by Nancy Zeltsman

Jamey Haddad is beloved by numerous, diverse musical artists for the breadth and brilliance of his creativity, the joy in his music-making, and the way he constantly lifts up others, on and off the bandstand. “Jamey is so full of passion for the exploration within the heartbeat of the world of music,” commented saxophonist Joe Lovano, who has been close friends with Haddad since their teens. “No matter what the setting, he raises the music to a higher spiritual level.” Terri Lyne Carrington declared, “Jamey Haddad is the musician’s musician, and the musician of and for the people.”

“Jamey often invents his own instruments to find the sounds he is dreaming of,” said Dane Maxim Richeson. “He is a genius with creating multiple/integrated percussion parts for films and music recordings. He is known for having a powerful rhythmic pocket; everyone near it can’t help but
to join his spirit.” 

Paul Simon wrote that Jamey has “been in my bands and on my records for 25 years now. He provides the glue that makes it hang together rhythmically.” Simon was grateful that Haddad introduced him to the instruments and rhythms of North Africa and Eastern Europe. Paul has often sought Jamey to be involved in the inception of “feels” for songs to come. 

“Jamey has the curiosity of a child, the skills of a virtuoso, and the enthusiasm of someone who has tapped into the vast traditions of world music-making,” said Roger H. Brown, Jr., President Emeritus of Berklee College of Music. 

“Jamey is a double threat,” said saxophonist Dave Liebman in a Drumhead magazine article. “This is why I hired him in the early ’90s, which lasted for ten years. Being a drummer who was familiar with ‘world music’ was not as common at that time. I was ready to learn what was going on in that language. Jamey was the perfect guy for what I was interested in. From the jazz standpoint, he comes right out of the Elvin Jones approach. Jamey had a rolling, cascade approach that was perfect for me.”

A few months ago, Haddad retired from teaching at Oberlin Conservatory, but he remains part-time faculty at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He was on faculty with Silkroad at their Global Musician Workshop in 2022 through 2025. Jamey also had previous, long associations with Berklee College of Music, New England Conservatory of Music, and The New School in New York City. He will always be a teacher. Lovano said, “His thirst for knowledge and the way he shares the blessings of his studies is unparalleled.”

Haddad offered that, when you’re working on learning to play something, “You really have to have the courage to decide for yourself. You can be intimidated by greatness of people around you, and somehow not really understand who you are. It’s an important thing.”

Jamey aims to “point the way to students’ natural tendencies, based on the world that is available to them, so they can have their own impressionistic idea of what that means to them. That is going to be very different from what it means to the next person. If you can play anything — even a rudiment or a scale — and feel, ‘When I do this, it taps something that makes me feel complete,’ then you know the value in it. If you can stay close to that feel and sound long enough, you’ll discover a portal into another dimension: what can happen in music. You can release the brain’s ability to play perfect options on the feeling you own; even misfires can be woven into the music. No time for second guessing or not trusting what you feel and hear to play. And you might not hear too much at first; it’s a process.”

Antonio Sanchez said that “Jamey played one of the most integral and ethereal roles in my musical education.” Jamey recalled inviting Antonio to play with Dave Liebman’s group to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the John Coltrane “Meditations” suite. “Two drummers played on ‘Meditations,’ and I asked Antonio if he wanted to play with me. Antonio said, ‘I’m not sure what I would play.’ I said, ‘Great! That’s what it’s about. Just listen and play how you feel. You know enough about the history of the music to do something that’s appropriate. You’ll get the spirit of it.’ I could see, when it was over, he was changed. It was kind of a rite of passage; it was a big deal. It was a big deal for me to even see him do it.”

BACKGROUND/CULTURAL INFUSION
Born in 1952 in Cleveland, Ohio, Jamey Haddad lived in New York City from 1985–2003, sometimes escaping to a farm in the Pocono mountains in Pennsylvania, and he now is settled back in Cleveland. His parents were third-generation Lebanese immigrants: his father owned various grocery stores and restaurants. Jamey described a middle-class upbringing, with wonderful infusion of cultural elements. 

Haddad’s musical heritage stems from going to Lebanese/Arabic picnics. “They would play music and dance, and that was all I needed to see. When people had that much fun, I knew right away! I told my Dad, ‘If you get me that drum, I can play that.’”

