Drummer who brought an irresistible melting pot of styles to hits by Marvin Gaye, Gloria Gaynor and the Jackson 5
In R&B, soul, funk, disco and other forms of African-American popular music, no performer is more valuable than the drummer who can find “the pocket”: the name given by musicians to that elusive place where the rhythm propelling a song is both profound and irresistible. James Gadson, who has died aged 86, seemed to live his entire working life deep in that pocket, giving momentum to such 1970s hits as Bill Withers’ Lean on Me, Marvin Gaye’s I Want You, Diana Ross’s Love Hangover, the Jackson 5’s Dancing Machine, Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, Smokey Robinson’s Cruisin’, Peaches & Herb’s Reunited and many more in future decades during his career in the recording studios of Los Angeles.
Other artists in related fields also made grateful use of his gifts. He played on Boz Scaggs’ Slow Dancer (1974) and Elkie Brooks’s Live and Learn (1979), Leonard Cohen’s The Future (1992) and, in this century, Rickie Lee Jones’s The Evening of My Best Day, Paul McCartney’s Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, Lana Del Rey’s Paradise, and several albums by Beck, among others.
Gadson came up in an era when every major American city had an elite group of drummers who were on first call for local recording sessions. The busy studios of LA were home to Earl Palmer and Hal Blaine, followed by Jim Keltner, Jim Gordon, Paul Humphrey, Ed Greene and Gadson, the one whose work would later be regularly sampled by artists of the hip-hop and breakbeat generations, including NWA and Kendrick Lamar.
