| Jazz |
Steve Houghton’s “Small Victories”: Finding Power in Restraint.
A veteran drummer and educator turns reflection into rhythm, and makes quiet swing again.
In a world where jazz drumming too often equates brilliance with volume, Steve Houghton has built a career on the opposite principle. For more than four decades, he has approached rhythm as an act of thought, a kind of musical mindfulness that prizes clarity over showmanship, reflection over flash.
Search his name online, and the first things you’ll find are his long teaching career, his respected drumming manuals, and an imposing list of recordings. But those entries don’t quite capture the essence of the man. Houghton isn’t simply a prolific artist; he’s an interpreter, one of those rare musicians who can make any ensemble sound more itself.
A Discography That Whispers, Then Resonates
His résumé reads like a quiet encyclopedia of modern jazz: AHA Trio – Brother to Brother, Steve Houghton Trio – Beautiful Friendship, Driftin’: AHA Trio Plus One, The AHA! Quintet – Freespace, The Manne We Love: Gershwin Revisited, John Williams Hits for big band and quintet, Live @ The Senator – Steve Houghton Quintet, Windsong, Remembrances, and his Signature Series. Together they form more than a hundred recordings, a career-long dialogue between invention and restraint.
A classically trained percussionist, Houghton has also appeared with the Boston Pops, the Philadelphia Pops, the U.S. Army Band, and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, ensembles where precision isn’t optional. That background informs his approach to jazz: every tone is shaped, every rhythm considered. He doesn’t play the drums so much as design with them.
A Band That Listens
On his latest project, Houghton’s thoughtfulness finds a natural counterpart in pianist Steve Allee, a longtime collaborator whose harmonic palette gives the album its emotional center. Together, they lead a group that moves with a quiet assurance, confident enough to underplay.
Nothing feels hurried or ornamental. Each track unfolds with an inner logic that reflects Houghton’s meticulous ear. The music never forces its way forward; it breathes. On “Waltz for Bill,” Lyle Mays’s tender tribute to Bill Evans, Houghton’s brushwork and cymbal phrasing do what the best drummers know how to do, they listen as much as they play.
“My small victories began in sixth-grade band, my first concert, my first award… surviving the pandemic and returning to music. These moments have been the pillars of my life.”, Steve Houghton, from his biography
A Teacher’s Mind, a Musician’s Heart
Now retired from academia, Houghton reflects on his journey with a humility that feels almost rare in jazz. In his online biography, he writes about the idea of “small victories”, the incremental triumphs that mark both a teaching career and a musical life. His list includes early school performances, collaborations with Woody Herman, Freddie Hubbard, and John Williams, and the simple act of returning to music after the pandemic.
That phrase, small victories, feels like the key to understanding his art. Every piece on the new album seems to embody that ethos, patient, precise, deeply felt. There’s a sense that Houghton has arrived at a kind of equilibrium, where intellect and instinct merge.
The Beauty of Measured Motion
This is not, by any stretch, a showy record. There are no extended solos designed to impress, no rhythmic pyrotechnics. Instead, Houghton’s group offers a subtler pleasure: the pleasure of intention. The more you listen, the more you hear, the understated dialogues between drums and piano, the deliberate pauses that say as much as the notes.
It’s jazz for grown-ups, you might say, music that trusts its listeners to meet it halfway. Beneath the elegance lies something enduring: a reminder that jazz, at its most honest, is not about speed or spectacle but about empathy.
After two decades in the classroom, Houghton sounds less like a professor and more like a philosopher of rhythm, a man for whom playing and thinking have become the same act. His “small victories” have turned into something larger: a body of work that values listening as much as leading.
And in that balance, the Steve Houghton Group finds its quiet power. Because sometimes, in jazz as in life, grace, even when whispered, still swings.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, October 13th 2025
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Musicians :
Steve Houghton – Drums
Larry Koonse – Guitar
Rusty Burge – Vibraphone
Steve Allee – Piano and Fender Rhodes
Jeremy Allen – Double Bass and Bass Guitar
Erin Benedict – Voice
Track Listing :
And Then Some
Faraway
Waltz For Bill
Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing
Make Someone Happy
Blue Comedy
Peau Douce
Fictionary
Lawns
Recorded, Mixed, and Mastered by Jake Belser at Primary Sound, Bloomington, IN