Jaki Liebezeit, drummer and founding member of pioneering German krautrock group Can, has died. Originally trained as a jazz drummer, Liebezeit teamed up with the other members of Can—themselves classical musicians—to break out of their old disciplines and explore the growing realms of rock, psychedelic, and electronic music in the late ’60s. (Supposedly, Liebezeit provided the backronym for the band’s name, declaring it retroactively stood for “Communism, Anarchism, and Nihilism.”) Liebezeit’s drumming—precise, complex, and almost metronome-like in its dedication to the beat—would help to define and anchor the band’s sound throughout the 1970s, even as it drifted across the realms of disco and ambient as the decade wore on.
Nowhere was Liebezeit’s robotic virtuosity more on display than on “Halleluwah,” from the band’s 1971 double album Tago Mago. While every other aspect of the 20-minute song meanders—Damo Suzuki’s vocals fading in at random intervals, and improvised guitar and keyboard parts wandering across the landscape—Liebezeit’s drums never lapse for even a moment. Even as the song explodes into chaos in its final moments, the drums stay rock solid, speeding up but never dropping the beat. Liebezeit’s take on the song is a rightly celebrated performance that’s been an inspiration to other rock drummers for more than 40 years.