JazzObituary

Jake Hanna obituary

Jazz drummer with a zest for performance

Not many jazz drummers are able to perform equally well in big bands, small groups and with vocalists. Jake Hanna, who has died aged 78, could do all these things, whether working with Woody Herman's powerful orchestra or providing lift and swing for piano trios led by Marian McPartland and Toshiko Akiyoshi or backing singers including Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby.

Hanna zigzagged between orchestral and television jobs, taking in a rich variety of recording and combo work along the way. Never much interested in band-leading himself, he preferred to work as a sideman, responding to offers only when he felt good about the musicians or the surroundings involved. He travelled extensively, visiting Britain frequently with all-star groups and playing at festivals. His final British performance was with the singer Roberta Gambarini's trio at the Brecon jazz festival in 2008.

Hanna was born in Dorchester, a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, and learned to play drums as a child in a marching band. He studied the drummers who appeared with the great touring bands of the day when they played Boston's vaudeville theatres and was well aware of the many talented players in Roxbury, Boston's thriving African-American community. He listened to all the records he could, especially those featuring Jo Jones and Gene Krupa, then the most celebrated drummers in jazz.

By the age of 13, he was a professional. Most bands had vacancies due to the wartime draft, and he kept busy with local groups before branching out, following his military service in Korea, with bands led by Tommy Reed and Ted Weems. He joined Akiyoshi's trio in Boston in 1957 after studying at the Berklee School of Music, and played summer engagements with her for four years at the Hickory House in New York before transferring to McPartland's trio at the same venue. To McPartland he was "a pleasure to watch; there is no wasted motion, yet he does everything with a flourish".

From then on Hanna's career see-sawed between big bands such as those of the trumpeters Maynard Ferguson (visiting Britain in 1967) and Harry James (whom he disliked), and Woody Herman's Swingin' Herd. Herman had been through lean times but Hanna's zest for playing helped to put him back on top, many observers sensing that the Herman orchestra of the early 1960s was among the best he had. The veteran critic George Simon applauded Hanna's emergence: "The way he drives everything is absolutely outstanding."

Hanna went on to play briefly with Duke Ellington and trumpeter Herb Pomeroy, and to work as house drummer for George Wein's Storyville jazz club in Boston, before joining the studio band on Merv Griffin's TV show in New York. Given the opportunity to move with the show when it relocated to Los Angles in 1970, Hanna took the bait, later describing the decision as "the stupidest of my life". He admitted that the band was outstanding even if the talents of those who appeared on the show were often dire, citing one Danny Meehan – who apparently used to whistle while standing on his head – as about the best of a bad lot. Even so, by the time the show folded in 1975, he had been with it for 10 years.

Thereafter Hanna was a free agent, basing himself in Los Angeles. He played often with neo-mainstreamers such as tenor-saxophonist Scott Hamilton and trumpeter Warren Vaché. He also helped Clooney to stretch her range to include jazz and was part of Crosby's touring entourage for the last two years of his life.

Bluff in manner and known for his caustic sense of humour, Hanna loved to tell stories about his fellow musicians, these often becoming more and more outlandish as the night wore on. Randy Sandke, the trumpeter, said of Hanna that "being with him on and off the bandstand was pure joy".

He is survived by his wife, Denisa, whom he married in 1987, and two sisters, Mary and Eleanor.

John Edwin "Jake" Hanna, drummer, born 4 April 1931; died 12 February 2010

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