# Nearly a century ago, Dave Tough helped define Chicago jazz drumming: Videos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2020/12/07/nearly-a-century-ago-dave-tough-helped-define-chicago-jazz-drumming-videos/
- Published: 2020-12-07T21:27:44+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**He died young, only barely outliving the big-band era, but his influence lives
on.**

Dave Tough looked like a gaunt but elegant character in a classic film noir, and
his life took some dark, dramatic turns as well. A poet and intellectual, Tough 
was also one of the original bohemian musicians, and while following his own unique
muse he helped pioneer the hard-driving Chicago style of jazz drumming.

Tough was born to Scottish parents in Oak Park on April 26, 1907, and his interest
in drumming took root at an early age. He was enamored with New Orleans drummer 
Baby Dodds, who’d become a fixture in Chicago in the 1920s and recorded here with
Louis Armstrong’s famous Hot Five and Hot Seven bands—Dodds was one of the most 
important jazz drummers of the pre-big-band era, and one of the first to be captured
improvising on wax.

While attending Oak Park High School, Tough made friends with saxophonist, composer,
and bandleader Bud Freeman, who was part of Chicago’s famous Austin High School 
Gang. The gang got together as jazz-besotted kids, ages 14 to 17, at Austin High
School in 1922: Freeman (C-melody tenor saxophone), Jim Lanigan (piano, sousaphone),
Jimmy McPartland (cornet), Dick McPartland (banjo, guitar), and Frank Teschemacher(
alto sax, clarinet).

Within a few years the band was frequently playing at the Lewis Institute, where
Tough was taking language and literature classes, and he would often join in on 
drums. (The Lewis Institute no longer exists, having merged in 1940 with the Armour
Institute of Technology to form IIT.) The Austin High Gang performed under several
names as their personnel evolved, including the Blue Friars and Husk O’Hare’s Wolverines(
the latter with Tough as a regular member). In 1927, jazz guitarist Eddie Condon
led the group for two sessions as “McKenzie and Condon’s Chicagoans.” Those recordings
helped make the young players famous, but the newly married Tough had already left
to play in Europe, replaced by Gene Krupa.

Tough had become a full-time professional musician in 1925, the year he turned 18,
and he worked with the likes of pianist “Jumbo Jack” Gardner, singer and saxophonist
Art Kassel, and violinist Sig Meyer. He split his time between the U.S. and Europe
in the late 1920s, often traveling with clarinetist Danny Polo. He played in Nice,
Ostend, Berlin, and Paris with guitarist George Carhart and clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow.
Lore has it that the Prince of Wales (who briefly reigned as Edward VIII in 1936)
sat in on Tough’s drums at a gig.

Tough returned to the U.S. in 1929, playing with prominent big-band leaders such
as Benny Goodman and Red Nichols and often recording with them in New York. After
a break due to illness in ’32—probably the first time his drinking really laid him
low—Tough returned to the game in ’35, moving to New York to drum for massively 
popular big-band star Tommy Dorsey as well as Red Norvo and Bunny Berigan. In 1936
he and his wife divorced, and he wouldn’t remarry till the mid-’40s.

Tough also kept playing Dixieland, and after leaving Dorsey’s band in 1938 he began
what would become a pattern of jumping capriciously from one job to the next—including
gigs with the likes of Jack Teagarden, Eddie Condon, and Joe Marsala.

Early in World War II, Tough became part of the swing orchestra led by clarinetist
Artie Shaw, and after joining the navy in 1942 he played in Shaw’s naval band. He
had epilepsy and was eventually discharged on medical grounds—in part because the
disorder wasn’t well understood at the time, often mistaken for an emotional or 
mental problem.

Though slight of frame, Tough was a powerful player. A perfectionist who hated to
take solos, he was known to gripe about the insipid, overly commercial music many
bands had to play to survive. He had the skill and musicality to work with the biggest
names of the era, but he was frequently dissatisfied and remained restless.

Tough did perhaps his most revered work with Woody Herman’s big band in 1945. Herman
had gotten on board with the emerging bebop style and played an important role in
popularizing it. Tough admired pioneering bebop drummer Max Roach, but he wasn’t
a big fan of the style—he thought of himself as much more of a Dixieland drummer.
His hard-swinging playing shepherded the high-energy stampede of Herman’s Herd, 
and it made him a star—but he saw jazz changing out from under him.

While Tough tried to develop a second vocation as a writer, his already serious 
drinking problem got worse. In November 1947 he played with cornetist Muggsy Spanier
at the opening night of Chicago’s original Blue Note club at 56 W. Madison, but 
he was already in decline. “By the New Year’s Eve performance at the end of Muggsy’s
engagement,” wrote Dan Caine in a 1989 Reader story It was clear that Tough, debilitated
by booze, was at the end of his career.

While out for a walk on leave from a veteran’s hospital in Newark, New Jersey, on
December 9, 1948, Tough fell during an epileptic seizure, struck his head on the
snowy sidewalk, and died. His body laid unclaimed in the morgue for three days.

Though Tough only made it to age 41, his legend lives on. Countless recordings spotlighting
his mad drum skills are still in circulation on LPs by Benny Goodman, Woody Herman,
Tommy Dorsey, and others. Drum nerds continue to study his groundbreaking playing,
and I found a lengthy online testimonial by UK drummer Bob Henrit, most famous for
his work in Argent and the Kinks, that discusses minutiae such as Tough’s technique
of sawing pieces out of his cymbals. “He cut chunks out of them to broaden their
sound and removed strategic rivets to shorten it,” Henrit wrote in 2014. “He was
famous for his ‘blurred’ ride figures where the sounds of strokes seemed to run 
into one another; this may well have come from his choice of heavy sticks with a
round bead.”

Henrit also quotes several jazz titans praising Tough, including Dizzy Gillespie,
who had this to say about his unflashy but not-just-timekeeping swing: “Dave never
got in the way; he didn’t overplay. What we need today are a few more Dave Toughs.”

_Playing with one of Tommy Dorsey’s many bands, Dave Tough added clever, idiosyncratic
beats to this 1937 version of “Twilight in Turkey.”_

_Dave Tough drums on this 1945 recording of “Northwest Passage” by Woody Herman’s
band._

_This 1945 version of “Golden Wedding” contains a rare Dave Tough drum solo._

![sh_dave_tough_web.jpg](https://i0.wp.com/media1.fdncms.com/chicago/imager/u/blog/
84323948/sh_dave_tough_web.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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