I've been driven to consider drum solos recently. I'm trying to fill the gaps in my experience with jazz, and those guys, God bless them, go with the idea that everybody solos. Everybody in the band gets a chorus or two. It works better for some instruments than for others.
Any music learner who faces learning how to solo may ask the teacher: what should I do? The usual answer is, "just sing the song with your axe." You can't just fly off into the appropriate scale, that loses the entire musical idea. There's a melody, or melodies, in there, and you should play with them. But what if your axe is a drum kit? Many great drummers stumble over the challenge of the solo. What they fill the space with may last one chorus, and it may be really, really excellent and super-difficult, but was it the song? Where did the melody go?
The drummer in this cut manages to sing the song, with a very slight structural assist from the horns. He sings the hell out of it too. I think that it's about the most successful drum solo that I can recall.
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