Years ago, before I played drums or knew anything about tuning, I saw drummer Kenny Washington and was impressed with his extraordinarily warm yet well-defined sound. It was in West Lafayette, Indiana and he was playing with McCoy Tyner. Washington, I now realize, is one of the premier mainstream jazz drummers of the past twenty years. I was gratified to read, recently, a sentence in Kenny Matheson's book "Giant Steps": "....Kenny Washington relates a story about how he physically destroyed his first juvenile drum-kit in a desperate attempt to capture [Max] Roach's sound." This anecdote helps me understand and reconnect with what I had heard ten years ago..