Dottie Dodgion, one of many only a few high-profile feminine drummers within the male-dominated jazz world of the Fifties and ’60s, died on Sept. 17 in a hospice middle in Pacific Grove, Calif. She was 91.
The trigger was a stroke, stated her daughter and solely speedy survivor, Deborah Dodgion.
Ms. Dodgion, who was recognized for her regular and swinging however unobtrusive strategy to the drums, labored for greater than 60 years with among the greatest names in jazz, together with Benny Goodman, Marian McPartland and Ruby Braff. She additionally led her personal combos. However she not often recorded.
“She didn’t get the publicity that she may need gotten by means of recording due to her gender,” stated Wayne Enstice, who collaborated along with her on her autobiography, “The Woman Swings: Memoirs of a Jazz Drummer (2021). “She wasn’t taken as severely as she ought to have been — not by different musicians, however by folks on the enterprise facet.”
Not like some drummers, Ms. Dodgion was extra involved with retaining the beat than with calling consideration to herself.
“There’s no denying that many drummers love the highlight,” she wrote in her autobiography. “That’s why I generally say I’m not a ‘actual drummer.’”
She not often took solos, she wrote, and when she did solo her strategy “got here from being a singer. I’d hear the melody inside my head so the rhythms I laid down all the time adopted the music type of no matter tune I performed.”
She continued to play till she was 90, along with her personal trio, on Thursday nights at the Inn at Spanish Bay in Pebble Seaside, close to her dwelling in Pacific Grove — a gig that lasted 14 years. After breaking a shoulder in 2019, she sang whereas one other drummer, Andy Weis, crammed in for her, till the coronavirus pressured the lodge to close down quickly.
“She swung onerous — and that meant there was a lesson to be heard in watching her play,” Mr. Weis stated by cellphone. “She knew precisely what tempo would swing the toughest.”
The celebrated jazz drummer Terri Lyne Carrington recalled that she had begun enjoying drums at 7 and first noticed Ms. Dodgion about two years later at a girls’s jazz competition. So far as Ms. Carrington knew on the time, Ms. Dodgion was the one feminine drummer round.
“She all the time had a ravishing time really feel, which is crucial a part of being a drummer,” Ms. Carrington stated in a cellphone interview. “She was by no means the fanciest, trickiest drummer on the earth who dazzled with solos, however she actually captured the essence of being a drummer.”
Dorothy Rosalie Giaimo was born on Sept. 23, 1929, in Brea, Calif. Her father, Charles, was a drummer. Her mom, Ada (Tipton) Giaimo, aspired to be a dancer however grew to become a waitress after her husband left the household when Dottie was 2.
Sooner or later, when she was 5, her father stopped by her grandparents’ home in Los Angeles, the place she was dwelling, and, as she stated, “kidnapped” her, taking her on the highway for 2 years to the resorts, highway homes and strip joints the place he led a band. Absorbing the sounds and rhythms of her father’s drumming was her introduction to point out enterprise, albeit towards her will. She was 7 when she returned to her mom, who had remarried.
Her stepfather, a rooster farmer, raped Dottie when she was 10; he was convicted and sentenced to twenty years in jail. After she and her mom moved to Berkeley, Calif., Dottie discovered peace in her weekend bus journeys to San Francisco to see her father’s band at a strip membership, Streets of Paris.
“His wonderful time attracted all the most effective strippers,” she wrote.
As a teen, she sang at personal events and weddings, which led to work within the mid-Nineteen Forties with bands led by the jazz guitarist Nick Esposito and the famend bassist Charles Mingus. Singing ultimately gave strategy to drumming, which she picked up by listening to her father, and thru the Fifties she performed in golf equipment in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Nevada. For a time, she was the home drummer at Jimbo’s Bop City in San Francisco.
Assembly the bassist Eugene Wright, who would change into an integral a part of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, had a transformative impact on how she considered her function in a band.
“Eugene coached me on the nuances of enjoying in a rhythm part,” she wrote, “together with the intangible insides on how one can match with the piano and the bass.”
Ms. Dodgion’s first marriage, to Robert Bennett, was annulled; her marriages to Monty Budwig, a bassist, and Jerry Dodgion, a saxophonist, resulted in divorce.
With Mr. Dodgion, who was in Benny Goodman’s band, Ms. Dodgion moved to Manhattan in 1961. On their first day there, the band rehearsed for an engagement at Basin Road East. Ms. Dodgion dropped her husband off; when she returned on the finish of the rehearsal, she was shocked when Goodman, who was searching for a brand new drummer, requested her to take a seat in with the band.
“I believed it was only a jam session,” she informed The New York Instances in 1972. “Benny’d name out a quantity — ‘Gotta Be This or That’ — and I’d begin searching for the music. However he’d say, ‘Don’t open the e book.’ Each tune, it was the identical — ‘Don’t open the e book.’ On the finish of the rehearsal, Benny stated: ‘See you tonight, Jerry. You, too, Dottie.’ That was how I came upon I used to be going to play with the band.”
Ten days into the engagement on the membership, Goodman forgot to introduce her when he name-checked another members of his 10-piece band. When the gang demanded that he announce her title, he relented, and she or he obtained a standing ovation. However as she left the bandstand, she later recalled, Goodman’s supervisor whispered “’Bye” in her ear, indicating that she was being fired for getting extra applause than her boss.
She was not out of labor for lengthy. She rapidly obtained a job with Tony Bennett on the Waldorf-Astoria Resort. Over the subsequent 40 years, she performed with Marian McPartland, Ruby Braff, Zoot Sims, Wild Invoice Davison, Joe Venuti and others.
“She might adapt from swing to bop, to Latin rhythms, all with out calling consideration to herself,” Mr. Enstice stated. “She might slot in with anybody.”
Ms. Dodgion labored with Ms. McPartland in 1964 and once more 13 years later, when Ms. McPartland led an all-female band.
“Dorothy had a pure sense of swing,” Ms. McPartland informed The Sacramento Bee in 1989. “She retains regular time and she or he swings — these are crucial issues for a very good drummer.”
