How Charlie Watts' 'Warm and Tender' Showed His True Jazz Heart

Drummer Charlie Watts spent most of his career locked into the Rolling Stones’ rhythm section, but his 1990 album Warm and Tender is the clearest statement of his private musical life. Recorded with his own jazz quintet—not the big band he sometimes led, but a tighter small group—the album is a set of standards and ballads that sound a world away from “Satisfaction.” Watts handpicked players like saxophonist Courtney Pine and pianist Brian Lemon, and his drumming here is all brushwork and cymbal washes, not the hard backbeat of the Stones.

The title track, “Warm and Tender,” is a lesser-known song from the 1950s, and Watts chose