Tom Rainey

Put the name of Tom Rainey in that big file titled "Drummers Who Deserve as Much Acclaim as the Bandleaders They Play With." And in the case of Rainey, that's saying a lot, because he tends to keep good company on-stage and in the recording studio. He has been the drummer of choice for a range of renowned creative artists from the relatively straight-ahead to the uncompromisingly avant, including Kenny Werner, Jane Ira Bloom, Fred Hersch, Mark Helias, Brad Shepik, Tony Malaby, Angelica Sanchez, Nels Cline, Andrea Parkins, Tim Berne, and David Torn. Rainey's voluminous recording credits and the artistic caliber of the musicians he's supported would easily place him on the A-list of drummers closely identified with the New York City modern creative jazz scene roughly from the late '80s onward, including Gerry Hemingway, Joey Baron, Bobby Previte, John Hollenbeck, Kenny Wollesen, and Jim Black. Rainey is certainly well known in the somewhat rarefied world of the avant-garde jazz cognoscenti, and he might have even wider recognition were he not seemingly content to occupy the drummer's chair in groups "led" by others rather than "lead" sessions of his own. But despite his impressive list of performing and recording credits, Rainey is thus far (up to early 2009 anyway) without a discography that has his own name emblazoned at the top. And he has not "written" much (particularly in the way of conventionally scored pieces), one noteworthy exception being the free jazzish "Safe at Home" on Souvenir by New and Used, a collaborative New York downtown jazz supergroup of sorts that rose and fell in the early to mid-'90s, and another being the warm and fuzzy "Hostility Suite," a trio number featured on Big Satan's Souls Saved Hear in 2004. Another Rainey writing credit, "Poetic...