NEW YORK — The B.O.N.E. Squad is the kind of jazz band that makes your knees quiver and feet convulse. Hip-hop jazz they call it, filled with funk and groove and soul. To some in New York, the B.O.N.E. Squad is a local institution, with a standing gig as the opening act for a theater in the Bronx.

But on this January night, the B.O.N.E. Squad is in a packed Manhattan music hall called The Cutting Room to play songs from its latest album with its newest member: a tall, lean 77-year-old Olympic legend who is standing behind a set of bongo and conga drums. Stix Bones, the band’s leader and main drummer, introduces him.

“The man himself,” he yells into a microphone. “Bob Beamon!”

And Beamon, who for nearly six decades has held the Olympic long jump record, starts slapping his palms across the congas. Bop-a-bop-a-bop. The beat builds fast, until it feels as though the whole room is filled with the sound of Bob Beamon playing congas. People in the crowd start to shout.

Beamon peers at them through round glasses that appear to change color in the light and look almost like a pair of Olympic rings. A small smile slides across his lips. Watching him, it would be impossible to imagine that less than a year earlier he could barely play, that he had never been trained and had to relearn many of the basics. Getting to this night, with this band, took months of agonizing work.

The B.O.N.E. Squad’s album cover is a black-and-white photograph of a brick apartment building that looks much like the 40 Projects in South Jamaica, Queens, where Beamon grew up. It bears two names: Stix Bones and Bob Beamon.

“I’m big time now,” Beamon said.

The album is called “Olimpik Soul.” The first song — an exaltation of saxophone, bass and drums — is called “Leap.”

More than just a record

Once, he flew across the sky. Footage from that afternoon in Mexico City in 1968 shows Beamon hurtling into the air, legs pedaling as if running up invisible stairs until, at the peak of his ascent, they flatten like wings and he inexplicably keeps soaring. He’s above the ground so long it almost appears the film has skipped.

When Olympic officials finally measured his jump, it was almost two feet beyond the previous record. His distance, 8.90 meters (29 feet 2½ inches), flashed on the scoreboard and has glowed ever since as perhaps the Olympics’ most unbreakable record. It has been surpassed just twice in non-Olympic competition — on the same 1991 night by Americans Michael Powell and Carl Lewis.

Another Olympics is just weeks away with no indication Beamon’s mark will be broken. For 56 years, he has lived as that record, even writing “29 2½ 1968,” when signing his name. The record has put him in the National Track and Field Hall of Fame and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Hall of Fame. It has allowed him to see places and meet people he never could have imagined. Muhammad Ali was a close friend. Arnold Schwarzenegger still is. This summer, he will play drums in Paris during the Olympics with famous French trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf.

Several online dictionaries have a word for his jump: “Beamonesque.” Defined by Wiktionary, it means “spectacular, remarkable.”

“I never had a library card, and I have my name in the dictionary,” he often tells people.

But Beamon didn’t want his life to just be a record. Now, mostly retired from years of work with youth programs and mentoring as well as his own companies, he couldn’t imagine sitting around the living room of the house not far from the ocean in Myrtle Beach, S.C., where he and wife Rhonda have lived for the past three years. His hair is gone and he walks with a bit of a lurch at times, but he seems to be in perpetual motion. Friends say he acts more like a man in his 40s.

“I’m going to be so busy I won’t have time for my own funeral” is another thing he likes to say.

Drumming was always his passion, even before he discovered track and field. He figures he has 6,000 jazz records, many of which he keeps stored on metal bookshelves in a second-floor alcove that is both his study and his recording studio.

“All the time that I was doing the sports. I was like, ‘Wow, what would it have been like if I continued to play drums and to be around great musicians?’” he said four months after The Cutting Room show. “That haunted me for years and years and years after the Olympics and so forth.”

Early last year, Beamon asked his younger cousin Al Brisbane, the B.O.N.E. Squad’s bassist, if he could join the band. That led to more conversations, an underwhelming tryout and months of excruciating practice in his second-floor studio that left Beamon’s hands aching before they finally made “Olimpik Soul.”

“Bob is a guy who is saying, ‘I’m not done living yet,’” says Abiodun Oyewole, a childhood friend who is also a founding member of the influental rap group The Last Poets and performs a spoken-word song on “Olimpik Soul.” “Life begins at 70 for some people.”

One giant leap into history

Beamon remembers everything about Oct. 18, 1968. He remembers the midday heat. He remembers the humidity. He remembers the persistent threat of rain, which came every afternoon despite the Olympics having been moved to fall because the summer months in Mexico City were too wet.

He remembers wanting to take his first-round jump before the rain. He was the fourth person in the first rotation of what would be six rounds. The first three had faulted on their leaps, stepping over the jump line. He worried about doing the same. He had faulted twice in that morning’s qualification round and had to take off extra far behind the line to be sure he qualified for the final.

