Artist: Roy Haynes

Roy Haynes is an American jazz drummer. He is among the most recorded drummers in jazz. In a career lasting over 80 years, he has played swing, bebop, jazz fusion, avant-garde jazz and is considered a pioneer of jazz drumming.

Haynes is a multi-Grammy Awardee and was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1999. His son Graham Haynes is a cornetist; another son Craig Holiday Haynes and grandson Marcus Gilmore are both drummers. 

Haynes made his professional debut in 1942 in his native Boston and began his full-time professional career in 1945.  From 1947 to 1949 he worked with saxophonist Lester Young, and from 1949 to 1952 was a member of saxophonist Charlie Parker's quintet. He also recorded at the time with pianist Bud Powell and saxophonists Wardell Gray and Stan Getz. From 1953 to 1958, he toured and recorded with singer Sarah Vaughan. 

A tribute song was recorded by Jim Keltner and Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones, and he appeared on stage with the Allman Brothers Band in 2006 and Page McConnell of Phish in 2008. "Age seems to have just passed him by," Watts observed. "He's eighty-three and in 2006 he was voted Best Contemporary Jazz Drummer in Modern Drummer magazine's readers' poll He's amazing." 

In 1994, Haynes was awarded the Danish Jazzpar prize, and in 1996 the French government knighted him with the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France's top literary and artistic honor. In 1995, the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts named Haynes as a NEA Jazz_Master. Haynes received honorary doctorates from the Berklee College of Music (1991),and the New England Conservatory (2004), as well as a Peabody Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University, in 2012. He was inducted into the DownBeat magazine Hall of Fame in 2004. On October 9, 2010, he was awarded the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation's BNY Mellon Jazz Living Legacy Award at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.