When he was about four years old, Jamey’s uncle, Dave Morad, taught him how to play the basic grooves of the Arabic dances on the darbuka. At age six, Jamey received a two-piece Rogers drumset and studied for about a year with Howard Brush, who played for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. When he was about 14, Jamey heard Gene Krupa play at a bar in Cleveland, where his uncle was a bartender. “The band that played opposite Krupa was a modern group that had the great piano player Bill Dobbins, Lamar Gaines on bass, and Bob McKee on drums.” Jamey started studying drums with Mc-Kee, who played on the Mike Douglas TV show. Jamey paid for one lesson a week, but McKee invited Jamey to come by every day. “I watched him give lessons, and I learned a lot from that.

“My sister would take me to dances, and I learned all the music of the best band in town. One night, they said, ‘We don’t know what to do because our drummer has to go into the Army Reserves,’ and someone said, ‘Jamey could do it.’ I was 14, but I had a moustache and I looked older; you had to be 16 to get in to play. They let me play the last tune and they hired me.”

Jamey played professionally from the age of 14: “little dances and things like that. Older guys would pick me up to play at more-grown-up dance bars by the time I was 15. From that point I always played in working bands in the Cleveland area that were extremely popular. I used to practice drumset day and night. I was fortunate because my Dad owned a bar in Cleveland’s inner city with a 90% Black clientele, and the music in that jukebox was ALL Black artists — Ray Charles, Nancy Wilson, Coltrane, all the Stax and Motown artists, too — and my dad brought all of those 45’s home.”

In 1971, Jamey completed one-and-a-half years at Berklee College of Music, where his teachers included Alan Dawson, Fred Buda, and Joe Hunt. Haddad also studied briefly with Skip Hadden, who offered, “He was good even then! He always brings the right stuff to whatever situation he is involved in.”

Jamey soon began traveling the world. “My hunger for travel was inspired by feeling that the American melting pot wasn’t giving me enough contextual experience of the music I felt most attracted to.” Thus began a lifelong series of living and studying abroad. “It started in 1974 with the summer I spent in Tunisia, and that was followed by living in Brazil for close to a year and living in India on a Fulbright for most of a year.” 

Travels to Nigeria and Ethiopia followed. Jamey recorded ten different female Berber tribes while traveling across the Atlas Mountains to the south of Morocco near the Saharan desert. “A real game changer was when I was invited by composer Richard Horowitz to perform with ten different Moroccan tribes at the 1992 World’s Fair in Seville, Spain. Every one of those groups was more than kind, sharing as much as we could absorb about their music. I have performed in Morocco at the Gnaoua Festival a number of times, and there is something magical there that keeps pulling me back!” He did two bus tours with the Fez Sacred Musical Festival. “Hopefully, that will never end because we’re losing the value of languages and culture faster than we can document them.”

Jamey has been attracted to making music that’s “a fusion — where everything’s impressionistic.” The more he got into world music, “the more I realized that there were things that spoke to me in various cultures I knew nothing about, other than the fact that I fell in love with the music. It had a healing quality for me, and I needed to know more about it.

“Some people,” he said, “were raised in an environment where it was inescapable for them to be something other than a product of an immense cultural infusion of religion, food, dance, social etiquette, music that accompanies every aspect of life — that has very specific meaning. When that song is played, or those things are done, it invokes generations of emotions that you’ve witnessed your whole life.”

CROSSING GENRES
One of Jamey’s career highlights performing in the classical music realm was the premiere of Argentine contemporary classical composer Osvaldo Golijov’s orchestra piece “Azul.” Golijov and Haddad had collaborated on many other projects, including soundtracks for Francis Ford Coppola. “The effect that Jamey has had on my music and on me as a composer is profound,” said Golijov. “I cannot imagine the last 20 years of my growth without him. And I know from many significant composers and musicians that Jamey’s presence has made their work much more powerful. He is universally admired by the new generation of performers. And loved!”

Jamey said of Golijov: “He saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. I could have never begun to imagine that I could participate in orchestral performances without his guidance, and without his belief that my instincts would offer a sonic solution to something he wanted that he thought I could produce. Neither one of us knew what it was going to be.

“That process that we percussionists all do — because of the hall you’re in, because of how the microphone responds, the way it ends up sounding from ten feet away as opposed to right in front of you — those are the things that you can ‘live or die’ by. The more experienced you are, the fewer modifications you make as to what the final solution is going to be — at least for that night [laughs].”

Jamey says his working method often amounts to “allowing myself to experience something and seeing what I can do. There’s a Keith Jarrett tune called ‘Forget Your Memories and They’ll Remember You.’ I always liked that because, if you allow, the miracle of the mind’s response will carry you — if you don’t mess it up by trying to insert a non sequitur to the organic process of listening and playing, or by feeling you need to insert something. I’m going to do whatever I can do” with whatever he’s in control of, “whether it’s my hands, or muting, to make the thing sound like I’m acknowledging the people I’m listening to.

