The drummer's drummer Roy Haynes has made supporting and heading small groups an art form since the 40s, rivaling Max Roach as bebop's most flexible, consistently evolving drummer.

Roy Owen Haynes was born in the Boston suburb of Roxbury on March 13, 1926. He moved to New York in 1945 and began hanging around 52nd Street listening to all the great Jazz players. In October of 1947, Roy was hired by Lester Young, which started a career that spans more than fifty years. In fact, Roy has played with just about everyone in just about every style in the past half-century of Jazz: Lester Young, Bud Powell and Miles Davis in the late 1940s; Charlie Parker from the late '40s into the 1950s, and then Sarah Vaughan, Thelonious Monk and Eric Dolphy up until the 1960s. He was Elvin Jones' principal backup in the great John Coltrane Quartets of the 1960s, and has since graced performances and recordings by the likes of Oliver Nelson (on the classic 'Blues and the Abstract Truth'), Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Gary Burton, Miroslav Vitous, Pat Metheny, and just about everybody else too.