Before you get into the records, you need to understand what made Philly Joe different from the other great drummers of his generation. It wasn't just time — though his time was immaculate — it was personality. You could hear him thinking. He'd drop a little rim shot in a place where nobody expected it, or lay back so far on a phrase that it practically fell off the beat, and yet somehow the whole thing held together. Max Roach was more compositional, Art Blakey was more physical, but Philly Joe had this quality of conversational wit that was all his own.

He grew up in Philadelphia, which at the time was producing a remarkable concentration of jazz talent, and by the early 1950s he'd made his way to New York and started building a reputation on the club circuit. Miles Davis heard him and essentially made him the drummer of choice for the quintet he was assembling. The records they made together — Cookin' (1956), Relaxin' (1956), Workin' (1956), Steamin' (1956) — are about as good as hard bop gets, and Philly Joe is a big reason why. He and Paul Chambers formed one of the tightest rhythm sections of the era, and Red Garland sitting on top of them gave the whole thing a groove that still sounds effortless today.

His relationship with Miles was not always smooth — there were periods where he was let go and rehired, and his struggles with drug addiction cost him time and opportunities throughout his career. But when he was on, nobody played with more confidence. There's a version of "Bye Bye Blackbird" from that period where he barely seems to be doing anything, just brushes and a whisper of bass drum, and yet he's completely in control of the temperature of the whole track. That kind of restraint is actually harder to pull off than the flashy stuff.

After the Miles years, he led his own groups and worked extensively as a sideman with players like Bill Evans, John Coltrane, and Hank Mobley. He spent time in Europe during the late 1960s, living in London for a stretch and working with local musicians, which gave him a second career of sorts away from the New York scene. When he came back to the States he continued working and teaching, and he formed a group called Dameronia in the late 1970s dedicated to performing the music of Tadd Dameron, the underrated composer and arranger he'd worked with earlier in his career.

If you're putting together a playlist to introduce someone to Philly Joe, start with the Miles Quintet records and then go sideways into Hank Mobley's Soul Station (1960), where he sounds absolutely relaxed and authoritative. Then maybe pull up something from the Dameronia recordings to hear what he sounds like as a bandleader with his own agenda. He never changed everything about how drums were played, but he refined and perfected a particular approach to the instrument that made every record he touched sound more alive.