4 MB THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2020In the 1960s, Milford Graves became a
groundbreaking drummer in avant-garde
jazz, but intertwined with his career had
been his constant study of music’s impact
on the human heart.
Now Mr. Graves, 78, who lives in Jamaica,
Queens, has become his own subject: He
has amyloid cardiomyopathy, sometimes
called stiff heart syndrome.
Doctors have informed him that the con-
dition, also called cardiac amyloidosis, has
no cure. When he received the diagnosis in
2018, he was told he had six months to live.
Since then, Mr. Graves said, he has come
close to death several times because of fluid
filling his lungs. His legs too weakened to
walk, he remains in a recliner in his living
room with a tube feeding medicine to his
heart and another draining fluid from his
midsection.
But he has hardly surrendered to the ill-
ness. Although he is under the care of a car-
diologist, he is also treating himself with the
alternative techniques he has spent dec-
ades researching.
Since the 1970s, Mr. Graves has studied
the heartbeat as a source of rhythm and has
maintained that recording musicians’ most
prevalent heart rhythms and pitches, and
then incorporating those sounds into their
playing, would help them produce more
personal music.
He also believes that heart problems can
be helped by recording a patient’s un-
healthy heart and musically tweaking it into
a healthier rhythm to use as biofeedback.
In recent months, Mr. Graves has been
listening constantly to his own heart with a
stethoscope and monitoring it with an ultra-
sound device he bought on eBay.
“It turns out, I was studying the heart to
prepare for treating myself,” he said.
His diagnosis has only invigorated his re-
search, musical explorations and creative
output as a visual artist, said Mr. Graves,
whose daily fight against the disease has
become something of a performance art
project.
He said he was rushing to further his re-
search and organize it, so that it could be
continued after his death by his students,
who are fastidiously documenting and
videotaping his daily activity, both for his
archives and for an exhibition in September
at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Phil-
adelphia.
The show’s curator, Mark Christman, vis-
its Mr. Graves and gathers his latest work,
from sculptures to customized drums to
new videos of Mr. Graves playing.
Mr. Graves has no idea how long he will
live — “It could be three days, it could be a
month,” or longer — but he is adamant that
he will be strong enough to play live for the
show, perhaps streamed from his recliner.
Where some might see cruel irony in be-
ing afflicted by heart disease, which he has
studied for 45 years, he sees a challenge.
“It’s like some higher power saying, ‘OK,
buddy, you wanted to study this, here you
go,’ ” he said. “Now the challenge is inside of
me.”
He wonders if he has somehow “internal-
ized” the subject of his study.
“I ask myself, ‘Why did I get something
that, in my research, I’ve been trying to rec-
tify?’ ” he said. “It’s a rare disease with very
little research on it. The experts say there’s
nothing to be done, so I have to look inward
for answers.”
Mr. Graves has long said that a healthy
heart beats with flexible, varying rhythms
that respond to stimuli from the body. The
rhythms, he said, bear similarities to some
traditional Nigerian drumming styles, and
he has fashioned some of his drumming ap-
proaches along these lines.
Because of the abnormal heartbeats
caused by his disease, which stiffens the
heart muscle and can lead to heart failure,
what he hears now in his own heart is the
“sound of survival,” he said.
It sounds less elastic and more plodding
than before the diagnosis, he said, with a
more metronomic regularity that he has
called a rigid, unhealthy quality in a heart-
beat.He is practicing his biofeedback tech-
niques by listening to his heart with a
stethoscope and mimicking the rhythm and
melody by singing and playing on a drum
near his recliner. He also plays recordings
of his own heart’s sounds on the drumhead
with the help of electronic transducers, ef-
fectively turning the drumhead into a
speaker.
That has helped him come up with drum-
ming techniques, including adjustments in
drumhead tensions and new stick styles.
It’s still drum practice, but with higher
stakes.
Mr. Graves has seen a resurgence in pop-
ularity in recent years, with exhibitions of
his art and research, festival performances
and an acclaimed full-length documentary,
“Milford Graves Full Mantis.”
