Drummer Side of Life: Alvin Queen 75

Robi Botos, Dave Young & Alvin Queen - The Honeydripper

As promised, we're back at the appointed hour to rejoinder the Oscar Peterson centennial flood with a musical compatriot of OP's who is exactly 25 years plus one day younger than Oscar, and who also features the always-attractive attribute of being still alive!

Full disclosure: I'm friends with this guy on Facebook, so I better get this right because he might (gasp) see it.

First, some basic biographicals: Born in the Bronx (like both my parents!), he was onstage with Ruth Brown (why have I never covered her on here? Shameful, I am) by age 16 in the mid-1960s. I think he replaced Billy Cobham in Horace Silver's band when BC went full Mahavishnu, but it might have been sooner than that.

I think it was not long after that that he emigrated to Canada, and then to Switzerland, where he established his own label -- Nilva, an anagram for Alvin -- in 1979.

It's there in Switzerland that he resides to this day, and I always see him in whatever airport or hotel when he posts his exploits and travels on FB.

One of the greatest living OG Jazz cats still doing it at the toppermost level on any instrument, he's been on too many records and played with too many of the world's finest musicians to even begin to list them all, or even a fraction of them, here.

I'm trying to think of the first time I ever heard or took notice of Alvin Queen. I wanna say it was way back in the 1980s, when my friend was obsessed with Charles Tolliver and those 1970s Music, Inc. records on Strata East, and insisted I come along for the ride. It didn't take much further prompting for me to hop in.

Something I truly dig about the rock solid, impeccably conceived and executed drumming of Alvin Queen is the fact that whenever I've come across a picture of him, or seen him on video, anchoring the backline so ably for so many Hall of Fame luminaries, he is almost always smiling the kind of smile that says someone is doing exactly what they want to do in life.

I guess that's one reason why the forces of depredation and evil tried to arbitrarily exile him that time, eh? Maybe after you-know-whore -- there, I said it -- gets done renaming The Kennedy Center for Hulk Hogan, he can get after making sure the unprecedented, knee-shaking terrorist threat posed by The Art Ensemble Of Chicago is taken care of. Oh, what am I saying? He probably thinks Roscoe Mitchell was in The Central Park 5.

Anyway this has precisely naught to do with President Dirty Diaper, and everything to do with the late, extremely great Oscar Peterson, because Alvin Queen -- I almost named this post "The Finest In Swiss Timekeeping," but thought it was too long for the header lol -- was in fact OP's last drummer. And since Oscar Peterson's passing in 2007, he has been somewhat of a keeper of the OP flame, helping organize and participating in several tremendous tribute projects.

One of which took place in 2013, when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation summoned three superheavyweights associated with Jazz in Canada to come to Montreal to recreate one of OP's most treasured and influential LPs, 1962's Night Train.

There's a pretty fabbo FM capture of this event -- with an announcer talking over the music too often -- that circulates in Bootworld, but after I whipped that version into presentable formation, I discovered that it was missing a whole bunch of the tunes and that the CBC site had it as a stream, complete, and with all the platter and none of the chatter.

This looked no lossier than the shorter iteration of it, so I integrated the salient CBC segments into the longer version and made sure no one is yakking over the songs whatsoever. You even get to hear OP's wife Kelly talk about how he came, at the instigation of Norman Granz, to write the epic Hymn to Freedom that closes the album and this concert.

Robi Botos/Dave Young/Alvin Queen

50 Years On the Night Train

A Tribute to Oscar Peterson's "Night Train"

Victoria Hall

Montreal, Canada

2.27.2013

01 CBC-FM intro

02 C-Jam Blues

03 Night Train

04 Georgia On My Mind

05 Bags' Groove

06 Moten Swing

07 Easy Does It

08 The Honeydripper

09 Things Ain't What They Used to Be

10 I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)

11 Band Call

12 Hymn to Freedom

13 CBC-FM outro

14 CBC talk: Kelly Peterson on "Hymn to Freedom"

Total time: 1:18:39

Robi Botos - piano

Dave Young - bass

Alvin Queen - drums

224/48k audio streamed from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation site @ cbc.ca

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited, assembled & slightly remastered by EN, August 2025

CBC segments are inserted from stevemtl's digital capture of a 2020 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation analog FM rebroadcast

demuxed for continuity & edited by EN, August 2025
401 MB FLAC/direct link

This performance is just 97 kinds of exquisite, so I hope my little representation of it does the thing justice. Because all three of the dudes play their everloving asses clean off as they more than do justice to the sacred OP texts they've come to the MTL to radio-render.

I shall return in a week with more pianos and things, but I wanted to celebrate and honor the centennial of Oscar Peterson -- and the 75th birthday of the incredible (not a drum machine) Alvin Queen today -- with some posts and shows worthy of such beautiful Maestros of our epoch.--J.