The purpose of this thesis was to study two legendary jazz drummers Elvin Jones´ and Roy Haynes´ personal characteristics of their playing style. The purpose of this thesis is to give also educational information to students and their teachers in the basic examination level in jazz drumming. In this thesis I also give some backround information of these two drummers and their history. The reason why I chose particularly these two drummers, Elvin Jones and Roy Haynes, was my personal interests towards these drummers and the fact that they both lived in the same centuries. Because they were born in the same century, they played partly with the same musicians but inspite of that they both created their own personal manners in their playing. They both gave a huge effect on the development of jazz music.

The research questions in this thesis were: 1) What kind of rhythms Elvin Jones and Roy Haynes uses and how they are in relation to the structure. 2) How they use the hi-hat and comp cymbal? The working methods in this thesis are seven transcriptions from six different compact discs. Based on the transcriptions that I have made, I demonstrate the results that I found.

As the main results, I found the following characteristics of Elvin Jones´ and Roy Haynes´ drumming. Elvin Jones playing consists of the elements of legato, dynamic and roundly softness. Elvin also marks the pulse with the whole drum set. Elvin Jones´ phrasing of comp cymbal differs from traditional and he uses a lot of phrases that goes over bar lines. For Roy Haynes playing style, it is usual that he doesn´t use accents on his cymbal line. From the sixtieth century Roy Haynes started to use a more broken kind of time cymbal line. For Roy Haynes it is also typical that he plays the hi-hat with an untraditional way. In his solos there attends melody and the use of unisonos and breaks.