Nasheet Waits is second-generation jazz royalty. His father was percussionist Freddie Waits, who was a studio drummer for Motown Records before making his name in the jazz world. The elder Waits played on records by a stunning array of artists including McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard, Andrew Hill, and Bill Dixon, among others, and was a founding member of Max Roach’s pioneering all-percussion ensemble M’Boom.

The Waits family lived in Westbeth Artists Housing, an artists’ community on the edge of Greenwich Village that opened in 1970 and also includes studio space and various arts institutions including the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, the avant-garde performance space the Kitchen, the Westbeth Gallery, and more. Nasheet and his brother Shareef were raised around artists of all types, but he was particularly drawn into the community of jazz drummers.

“I never even knew that these people, including my father and all the people that he was working with were like, you know, master musicians, geniuses, and innovators,” he told me recently, over Zoom from Switzerland. “I mean, they were my father’s friends, almost like family… Max Roach was like a godfather to me. I mean, I didn’t really understand the gravity of having the ability to reach out to him and him answer… and bring me into his circle until I was much older.”

Waits’ mother Hakima died when he was 13; he was sent to boarding school and from there attended Morehouse College, studying history and psychology. But he had to return to New York when his father died suddenly in 1989; he and Shareef continued to live at Westbeth, with support from Roach, his godfather Dr. Fred King, and drummer Michael Carvin, who was also his teacher at Long Island University.

“Anytime, I could call those incredible men and they were there for me and my brother in a lot of ways. Not just musically. So those three people meant a lot to me, and I had a lot of other people that were very kind and very generous and imparted a lot of information to me: Jack DeJohnette and Billy Hart were really close friends of my father’s as well. And they were very kind and continue to be very, very helpful and stay in touch, you know, like uncles in the music and I don’t take that for granted.”

Waits has been performing professionally since the 1990s. He got an early break working with saxophonist Antonio Hart, but from the beginning, he’s been an adventurous player up for anything; he can be heard on two tracks from avant-garde Japanese vocalist UA’s 1998 album Ametora, for example. Toward the turn of the century, he made a few crucial connections with pianist Jason Moran, vibraphonist Stefon Harris, and bassist Tarus Mateen.

“I first met Jason when he was a student at Manhattan School of Music,” he recalled. “He was rooming with Stefon Harris, and Tarus Mateen and myself had started — we had a connection, and we reconnected through Marc Cary. And Stefon hired Tarus, I believe…So Jason, Tarus and myself played with Stefon for a few gigs and then there was a band called New Directions that was, like, a contrivance of Blue Note records, almost like one of those young lion-ish type things where Greg [Osby] was like the older mentor of the group.”

The New Directions band, which also included saxophonist Mark Shim, made an album and spent several months touring in the US, and gradually the bond between Moran, Mateen, and Waits grew tight enough that the pianist decided to make it official, dubbing the group the Bandwagon. They first appeared on his 2000 album Facing Left and have been together ever since. Their collective musical language is not that of a typical piano trio, which makes it difficult for other players to find a way in. Waits says, “As a rhythm section, nobody was really comfortable with us. So we had to kind of find our own way and also work some things out amongst ourselves.”

Still, in 2001, they made an amazing and still revelatory record, Black Stars, with one very special guest: saxophonist and flutist Sam Rivers, who had worked with Waits’ father (and whose granddaughters had been in junior high school band with him). “Sam was, you know, he wasn’t that familiar with Tarus and myself,” he recalls. “I think he knew Jason a little bit better, musically speaking, but he was kind of trying to wait and see if we were going to be able to bring and sustain the energy that he always brings or sustains…so it was really like a confirmation from a master. Like, you’re on the right path; keep doing what you’re doing. You know, I’m supporting you by being here, because if he didn’t think this shit was happening, he wouldn’t have cosigned it. He would be like, y’all aren’t ready. But the fact that we had the courage to jump in there and some intuition and some wherewithal to even be in the same room with him was, you know, it gave you some confidence.”

I saw that band play at Iridium, and more than 20 years later, I’m still struck by the way they were able to challenge each other, rising to and staying on the same level as a ferocious improviser and thinker like Rivers, and Waits’ approach to drumming is key to that. As Moran said in a Jazziz profile of Waits in 2017, “The way Nasheet’s sensibility moves on the kit is unsettling. He can make the ground that might be lush soil turn into ice very fast. You think you have your footing, then all of a sudden it becomes very slippery, and that next step you take, all of a sudden you’re sliding… Any bandleader who calls Nasheet is not looking for anything light. They want to feel the fire underneath them.”

One player who definitely wanted to feel the fire underneath himself was legendary German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, and he and Waits worked together off and on for several years, sometimes joined by bassist Eric Revis. “I was working at the Berlin Jazz Festival…with Andrew Hill and Jason, played a concert with Andrew earlier in the evening, and then we played with Jason in a club, I think, later that night,” Waits recalls. “And John Corbett, who was the curator of the Berlin Jazz Festival that year… was like, ‘Oh, man, I was just listening to you play with Jason. I think it would be great if you and Brötzmann did some duos, what do you think about that?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, that sounds great.’ Now, mind you, I had never really listened to Peter. I didn’t know his music at that point, but I was like, yeah, that sounds cool.”

