While Wilby Fletcher is gaining a solid reputation for his steady work with such jazz notables as McCoy Tyner, Ron Carter, James Moody and Ahmad Jamal, he is not locked into that single idiom. The 30-year-old drummer is equally proud of his work in the fields of R&B and Top 40, as well as the sensitive support he has provided for singers like Harry Belafonte and Jon Lucien. Make no mistake about it, Wilby is a jazz drummer, and quite an accomplished one at that. He can swing with the best of them. But he can also play in the pocket, as he is currently doing with bassist John Lee’s group Thrust. Or he can rock out, as he does on occasion with a Connecticut-based bluegrass-rock-fusion band called Colonel Bird. Wilby can cover all the bases and do it with authenticity. That’s a quality he first admired in one of […]

June 1985 Issue