Guarding His Place

Gravatt retired from prison job to reclaim place in jazz 

By MATT PEIKEN
St. Paul Pioneer Press; January 23, 2005©

It's 2 in the afternoon on a Tuesday, and Eric Kamau Gravatt is spending his day like a shut-in.

The shades of his South Minneapolis home are at half-mast, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd are dancing on a muted TV, and Gravatt is deep into a pack of Kools.

Still, there's life here. The Latin jazz of Carlos Valdez is playing on a cassette, and when the tune turns to John Coltrane's "Chasin' the Trane," Gravatt closes his eyes and hums the saxophone solo squawk for squawk. A music stand and a drummer's practice pad stand like ready servants just past the front door, should Gravatt find himself in the mood.

"It seems like I need to have wood in my hands every day," says Gravatt, twin jets of smoke streaming from his nostrils. "Haven't felt this way for 20 years."

Gravatt is a curiosity as much for his place in music as for his decision to turn away from it. Thirty years ago, as he moved from Philadelphia to Minneapolis, Gravatt was as close to a first-call drummer as one could find outside of New York City. He had played with Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson and Blue Mitchell. He had recorded and toured with one of the earliest incarnations of Weather Report and had joined McCoy Tyner's trio.

Just as his career looked to reach iconic status, Gravatt traded it all in for financial stability. Supporting two young daughters at home, he spent the next 17 years working the graveyard shift as a guard at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Lino Lakes. During that span, Gravatt performed only locally, sparingly and quietly. To this day, few local audiences are aware of his resume.

Now retired from prison work and about to turn 58, Gravatt is reclaiming what he considers his life calling. Just back from touring with Tyner's big band, Gravatt is at the Artists' Quarter this weekend fronting his own group, Source Code.

"I look back and see the impact I had -- or least people tell me I had," he says. "I'm just now realizing this is what I was meant to do. The rest of this has been a test."

HARDENED OUTLOOK

Long before beginning work in a prison, Gravatt developed a hardened outlook on a musician's life. He remembers playing in clubs where owners stowed away the Steinway and brought in a Baldwin piano whenever black artists performed. He had to move his drums through riotous streets the night Martin Luther King Jr. was shot.

None of that accounts for his moody interior and steely exterior, which to this day intimidate or ward off some of his peers.

"I can play music with you, but it don't mean I have to drink with you or laugh at your silly-ass jokes," he says, pausing for a moment to reflect on his musical relationships.

"I alienated a lot of people -- been doing that since I was a kid," he says. "I don't have too many friends, but I'm fine with that. People's feelings bruise easily, and sometimes I forget that."

Gravatt started his musical life as a conga player, and his drumming style is grounded in African rhythms and colorful textures. Modern Drummer Magazine has mentioned him over the years, and there's a small but cultish awareness of Gravatt's contributions to the jazz discography.

His earliest recordings, with Weather Report, show a musicality that impressed but also frustrated the group's founder, Josef Zawinul, who eventually replaced Gravatt in the studio with a more bottom-heavy drummer.

"It really hurt Gravatt," Zawinul told Downbeat Magazine in 2001. "Gravatt was a genius. It wasn't that he didn't play good enough. He was a bad dude, man. (For the third album), I wanted to have what's today called the hip-hop beat, but I needed a low bass drum. Eric had one of those long, small, little things that went 'boop.' That didn't make it. When Eric saw (his replacement) in the studio, he kind of freaked out, and his spirit was not there anymore."

Steady work with the fusion band Natural Life brought Gravatt and his family to Minneapolis. After that group fizzled, family life kept him here. His daughters were 4 and 7 when their mother died, and his next two marriages ended in divorce. Gravatt has been married to his fourth wife for 13 years.

He toured occasionally with Tyner, who had forged his legend in the late '50s and early '60s as part of Coltrane's "Classic Quartet." But even with an artist of that stature, Gravatt had to pay for his own hotel rooms. Tired and too proud to work locally for $50 a night as a sideman, Gravatt sought stability and found it in Minnesota's prison system.

"I played as much drums as I could and raised as much hell as I could," he says. "I've washed dishes, painted apartments, short-order cook. I had kids, and corrections were the only thing being offered that paid that good, and they had (benefits) you couldn't get in jazz."

DISTINCTIVE TALENT

Kenny Horst, owner of the Artists' Quarter and the club's house drummer, has known of Gravatt since Gravatt's days in Philadelphia. Horst considers him a distinctive talent and misunderstood presence on the local jazz landscape.

He has watched Gravatt finesse more tones out of a ride cymbal than many drummers can unfold on an entire kit, crack walnuts with one hand and cry at the funeral of Bobby Peterson, the pianist for Natural Life.

"I don't know why he didn't click as a working drummer here. Maybe people are a little afraid of him," Horst says. "Underneath that brash exterior, Gravatt's a really nice, very sentimental kind of guy. I'm just so glad he's not working in that prison anymore -- it was such a waste; he should have been playing. I think he's having the time of his life right now."

Gravatt recorded with pianist Tony Hymas the day after retiring from prison work, in 2001, and was surprised to get yet another call last year from Tyner. Years earlier, Gravatt turned down one offer to tour with Tyner because of commitments at the prison and chewed out Tyner by phone on another occasion over a mixup.

Their relationship apparently patched, Gravatt toured Europe with Tyner in April and, in the summer, did his first big-band gig with him in Japan.

"He must have been at the end of the line because there are 20,000 other cats who would give (anything) to play with him," he says. "I'll be forever grateful he called."

Gravatt talks about much of his past with his head turned, as if addressing an invisible presence in the room. When he talks about his life now, he looks his company in the eye. He's moving back to Philadelphia by this summer -- "I milked this pond dry," he says of the Twin Cities -- and is hungry to record.

"The only time I feel I know what I'm doing is when I'm playing the drums. Every other decision in my life, I agonize over," he says. "I came into this world at 3 1/2 pounds. I'm just a sand-and-grit kind of person, and I've been able to weather anything that's come in the world. But I'm basically homesick. Maybe I'm an elephant getting ready to croak -- they always go off to die alone."