“You don’t ever want to be judging yourself while you’re doing it,” Jamey said. “You really have to be able to speak from the heart. If you’re not in the habit of doing that, then you have to simplify, so you can really align with something that means something to you. And, hopefully, your life isn’t so complicated that you can’t take a step back — and give yourself a chance to stay close to something that makes you feel like it’s true.”

INNOVATION 
Haddad’s instrument choices are tailored to each situation. Occasionally, the starting point is a traditional drumset but, more often, it’s a new, hybrid setup. His enormous collection includes some instruments that are “store-bought,” some he requested people to make for him, instruments he found on travels around the world, and some he designed himself. Due to Jamey’s knowledge of percussion instruments from around the world, he was part of the team that contributed to the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, the world’s largest musical instrument museum.

Haddad had a hand in designing the Hadgini, developed with master ceramicist Frank Giorgini: a two-sided clay drum made by LP Udu Drum. The construction is based on centuries-old African traditions. The Hadgini drum is in the Permanent Instrument Collection at both the Metropolitan Museum of art in New York City and the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix.

The Hadjira is offered by Cooperman Fife and Drum. It’s sort of a combination of the kanjira and riq, with pandeiro jingles in a unique configuration. He also designed the Koohabata drum, which was carved from one piece of black walnut by William Kooienga. It is a bata drum with a djembe-styled mouth coming out of the center of the drum. “It is a fantastic instrument!” Haddad says. The newest, the Hadphoon, “is a circular metal plate with cut-outs that look like a shot of a typhoon from space,” said Haddad. “It takes on a totally different sound depending on the host drum you place it on.

“Some of the instruments I worked on developing were ergonomic developments of existing ideas that allowed a combination of various techniques and sound combinations of metal, wood, and skin. I had a technique that combined split finger technique from playing Indian music, and Arabic snapping technique from playing darbuka. So, I thought about how these sounds could complement each other. Could I merge them into a single instrument? We probably made ten different variations of different ones until they discovered what I would like and use. And some of them are actually things that other people liked, too.”

INSPIRING OTHERS
When Shane Shanahan, who plays with the Silkroad Ensemble, first moved to New York in 2000, “most of the other percussionists I met were students of Jamey’s from Berklee. They raved about him.” Shane began to familiarize himself with Jamey’s work and was amazed. “Every recording I heard was an inspiration. I only had one formal lesson with him, but that turned into a three-hour hang session. Those three hours had a disproportionate impact on me as a musician and as a human.” 

Shanahan felt lucky to tour and perform with Haddad several times since. “To feel firsthand how he uplifts every musician in every ensemble is an education in itself. He does the same offstage as well, sharing his positive energy and appreciation with the crew, staff, and audiences alike.”

COLLABORATIONS 
Jamey has worked with an extremely diverse group of people who, time and time again, saw something in him that he wouldn’t have necessarily imagined for himself. Along with work with such artists as Yo-Yo Ma, Osvaldo Golijov, and Bokanté with Michael League from Snarky Puppy, Jamey’s discography encompasses work with Dawn Upshaw, Elliot Goldenthal, Brazilian guitar duo the Assad Brothers, Daniel Schnyder, Simon Shaheen, Paul Winter Consort, New York Voices, Simon & Garfunkel, Sting, Carly Simon, Danilo Perez, Herbie Hancock, Nancy Wilson, Dave Liebman, Fred Hersch, Esperanza Spalding, Maya Beiser, Trichy Sankaran, Glen Velez, Betty Buckley, Steve Shehan, Tino Dorato, Leo Blanco, and Nguyen Lee. In Paul Simon’s band, he’s worked alongside drummers Steve Gadd, Steve Shehan, Charlie Drayton, Jim Keltner, and Cyro Baptista.

LEGACY
“The notion of LEGACY…,” said Gordon Gottlieb, “generosity of moving an art form forward by passing along the cornerstones of that art to succeeding generations, ranks amongst the highest callings. Jamey Haddad lives for this calling.”

Glen Velez cites that Haddad has made “a profound contribution to the American renaissance in percussion in our time.”

Esperanza Spaulding described: “Your heartbeat changes around him. You become more grooving and fluid in step and articulation. He’s really absorbed countless worlds of rhythm into his spirit-body, so the rhythms that move through him feel timeless, ancestral and rooted, while always driving the music toward the future.”

RESOURCES
Baumann, Greg. “Jamey Haddad: A Life in Rhythm and Harmony” Drumhead magazine, Issue 076, November-December 2019
Cleveland Arts Prize 2010 video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThKd67O8Y-Y
Website: http://jameyhaddad.com