“Instead of going into despair, his re-
sponse was, ‘I’ve been asked to look deeper
at this,’ ” said Jake Meginsky, the film’s co-director and a longtime assistant of Mr.
Graves. “He’s surviving this prognosis, and
through his creative process he’s offering us
a record on what that survival is like.”
Mr. Graves approach is no surprise to
those familiar with his unconventional life
path.
He grew up in the South Jamaica housing
projects and in the 1960s played with such
avant-garde musicians as Cecil Taylor and
Albert Ayler, with whom he performed at
John Coltrane’s funeral in 1967. He turned
down offers from Miles Davis to join Davis’s
band.
In more recent years, he has also collabo-
rated with the rocker Lou Reed, the pianist
Jason Moran and the avant-garde saxo-
phonist John Zorn.
Mr. Graves became a largely self-taught
musician and scientific researcher, delving
into herbal medicine, holistic healing,
acupuncture, martial arts and other disci-
plines.
With only a high school diploma and min-
imal formal medical training, he taught mu-
sic healing and drumming classes at Ben-
nington College in Vermont for nearly 40
years before retiring in 2012.
He developed a martial-arts style mod-
eled after the movements of the praying
mantis and dance traditions from West Afri-
can styles and the Lindy Hop.
“He did pretty much everything on his
own, and it’s very important that his work
continue, so he wants to leave everything in
the right places with the right people,” his
wife, Lois, said. “He knows he has more
work to do and he’s going to get it done.”
Since 1970, Mr. and Ms. Graves have lived
in a home in Queens that he has decorated
with a Gaudíesque mosaic of stones and col-
ored glass. The Graveses have turned the
yard into a lush garden, dense with citrus
trees, herbs and exotic plants. He converted
a free-standing garage into an ornate tem-
ple that was often used as a dojo for martial
arts.
But it is the basement where his heart re-
search has been mainly conducted. The
space is packed with African idols, anatom-
ical models, herbal extracts, African drums
and a hodgepodge of heart-monitoring
equipment displaying intricate electrocar-
diogram readouts.
Here, he said, he has treated students,
neighbors and colleagues, and since 1990
has recorded perhaps 5,000 heartbeats. Mr.
Graves created programs to analyze the
heart’s rhythms and pitches caused by
muscle and valve movement. He found
ways to amplify the more obscure patterns
and complex melody lines in the vibration
frequencies underneath the basic thump-
THUMP heartbeat, and use them for both
musical and medical analysis.
In 2000, he received a Guggenheim grant
to purchase heart-monitoring equipment.
And in 2017, he co-patented technology for
using heart melodies to regenerate stem
cells.
Dr. Baruch Krauss, who teaches pediat-
rics at Harvard Medical School and is an
emergency physician at Boston Children’s
Hospital, said Mr. Graves’s work “has a lot
of potential and possibility” if it were to be
furthered in a clinical setting.
“There’s a lot there to be studied and used
as a basis for further research,” said Dr.
Krauss, who follows Mr. Graves’s work.
“He’s continuously inquisitive and cre-
ative and interested,” he added, “and this
condition really hasn’t slowed him down.”
In his living room on a recent Sunday, one
of Mr. Graves’s students, Peyton Pleninger,
24, helped him set up a device to play heart
sounds and assisted him with making an as-
semblage for the art show.
“I don’t want to leave the planet with
things undone,” Mr. Graves said.MARK CHRISTMANJazz Drummer Turns to an Inner Beat
EDDIE HAUSNER/THE NEW YORK TIMESGEORGE ETHEREDGE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESFrom top: Milford Graves, who
has amyloid cardiomyopathy;
Mr. Graves on drums in 1965;
his home has been a lab for
studying heart sounds.Hearing the ‘sound
of survival’ while
facing a rare disease.Milford Graves’s study of heart
rhythms has led to techniques
that he uses to treat himself.
By COREY KILGANNON