Badal Roy

Bangladeshi percussionist Badal Roy (born 1945) has worked with many of the leading names in modern jazz since arriving in New York City in 1968. He was born in Cumilla in what was then East Bengal and still (just about) part of the British Empire. He grew up in Pakistan, where his father was a secretary of state. He took tabla lessons from his uncle, but at this point had not settled on music as a career. In fact, at college he was national champion at tennis and ping pong. He studied computer programming and earned a Masters Degree in statistics. As a teenager, he was a fan of Elvis Presley, and saw Duke Ellington in concert on his state department tour of 1963.

In 1968 Roy travelled to New York, intending to pursue a PhD. He found work playing tabla in nightclubs, and also in a restaurant, the Taste of India in Greenwich Village, where he also occasionally jobbed as a busboy. One regular customer would ask to sit in each week on guitar, and one day asked Roy if he’d bring his tabla along to a recording date. The guitarist, he learned, was John McLaughlin, and the album was My Goals Beyond, McLaughlin’s first effective exploration of Indian music on record. Playing flute and saxophone on that album was Dave Liebman, who a few years later would become a major collaborator. Roy recorded with Phaorah Sanders in 1972, and the same year he began to record for Miles Davis in a band that included Sonny Fortune, Lonnie Liston Smith, Al Foster and Carlos Garnett. Soon he was a member of Davis’ touring band and stayed with him for 3 years.

Roy was on Dave Liebman’s first albums for ECM Lookout Farm (1974) and worked with him on several more sessions through the 1970s. He worked with Yoko Ono in 1982 and recorded a collaborative album Asian Journal with Steve Gorn, Mike Richmond and Nana Vasconcelos in 1994. Since the 1980s he has toured and recorded with Jon Hassell, Ornette Coleman, Steve Turre, Michael Wolff and Bill Laswell and many others. His debut album as a bandleader came only in 1997 with One in the Pocket.

Key Recordings:
With John McLaughlin, Dave Liebman
Asian Journal (Nomad 1994)