Jay Rosen (drummer)

At age 10, Rosen became interested in jazz drumming after seeing Tony Williams perform with Sonny Rollins.[1] He took lessons from Tracy Alexander, son of Mousey Alexander (with an occasional lesson from the elder Alexander).[1] Later, he would study briefly with Barry Altschul.[1]

Around age 18, Rosen became a professional musician. He worked at studios, weddings, and cocktail lounges in rock, rhythm and blues, country, jazz, and Brazilian music.[1] His recording career in improvised music began in the mid-1990s, when he recorded Split Personality (GM Records) with Mark Whitecage and Dominic Duval.[1] He began an association with the CIMP label in 1996,[1] and has also recorded for Cadence).[3][4] Todd Jenkins describes Rosen and Duval as the "house rhythm section" for CIMP, given the number of recordings on which they have appeared.[5]^: 231

Since 1998, Rosen has performed with Joe McPhee and Dominic Duval in Trio X.[5]^: 360[6] In 2000, he joined Cosmosomatics, a quartet with saxophonists Sonny Simmons and Michael Marcus and bassist William Parker.[7]^: 114

Rosen describes himself as "a musician who plays percussion" rather than "'just a drummer.'"[1] He uses a set of small cymbals that he approaches "like a string player, or a reed player," and his drum kit includes objects such as a boat propeller and a set of organ pipes that he activates with foot-driven bellows.[1] Although Rosen is associated with free improvisation, he questions whether the music he plays is "free:"

"While 'free music' indicates that you're free to play whatever you want to play and you're not following chord progressions, and there's no time, there's no this, no that...The way I've been playing free music, with my constituents, doesn't really follow those guidelines. When we play, it's very well put together, in actuality. We're not just blowing to blow; there's listening going on, there's concerted effort at construction and organization, at putting things together — at minute levels — that hardly go on in 'free music' anymore."[1]