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Doug Hammond
He has worked with musicians like Earl Hooker, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Sammy Price, Donald Byrd, Wolfgang Dauner, Ornette Coleman, Steve Coleman, Nina Simone, Betty Carter, Marion Williams, Carl Craig, Paquito D'Rivera, Arnett Cobb, James Blood Ulmer and Arthur Blythe.
He currently lives and works in Linz, Austria. He was a professor at the Anton Bruckner Private University for Music, Drama, and Dance in Linz.
He plays drums and is a percussionist. Not a thunderer, not a ricocheter, but a thorough support, a crafty signal giver, straight ahead and with muscles, sure and singing, sophisticated and naive, like it should be in jazz. It was never his intention to drum a siege upon the winter palace of jazz. And no rock morsels either. He is much more a keeper of old percussion values - an Enlightened One - far from being a fawning submission to the heritage. He's a remover, a refiner, a renewer. Nothing evaporates, much evokes: the African-American raw materials; the authority of a Baby Dodds, who Armstrong gave wings to; all of the higher obligations of black swing giants from Chick Webb to Syd Catlett; the perfection of the matador par excellance Max Roach; the potential to be the liberator of the Free Era.