Ernie Andrews and Dakota Staton.
Carvin and Carn formed a band with future Oakland guitar maestro Calvin Keys, who’d just arrived from Omaha. They added saxophonist Curtis Peagler, an underappreciated hard-bop master who exerted a profound influence on Carvin. A sharp dresser, “Curtis had that charisma,” the drummer recalled.
“It wasn’t cocky. It was, ‘I have worked this out.’ He could play a ballad. He taught me [to] learn the lyrics. When he played ‘You Go to My Head,’ he really conveyed it. After that I learned the lyrics to every song, and it changed my musicianship — and it changed my attitude — because the story started to reveal itself.”
L.A. treated Carvin well. He became a regular drummer for Motown sessions in 1968 after founder Berry Gordy accelerated the label’s shift from Detroit to the City of Angels. And Carvin spent a year playing on the Barbara McNair Show, one of the first TV variety shows hosted by a Black woman. But a trio stint with L.A. piano great Hampton Hawes and bassist Henry Franklin, which included a stop at the 1971 Montreux Jazz Festival (the video is often misidentified online as a date from Paris in 1974), left Carvin determined to get to New York.
It’s a sign of his idiosyncratic brilliance that before settling in Manhattan, he detoured to San Francisco, looking “to learn how to move around as a drummer without a car.” He ended up around the corner from the Both/And Club, one of the city’s premier jazz spots at the time. Carvin wasn’t looking to gig. He’d saved enough money to woodshed for a year or two and spent a lot of time hanging out with Both/And proprietor Delano Dean, who turned the drummer on to cutting-edge players like Andrew Hill, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, and Grachan Moncur III.
A childhood friend of Bobby Hutcherson’s, Dean took matters into his own hands and told the vibraphonist that Carvin wanted to play with him. Before long, Hutcherson had assembled a new group with bassist James Leary and an 18-year-old pianist-composer from L.A., Todd Cochran. “That turned into a great band,” Carvin said. “Bobby was on fire. I talked him into bringing his marimba.”
Before Carvin made the move east in 1973, he’d tracked down a gig with Freddie Hubbard, which meant the drummer hit New York as a figure who commanded attention. He’s embraced the spotlight when it’s come his way, but Carvin has his eye on the long game.
“When I was born, there were great drummers walking the streets of the U.S.A. — Papa Jo Jones, Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Max Roach, Elvin Jones,” Carvin said. “I grew up at a time when America had the greatest drummers in the world. When time comes for Michael Carvin to leave the landscape, I want to leave as many great drummers as possible.”
