Joe Chambers -

Joe Chambers is an American jazz-funk drummer, pianist, vibraphonist, and composer from Stoneacre, Va. He became a central Blue Note session player in the 1960s through recordings with Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, Wayne Shorter, Andrew Hill, Sam Rivers, and McCoy Tyner, while several of those sessions also featured his compositions. Chambers joined Max Roach in M’Boom, worked with Charles Mingus and the Super Jazz Trio, and established a bandleader catalog with The Almoravid, New World, Double Exposure, Phantom of the City, and later Blue Note and Savant albums.

Background

Joe Chambers was born Joseph Arthur Chambers on June 25, 1942, in Stoneacre, Virginia. His family moved to Chester, Pennsylvania, when he was two. Chambers grew up with a mother who wrote and sang and a father who worked as a writer. All five children played instruments in family music sessions. His older brother Stephen Alexander Chambers later became concert composer Talib Rasul Hakim. Chambers gravitated to drums at age five, when he assembled an improvised kit from kitchen utensils. He also received occasional piano lessons as a child. At Chester High School, he took formal drum and piano instruction and played in school ensembles. He also studied theory and composition.

Chambers graduated in 1960 and studied theory and composition at the Philadelphia Conservatory through the 1960–61 academic year. At eighteen, he joined R&B singer Bobby Lewis on the road. A Washington engagement brought Chambers to the capital, where he settled. He then enrolled at American University and studied composition and theory from 1961 through 1963 in Washington.

Chambers joined the JFK Quintet, which paired him with alto saxophonist Andrew White, trumpeter Ray Codrington, bassist Walter Booker, and pianist Harry Killgo. The group held a three-year, six-night-a-week residency at Bohemian Caverns, where Chambers also played occasional solo-piano sets on weekends. At the club, Chambers met musicians who came to Washington for Howard Theatre engagements, including Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Freddie Hubbard, and Eric Dolphy, who played with the quintet for several weeks in summer 1963. Dolphy and Hubbard urged Chambers to move to New York.

Chambers moved to New York in 1963 and took a six-week Five Spot engagement with pianist Cedar Walton. Eric Dolphy then hired him for a September concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, and bassist Richard Davis. At the Out to Lunch rehearsal, Dolphy asked Chambers to bring original music. Chambers brought “Mirrors,” a classroom piece from American University that illustrated mirrored thematic construction. Hubbard and Blue Note A&R man Duke Pearson selected the piece, and Hubbard hired Chambers for the May 7, 1964, Breaking Point! session at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

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