Graves came up in New York in the 1960s, right in the thick of the free jazz explosion, and he was one of the people actually driving it. He played with Albert Ayler, Don Pullen, Pharoah Sanders, and Paul Bley, among others, and what made him stand out even in that crowd of radicals was that he wasn't just playing freely — he was thinking freely. He had a genuine theoretical framework for what he was doing, rooted in his study of African and African American percussive traditions, but also in biology and physics. That combination sounds eccentric until you actually hear him play, and then it makes a strange kind of sense.

The drumming itself is dense and physical. Graves didn't keep time the way most drummers do — there's no steady ride cymbal ticking away in the background to anchor you. Instead, everything is in constant motion: the bass drum, snare, toms, and cymbals all contribute equally to a conversation that has no predetermined destination. It can be disorienting at first, especially if you're used to the drummer serving the soloist. With Graves, everybody is the soloist, including him. You have to let go of waiting for the downbeat.

His duo recordings are some of the best places to start. Meditation Among Us (1966), recorded with Don Pullen), is raw and confrontational — two musicians pushing each other into territory neither could reach alone. [Bäbi (1969), a duo with Andrew Cyrille, is more meditative but no less intense. Both records capture Graves at a moment when free drumming was still new enough that nobody quite knew what the rules were, which meant Graves could invent his own.

Later in life, Graves taught at Bennington College for decades, and by all accounts he was a singular teacher — someone who could connect a student's ear training to their pulse rate and make it feel completely logical. He also continued recording and performing well into his later years, and the 2017 album Milford Graves Full Mantis (2018) reminded everyone that he hadn't softened at all. It's a sprawling, generous record that ranges from solo drumming to electronics to spoken passages, and it sounds like a man who had simply accumulated too much to say to fit it neatly into one format.

The honest thing to say about Milford Graves is that he's an acquired taste, and not everyone will get there. If you need a clear pulse and a recognizable melody to hold onto, his records will frustrate you. But if you're willing to sit with music that demands something back, there's a real reward in it. He wasn't trying to be difficult — he was trying to be precise about something most musicians don't even think to ask about. That's a rare thing.