Ronnie Free

Ronald Guy "Ronnie" Free (born January 15, 1936 in Charleston , South Carolina ) is an American jazz drummer.

Free received lessons from his father (an alcoholic who forced him to practice constantly, even under blows) and left school in 1952 to go on tour with the comedian trio Tommy Weeks and his Merry Madcaps , of which he soon joined a show orchestra moved from Tampa, Florida. Inspired by records by Max Roach , he turned to jazz around 1955. He played in the off-Broadway production Shoestring Revue in New York City in 1956 , where Oscar Pettiford heard him in a solo and invited him to play with him. He also played briefly for a few weeks with Woody Herman (but couldn't get along in the big band and was fired). At that time he was already addicted to heroin and also took other drugs, which got him increasingly in trouble (for example, he was fired from the band of Lena Horne in Las Vegas for possession of heroin). He played with Sal Salvador , Ray Eberle (1958), with Mose Allison (1958/59) in a trio with whom he recorded ( Ramblin with Mose , Prestige 1958, Creek Bank 1958, Autumn Song 1959), and with George Wallington ( 1959). Also in 1959 he played with Marian McPartland in a trio at Hickory House. During this time he lived in a loft near 6th Avenue, the center of a jazz scene that included trombonist Clyde Cox , trumpeter Ralph Hughes, and photographer W. Eugene Smith , with whom he lived for a year. He often played the night through in jam sessions in the late 1950s, with Thelonious Monk , Bud Powell , Gerry Mulligan , Zoot Sims, and others. He then played in bands with Lennie Tristano , Lee Konitz and others.

At the time he was considered a hopeful jazz drummer in New York, but then disappeared from the scene overnight when he was caught for drug possession in 1959 and admitted to the Bellevue Mental Hospital. Marian McPartland recalls not meeting him again until the 1990s on the street in Columbia, South Carolina . Until then she had heard nothing more about him.

He was released from Bellevue Hospital into the care of his parents in South Carolina, married, and worked as a typist in a shipyard in Charleston. He was brought in by Mose Allison in the 1980s when he needed a drummer in San Diego. In the late 1980s, he moved back to Charleston and played beach volleyball. In the early 1990s he played locally with a trio (Tommy Gill, piano, Wayne Mitchum, bass) in the Charleston area.

He also recorded with Lee Konitz and Jimmy Giuffre . Tom Lord's discography lists six sessions from 1957 to 1959.

In 1958 he and Allison were supposed to be on the photo A Great Day in Harlem , but they were too late.

literature

• Carlo Bohländer , Karl Heinz Holler, Christian Pfarr: Reclam's Jazz Guide . 3rd, revised and expanded edition. Reclam, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-15-010355-X .

Web links

• Sam Stephenson What happened to Ronnie Free?