Gerry Mulligan Quartet – "Walkin' Shoes" (1953)

The late Charlie Watts became interested in drumming when he was about 13 years old – in 1954 or thereabouts.

“I bought a banjo, and I didn’t like the dots on the neck,” Watts told the New Yorker in 2012. “So I took the neck off, and at the same time I heard a drummer called Chico Hamilton, who played with Gerry Mulligan, and I wanted to play like that, with brushes. I didn’t have a snare drum, so I put the banjo head on a stand.”

Chico Hamilton

Watts’s understanding parents forgave him for destroying the perfectly good banjo and gave him a drum kit.  He taught himself to play by drumming along to the jazz records that he bought.

Watts became world famous as a member of the Rolling Stones – he joined the group in 1963, and never missed a Rolling Stones concert for as long as he lived – but he was first and foremost a jazz drummer.  He released a number of jazz albums before dying last month.

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In 1952, jazz saxophonist, composer, and arranger Gerry Mulligan put together a pianoless jazz quartet with trumpeter Chet Baker, bassist Bob Whitlock, and Hamilton.  “Walkin’ Shoes” – one of Watts’s favorite Mulligan-Hamilton tracks – was released the next year on the group’s first album, a ten-inch LP titled Gerry Mulligan Quartet Volume 1:

Hamilton – whose real first name was Foreststorn – recorded some 63 albums as a bandleader between 1955 and 2013.  (He died that year at age 92.)  He also performed as a sideman with numerous legendary jazz greats, including Mulligan, Count Basie, Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, Dexter Gordon, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, and Charlie Mingus (who was his high-school classmate).

Click here to listen to “Walkin’ Shoes.”

Click on the link below to buy the track from Amazon: