25. Steve Smith
In the music industry, Steve Smith is most known for his stint with the band Journey, which spanned 1978 until 1985. Readers of Modern Drummer magazine have ranked Smith the No. 1 all-around greatest drummer for the past five years in a row, while Rolling Stone has praised Smith’s drumming on “Don’t Stop Believin” as “as skyscraping as [Steve] Perry’s skyscraping vocals.” Smith has also been nominated for a Grammy Award. That’s pretty good praise, don’t you think? “How many other people could drive a band like that while also playing the hi-hat?” asked American jazz drummer Peter Erskine of Smith.
25. Steve Smith
24. Fred Below
Fred Below was a legendary blues drummer, whose work on the Chuck Berry classic “Johnny B. Goode” will be familiar to fans of the genre. He grew up on the south side of Chicago, “in a world dominated by music,” as he puts it himself. By the age of 14, Below had formed a jazz band with two of his high school pals, Johnny Griffin and Eugene Wright, both of whom went on to achieve success as musicians in their own right after graduating.
Because Below grew up listening to jazz, he had to work hard to get into the blues genre. It was because it was a style of music that I was unfamiliar with – and that wasn’t taught in school –that I found the blues so fascinating. The information below has been recalled. Therefore, it was imperative that I play it in a way that made sense to me.
24. Fred Below