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John Densmore's Jazz Education

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John Densmore, the former drummer for the Doors offers an essay describing the infinite musical knowledge gleaned from his club-hopping days well before he ever met Jim Morrison.

THE GREAT jazz drummer Elvin Jones carried on a constant musical conversation with John Coltrane. It inspired me to have that kind of dialogue with Jim Morrison. Not that I was in Elvin's league, but his courage gave me the “huevos" to stop the steady rhythm on the Doors' “When the Music's Over," and just jab at my kit during Jim's rap about “What have they done to the Earth, what have they done to our fair sister, rip her and bit her, stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn, and dragged her down."

As a teenager, I saw Elvin play many times at these “sacred gin joints" (jazz clubs) in Los Angeles. I was too young to make the Central Avenue scene, but I knew it was much more than a major thoroughfare.

On an off night from the Orbit, a Santa Monica bar gig I got with my very lame fake ID from Tijuana, I stumbled into the Renaissance Club on the Sunset Strip, where Lenny Bruce had performed. It was my first time in a jazz club, and I was ushered to a table in the back behind a pole. I was one of very few white people in the place, and the Renaissance Club was intimidatingly cool. It had an attitude. I hadn't cultivated one yet.

Pretty soon I was hitting all the great haunts: The Lighthouse, the Bit, the Parisian Room and Melody Lane down on Adams Boulevard. Some teenagers were dragged to church by their parents to get a dose of religion. . . . I found it with jazz.

This music has brought me back to these clubs, only this time I'm on stage! It is with great humility that I step onto the same stages that my early mentors commanded. Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Oscar Peterson. There probably isn't a jazz musician you could name that I haven't seen play live.

The first time I saw Elvin Jones was in 1963 at Shelly's Manne-Hole, the jazz club in Hollywood. The doorman knew I was underage but let me pass because of the addiction to sound he could see in my eyes. Jones sat behind one of the greatest jazz quartets in the history of the art form, and he did it with a huge grin. The Beatles hadn't hit yet, and he was my muse.

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