Mickey Roker was born in Miami in 1932, and at age ten he moved to Philadelphia, where he still resides today. Throughout the 1940s and ’50s, Philadelphia was an epicenter for aspiring musicians, including John Coltrane, Stan Levey, the Heath brothers, and Benny Golson, who wanted to play new forms of improvisational music. As a teenager, Roker received rudimental training in drum and bugle corps, and at seventeen he got a set of drums from his uncle. After serving two years in the army, Roker began working around Philadelphia in a variety of R&B groups. Then, in the ’60s, he became part of the elite stable of studio musicians for Blue Note Records. “Each record date we did was fun, but it was also serious business,” Roker says in MD founder Ron Spagnardi’s book The Great Jazz Drummers. “We’d rehearse for two days first. Engineer Rudy Van Gelder really knew […]

April 2014 Issue