A few months later, Corbett booked the Brötzmann/Waits duo in Chicago and the drummer flew out. “I get to the club, and you know, he gets there and he’s, like, really very quiet. He’s very pleasant, you know, but like, real quiet. And I was like, ‘Well, what are we going to play?’ He said, ‘Well, we just do our best, you know?’ And I’m like, ‘What does that mean?’“

What it meant, as was typical for Brötzmann, was that he was going to start from zero and just not stop. “The energy and the vibration that was coming… I’m trying to match it, the intensity. For about seven minutes I was like, dripping in sweat. I felt like I was gonna pass out [and] I looked over at him and he looked like he had just started. He was gonna blow the house down. And we had two sets, you know? That was a quick lesson in energy distribution, you know, and pacing yourself. I paralleled working with him to, like, running the 400. Like, you can’t do an all-out sprint, but it’s like 9/10 of a sprint, but you still have to be mindful of your energy, because if you go off, you’re not going to be able to finish the race.”

In addition to the Bandwagon, Waits is one-third of another fascinating trio: Tarbaby, a collective he formed with Revis and pianist Orrin Evans in the late 2000s. They released their eponymous debut on Evans’ Imani label in 2009. It featured guest appearances by tenor saxophonists JD Allen and Stacy Dillard, and subsequent albums on Posi-Tone, RogueArt, and Clean Feed have brought alto saxophonist Oliver Lake; trumpeters Ambrose Akinmusire, Josh Lawrence, and Nicholas Payton; and guitarist Marc Ducret to the party. The group performs a wide range of music, from originals by each member to tunes by Sam Rivers, Andrew Hill, Fats Waller, and Oliver Lake. They’ve also recorded versions of Prince’s “Sometimes It Snows In April” and the Bad Brains’ “Sailin’ On.”

Waits describes Tarbaby as “like a home for us outside of our other homes…we had so much fun just hanging out with each other and having a good time and talking about what we gravitated toward that it became kind of like a laboratory for us to bring music in to develop in different ways. It became like a way for us to be able to workshop stuff that we were thinking about, tunes that we had written, ideas that we had, and it was a great place for us to be able to kind of come in, congregate and discuss and execute these different ideas.”

After nearly a decade between releases, Tarbaby released its fifth album, Dance Of The Evil Toys, in 2022, and now they’re back with You Think This America, one of two records Waits is putting out through photographer Jimmy Katz’s Giant Step Arts organization. It’s their first to not feature any guests, just live recordings of the trio at the Ida K. Lang Recital Hall on the campus of New York’s Hunter College. Waits describes that shift in approach as “something that we kind of wanted to do consciously. Like, most of the things that we had done were always augmented with other people, where this is an opportunity to just showcase the trio and be like, okay, this is what’s behind all the other stuff, that’s supporting all the other stuff. In the same spirit, though.”

Waits’ other new album, New York Love Letter (Bitter Sweet), is only his third under his own name. It features saxophonist Mark Turner, vibraphonist Steve Nelson, and bassist Rashaan Carter, and it grew out of a series of live performances at the site of Seneca Village, a Black settlement that was torn down in 1857 under eminent domain, in order to make room for Central Park. The band represents three different artistic generations coming together: Waits is 53, Turner 58, but Carter is just 38, and Nelson is 69. But it was the vibraphonist who was key to the whole project, according to Waits. “The times when I have heard him, what he offered was always really striking and always seemed like the baddest stuff that was created during the set. I’d be like, Steve Nelson tore the house down!”

The album includes nods to two of Waits’ key creative partners; the group performs Jason Moran’s “Snake Stance” and Andrew Hill’s “Snake Hip Waltz.” Those are followed by two Waits compositions, “Moon Child” and “The Hard Way AW,” and the record ends with versions of two lesser-known John Coltrane pieces: “Central Park West” and “Liberia,” both from the 1963 album Coltrane’s Sound.

“When we were doing those concerts out in the park, we used to start with ‘Central Park West,’ because Seneca Village is on Central Park West,” Waits explains. “So it kind of seemed like a natural. And it’s such a beautiful song, very direct, and playing outdoors it had a way of kind of, especially during that time of the pandemic…people were always saying, this is the first live music I’ve heard in nine months, because nothing was happening indoors. So it was an opportunity to welcome everybody into the concert. And ‘Liberia’ was just another bad tune that you don’t really — I haven’t heard many people play that song, actually. Generally, that’s probably one of the rules that we follow [in Tarbaby] was like, we don’t really use overused material. You probably won’t hear us play ‘On Green Dolphin Street’ or something. Even though I like ‘On Green Dolphin Street’ and ‘Stablemates.’ But you probably won’t hear us address that. We kind of have a mission to highlight and expose, you know, the Sam Rivers and Andrew Hills and Elmo Hopes of the world, because not everybody’s heard those people and they’ve got an incredible catalog.”

Nasheet Waits doesn’t seem to like the term “jazz”; several times during our conversation, he described it as inadequate to what his father, Max Roach, and others did. But he’s become one of the most interesting and exciting drummers of the last 20 years or more, and it’s great to see him stepping into the spotlight as a leader.

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