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Twenty-eight years ago, in March 1994, Mike Melito's fellow Rochesterian, Chuck Mangione, presented a traveling festival in upstate New York. He hired Roy McCurdy to play with Nat Adderley - with whom McCurdy had played on 7 leaders, plus another 19 with Cannonball Adderley, between 1966 and 1979 - in a band that included pianist Don Menza and Rochester guitar stalwart Bob Sneider. He assigned Melito to the other act, James Moody, in a unit including then up-and-coming pianist Danilo Pérez. "Roy and I hit it off right away," Melito says. "I'd obviously been checking him out for years. We played the same set of drums, same cymbals - and I learned a lot about sound. He didn't talk to me about anything. I watched him, and figured out what he was doing that I wasn't. "I believe you're a student forever. I work a lot on my sound, on my hands, on my cymbal beat. My goal has always been to sound as authentic as possible as a player and strive for the same sound as my heroes." Melito offered this self-assessment after relating an encounter some thirty years ago with iconic drum conceptualist Max Roach, whom he'd studied closely since age 12, when Melito heard the 1947 Charlie Parker-Miles Davis-Roach classic "Dewey Square" on "the first jazz record I ever bought on my own." Another Rochester friend, trumpeter John Sneider, had played Roach some tapes featuring Melito, and the maestro noticed. "I met Max and he gave me one of the greatest compliments I've ever received," Melito recounts. "He said, 'You really know how to phrase; the snare drum...' - and gave me a big hug." The 56-year-old master offers a highly personalized refraction of Roach's late 1950s investigations of the possibilities of 3/4 waltz time towards the end of his eighth self-released album, To Swing Is The Thing, a title that efficiently encapsulates the imperatives that have driven him through 40 years as a professional drummer.

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