# Ralph Peterson Jr., who re-enlivened Hard Bop, dead at 58: Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2021/03/02/peterson-jr-who-re-enlivened-hard-bop-dead-at-58-video-photos/
- Published: 2021-03-02T13:33:25+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Ralph Peterson Jr., a drummer, bandleader, composer and educator whose lunging
propulsion and volatile combustion were hallmarks of a jazz career spanning more
than 40 years, died on Monday in North Dartmouth, Mass. The cause was complications
from cancer, his manager, Laura Martinez, tells NPR Music; Peterson had been living
with the disease for the last six years. He was 58.**

The sheer, onrushing force of Peterson’s beat, paired with his alert ear and agile
dynamism, made him one of the standout jazz musicians to emerge in the 1980s. Part
of a striving peer group known as the Young Lions, which coalesced around the resurgence
of acoustic hard bop, he distinguished himself early on as a powerful steward of
that tradition.

“It’s music that revolves around richly ambiguous harmonies and shifty, mercurial
melodies,” wrote Jon Pareles in 1990, reviewing a performance for the _New York 
Times_. “Difficult as it is to play, Mr. Peterson and his group rekindled the style’s
sense of risk and triumph.”

Risk and triumph, each inextricable from the other, aptly describes nearly all of
the music associated with Peterson — as a locomotive engine on the first several
albums by trumpeter Terence Blanchard and saxophonist Donald Harrison; as a leader
of bands like Triangular, a venturesome piano trio, and the Fo’tet, with a frontline
of saxophone and vibraphone; and as the anointed heir of Art Blakey, a hard-bop 
progenitor and drummer-bandleader of the Jazz Messengers, whose ranks produced several
generations of major jazz talent.

Because of his own role in that band, Blakey didn’t often work with other drummers.
Peterson was a notable exception, initially as the second drummer in a Jazz Messengers
Big Band. He became Blakey’s protégé — and after the master’s death in 1990, his
torchbearer and successor. Peterson devoted his 1994 Blue Note album _Art _to Blakey’s
music and memory, and later formed the Messenger Legacy, a wrecking crew of other
prominent Jazz Messengers alumni.

Peterson often emulated facets of Blakey’s style — like a press-roll crescendo on
the snare drum, an object lesson in tension and release — with unabashed vigor, 
confident that his own musical persona was capacious enough to accommodate them.“
I think if you don’t know how to play like somebody else _first_, you can never 
arrive at what somebody can identify as your own style,” he said in a 2011 interview
with pianist George Colligan, an occasional collaborator.

Among the many others in Peterson’s circle were saxophonists Steve Wilson, Craig
Handy and Wayne Escoffery; clarinetists Don Byron and Todd Marcus; cornetist Graham
Haynes; and pianists Geri Allen, Michele Rosewoman, Orrin Evans and Uri Caine. Some
of those musicians featured Peterson in their bands; most of them played in his.

On a 2001 album called _The Art of War, _Peterson served as the anchor for a band
of younger players: Evans, trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, saxophonist Jimmy Greene and bassist
Eric Revis. They bring the requisite fire and commitment to his tune “Freight Train,”
whose title suggests one of the go-to metaphors his playing frequently inspired.

Born in Pleasantville, N.J., on May 20, 1962, Ralph Peterson Jr. came up in a family
of drummers: his grandfather played drums, and so did four of his uncles. He started
on drums at age 3, but it was as a trumpeter that he made his way into the jazz 
studies program at Rutgers University.

Partly through the benediction of Blakey, he took off as a drummer in the revivified
hard-bop mode, bringing an explosive quality that defied any complaint of stale 
conservatism. After appearing on albums by Out of the Blue, a band assembled by 
Blue Note Records as a vehicle for young jazz players, Peterson made several of 
his own releases for the label — starting in 1988 with _Triangular _and _V, _both
featuring Geri Allen.

With the Fo’tet, active through the ’90s, Peterson explored a pugnacious and slippery
form of post-bop, finding an essential partner in Bryan Carrott on mallet percussion.
The group devoted entire albums to jazz repertory (_Ornettology_, _The Fo’tet Plays
Monk_), but also served as a vehicle for new music. _The Reclamation Project, _released
on Evidence Music in 1995, consisted entirely of Peterson compositions, including
some bearing titles – “Turn It Over,” “Song of Serenity,” “Acceptance” – that hinted
at his own winding path.

Ralph Peterson Jr., [](https://i0.wp.com/media.npr.org/assets/img/2021/03/01/_dsc3576_custom-04594058787e07ef606057a4b5f1763d89f632c8.jpg)

In his 20s, with a career on the rise, Peterson struggled with drug addiction. Years
later, after finding sobriety, he often pointed to that experience as a cautionary
tale for his students at the Berklee College of Music, some of whom became collaborators
on the bandstand. Peterson formed the GenNext Big Band as a crucible for Berklee
talent, patterned after the Blakey big band; its first album, in 2018, was a Blakey
tribute titled _I Remember Bu._

Peterson released that album on his own Onyx Music, which he formed a decade ago,
partly out of frustration with the unavailability of his Blue Note recordings. Among
the other albums on Onyx are _Onward and Upward, _by the Messenger Legacy, and two
titles by Aggregate Prime, an exploratory quintet featuring Gary Thomas on saxophone
and Mark Whitfield on guitar.

On a 2016 album titled _Triangular III, _Peterson enlists a former student, Luques
Curtis, and his brother, pianist Zaccai Curtis. Here is the trio playing “Backgammon,”
a Walter Davis, Jr. tune; the footage captures Peterson’s powerful presence on drums,
and the way he could shift the emphasis in a performance from one moment to the 
next.

Peterson’s next album, due out this spring, will also feature the Curtis brothers,
along with vocalist Jazzmeia Horn and percussionist Eguie Castrillo. He titled it
_Raise Up Off Me_, referring in part to the experience of Black Americans with law
enforcement.

A lifelong embodiment of the warrior philosopher, Peterson also ran a Taekwondo 
studio in Boston; he received his ranking as a fifth dan black belt in 2019, as 
he was fighting cancer. Speaking with Bill Milkowski for a Downbeat profile the 
previous year, Peterson was open about what he had endured.

“I guess it’s the Klingon in me,” he said with a laugh, alluding to the bellicose
_Star Trek _species. “I’ve had enough chances to be dead, but I’m grateful to be
alive. And the focus and intensity and pace at which I’m now working and living 
is directly related to the spiritual wake-up call that tomorrow isn’t promised.”

![Ralph Peterson Jr., performing in 2012 at Symphony Space in New York.](https://
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