On November 20, 1969, at King Studios in Cincinnati, James Brown told his drummer to stay out of the way.
“You don’t have to do no soloing, brother, just keep what you got,” Brown said on the tape. Clyde Stubblefield kept what he had. Then the horns dropped away and he played eight bars alone.
That break went on to become one of the most sampled recordings in music, and it is not on this list. It isn’t a solo. It’s a groove with the band lifted off it.
Which is the argument here. A drum solo means the record stops being a record and turns into one person and a kit. The ranking measures what each performance did to the drummers who heard it, not necessarily degree of difficulty.
10. Ron Bushy, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” (1968)
Doug Ingle wrote the song drunk on Red Mountain Wine, slurring the name, which is how “In the Garden of Eden” became “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”
Iron Butterfly cut the long version at Ultra Sonic Studios in one take that ran just past seventeen minutes.
Ron Bushy’s solo sits in the middle, with toms and a walking bass drum, and it taught a generation of American teenagers what a drum solo was.
Ringo Starr caught the band at the Royal Albert Hall and paid the compliment sideways, saying “I hope you don’t mind I stole a part of your drum solo.
9. Neil Peart, “YYZ” (1981)
Rush recorded it at Le Studio in Morin-Heights, Quebec, for Moving Pictures. The opening is the Toronto airport’s Morse code identifier, heard over a cockpit radio on the way home.
“It’s the worst thing you can imagine,” Alex Lifeson said of the song’s origins, “a f*cking song written by the rhythm section.” And in many ways, he’s not wrong, with the song’s solo eventually becoming the typical yet predictable modern rock audition piece.
“I want to be an improviser, and I’ve worked very hard at that. It’s an art,” Peart told MusicRadar in 2011.
It was nominated for a Grammy in 1982 and lost to “Behind My Camel,” an instrumental by the Police.
8. Billy Cobham, “Quadrant 4” (1973)
Electric Lady Studios, 1973, Ken Scott engineering. Spectrum went down in two days, according to bassist Leland Sklar’s account, and three, according to another; most of it needed one or two takes.
Cobham opens the album with a double bass drum shuffle clocking at 242 beats per minute for the quarter note, then solos across the top of it without easing off.
Scott said he treated Cobham’s kit like anyone else’s. “I just used more mics.” For a drier snare, Cobham “laid his wallet on the top head.”
7. Buddy Rich, “West Side Story Medley” (1966)
Ten minutes and forty-eight seconds of Leonard Bernstein put through a big band on Pacific Jazz, and the closing stretch belongs to Rich alone.
He was in his late forties and had been performing since infancy. Harvey Siders of Down Beat asked him in 1967 why he drove himself to exhaustion. “Man, ’cause I love it.”
6. Ginger Baker, “Toad” (1966)
Cream recorded it for Fresh Cream between July and October 1966. The studio version runs five minutes and nine seconds. The live version on Wheels of Fire runs sixteen, roughly thirteen of them drums.
Life praised “sustained, imaginative drumming that would knock out a Carnegie jazz audience.” Spin later handed the track the “dubious distinction of introducing the drum solo to the rock LP,” which is closer to the truth and much less flattering.
Baker spent his life refusing the compliment, since he considered himself a jazz drummer trapped in a loud band. “I hate volume. Why does rock music have to be so loud?” he asked an interviewer decades on. He graded John Bonham, Ringo Starr and Charlie Watts at three or four out of ten and himself “a golden 10.”
5. Art Blakey, “A Night in Tunisia” (1960)
Recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, August 1960, with Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Bobby Timmons and Jymie Merritt. The title track runs about eleven minutes, and Blakey starts it by himself, then duels the bass, and nobody plays the melody until he’s done.
One reviewer called it possibly “the fastest ‘Night in Tunisia’ ever recorded” and the opening “a crazy-wild drum solo.” Blakey’s standing instruction to audiences explains his approach to an instrument most bandleaders kept in the back. “If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet.”
4. Steve Gadd, “Aja” (1977)
Steely Dan had rehearsed for roughly three hours before the tape rolled.
Gadd’s section arrives late in a track that runs seven minutes and fifty-six seconds, and none of it was written down. “His part was not written,” Walter Becker said. “We discussed the tune a little bit and by virtue of his musicianship he just knew what to do.” Becker remembered telling him just to play like hell.
Two takes, spliced in the mix. For a band that kept guitarists in the booth for weeks chasing eight bars, that was close to a miracle. Engineer Bill Schnee said “everyone in the room was still amazed that we did ‘Aja’ as quickly as we did.”
Gadd himself made it sound like a Tuesday. “The session went real smooth. Everyone had their head into it like probably it was going to take a long time to get it, if we ever would get it. And, that day, it just seemed to fall into place.”
3. Max Roach, “The Drum Also Waltzes” (1966)
Three minutes and thirty-four seconds, no other instrument anywhere near it, released by Atlantic on an album Roach assembled from sessions in October 1965 and April 1966.
It’s a waltz. That is the point, and it separates Roach from nearly everyone here, because the solo has a tune a listener can hum and a shape a listener can follow.
“What makes a piece an art piece is design. Design,” Roach said. “So when I build a solo it’s design within the structure of something, sometime. Basically it’s design. Like creating a poem, a painting, or anything else.”
2. John Bonham, “Moby Dick” (1969)
Jimmy Page caught Bonham improvising alone in the studio in 1969, taped it, and spliced the best of it together. The version on Led Zeppelin II runs four minutes and twenty-five seconds, cut down from something far longer, with a blues riff bolted on either end.
Steve Pilkington described the track as “essentially, a drum solo bookended by a token blues-rock riff,” which is accurate and also the appeal.
Onstage the other three left and Bonham played until he was done. Six minutes on a short night, half an hour on a long one. “I usually play for twenty minutes, and the longest I’ve ever done was under thirty,” he said.
Partway through he dropped the sticks and played with his bare hands, and the reason was tone rather than theater. “I can get an absolutely true sound. It hurts at first, but the skin soon hardens and now I can hit a drum harder with my hands than with drum sticks.”
1. Gene Krupa, “Sing, Sing, Sing (with a Swing)” (1937)
Hollywood, July 6, 1937. Benny Goodman’s orchestra needed a number long enough to fill both sides of a twelve-inch Victor 78, so the arrangement was stretched with long tracts of Krupa’s tom-toms. Eight minutes and forty-three seconds, unheard of for a popular record.
Nobody planned any of it. Singer Helen Ward said the tom-tom passage began as a refusal onstage.
“One night Gene just refused to stop drumming when he got to the end of the third chorus, where the tune was supposed to end, so Benny blithely picked up the clarinet and noodled along with him.”
Goodman kept it in. The tune “was still a big thing, and no one-nighter was complete without it,” he said of the years that followed.
At Carnegie Hall on January 16, 1938, the band ran it to twelve and a half minutes in front of an audience that had never watched a drummer given that much room. Every performance above descends from this one, which is the case for putting it first.
Buddy Rich, not a generous man about other players, made the lineage plain. “At one time every drummer in the world wanted to play like Gene Krupa,” he said. “Gene was the inspiration for every big-name drummer in the business.”