Chick Webb
Diagnosed with Pott's disease — spinal tuberculosis — as a Baltimore child, William "Chick" Webb was told drumming might strengthen his damaged spine; he saved newspaper-selling money for a used drum set and busked on the street. Self-taught, he never learned to read music, working out rhythms by imitating drummers he heard in parades and park bands. At 17 he left for Harlem, and by 1931 his orchestra was the house band at the Savoy Ballroom, where Duke Ellington said Webb "painted pictures of dances with his drums," always in communication with the crowd. A teenage singer named Ella Fitzgerald joined in 1935; their 1938 novelty "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" became the band's biggest crossover hit. Webb died the next year at 34, but Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, and Art Blakey all cited him as the drummer who set the standard.
Webb grew up on Baltimore's Pennsylvania Avenue in the 1910s, a few blocks from where Eubie Blake was already famous for the ragtime piano that made Shuffle Along a Broadway sensation. "Baltimore was really a big piano ragtime center," Blake's biographer Stephanie Stein Crease told Jerry Jazz Musician, "and Eubie was in the middle of all of that." A Baltimore Jazz Alliance retrospective records that the young, self-taught drummer had "ears attentive to the ragtime rhythms popularized by fellow Baltimorean Eubie Blake" — and when Webb chased his own break, he followed the same road Blake had already cut, from Pennsylvania Avenue to Harlem.
listen forBlake's 1917 piano-roll recording of "Charleston Rag" rolls on a stride left hand that hits hard against the beat while his right hand spins a syncopated melody over it — the rhythmic tension between the steady stomp and the offbeat accents is the whole trick. Listen for that same push-pull two decades later on "Liza": Webb's drum breaks land just off the downbeat, worrying the beat the way Blake's left hand does, driving dancers rather than merely keeping time. The instrument changed from piano to drum kit; the syncopated argument between beat and accent didn't.