He remembers feeling nothing extraordinary about his sprint down the runway. The jump itself didn’t seem special to him. He remembers the first thing he did after landing was to see if he had faulted. The jump official held a white flag. The jump was clean. He remembers feeling relieved.

He remembers the judges standing around the camera-like device that had been installed on a railing beside the jumping pit to measure each leap. He remembers someone telling him the device couldn’t be used because he had jumped beyond the end of the railing. That’s when he realized that maybe his jump was longer than he thought.

The judges asked for a tape measure, but no one had one. Beamon remembers standing and waiting while one was retrieved. He wondered if he had broken the world record, which was 8.35 meters (27 feet 4¾ inches). He thought he might have beaten it by two or three inches. His stomach twisted. Minutes went by; five, 10, 15. The start of the 400-meter final was held up. He kept standing. Time, it seemed, stopped.

Finally, someone brought a tape measure. Beamon remembers watching the officials tugging the tape, stretching it out, pinning it to the spot where he had landed in the sand. He remembers seeing 8.90 appear on the scoreboard. He remembers thinking it was a result in the women’s discus, which had been going on at the same time. He wondered when they were going to post his jump. Then people started coming toward him. He heard a roar from the crowd. He saw fans spilling down from the stands. Somebody told him the 8.90 was for him. He had broken the world record by almost two feet.

He remembers his legs going weak. He remembers falling to the ground. He remembers being on his knees. He remembers being so overwhelmed that all he could do was cry.

Then the rain came, drenching history. He remembers feeling sorry for the other competitors because most long jumpers don’t like bad weather. He remembers taking his second-round jump, which was just a mere 8.09 meters, before skipping the final four rounds. There was no point. For the next 13 Summer Olympics, no one was coming close to 8.90.

Finding his way out of an at-risk youth

Beamon knows exactly the moment he fell in love with drumming. He was 9 years old and sitting, on a warm Saturday morning, in his grandmother’s apartment, where he lived. The window was open, and he could hear a drumbeat coming from outside.

“The sound was so awesome that I can hear every stick hitting and every drum hitting,” he said. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t know what they’re playing on, but I want to get a drum set and start playing that kind of music.’”

Beamon’s childhood at the 40 Projects had not been good. His mother died when he was a baby. His father was in and out of his life. His grandmother raised him. He struggled to know whom to trust. His refuge was the basketball courts outside, where Oyewole would pick him first in games because even then he jumped higher than everyone else. He couldn’t read or write. He got in trouble at school. He was forced to hang around with a gang.

He looked at his life and the world around him and knew something had to change.

“I was a bad boy,” he says. Heroin was making its way into the city, and he was attending funerals for friends dead after overdoses.

“We had conversations about what we want to do when we grow up and you’re actually looking at this person in a coffin,” he said. “And he’s not moving; he’s not talking; and they’re getting ready to close up this box on him and they’re going to put him in the ground so he’s never going to come out of the ground.

“And I was like: ‘Bob, are you trying to be there with them? Are you trying to do the same thing?’ And I said, ‘Hell, no.’ I knew I had to get out of that coma I was in.”

At 14, he was sent to an alternative school in Manhattan. He saw it as a chance to start fresh. He learned to read by looking at the sports pages. He found friends who liked drums, too. He found coaches who introduced him to track and field. He found he could jump really far.

The next year, he took a subway to New York’s Junior Olympics, begged one of the other competitors to loan him their spikes, took one turn in the long jump and broke the Junior Olympics record. His picture was in the New York Mirror. Soon he was off to high school and then college at North Carolina A&T and then the University of Texas El Paso and the Mexico City Olympics.

A beat he couldn’t resist

At first, being the man who jumped 8.90 meters wasn’t much easier than growing up in the 40 Projects. His track scholarship at UTEP had been pulled before the Olympics when he refused to compete in a meet against BYU following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. There was no professional track and field at the time. He didn’t have many endorsements. He felt used and unsure. He was drafted by the Phoenix Suns but never played. He got his degree from Adelphi University in New York, worked for a time in banking, never really tried for another Olympics and stumbled through jobs, all while appearing on occasional Olympic telecasts and “Superstars” episodes.

“Do you know who you are, Bob?” Basketball Hall of Famer Julius Erving asked him in 1984.

In his 2000 memoir, “The Man Who Could Fly,” Beamon writes that he really didn’t. He had one of the most famous names in sports, yet it didn’t feel special. He smoked cigarettes and ate too much. Eventually he pulled himself together, lost weight and found a career in the Miami area working with kids’ programs, then started his own businesses. He became, as Dr. J had told him, Bob Beamon. He designed his own line of Olympic ties and scarves.

But he missed playing the drums. Once while living in San Diego a few years after the Olympics, he dragged his drums to a local jazz club and sat in with the musicians. For a night, he played like a real drummer, just as he had dreamed. But he was too busy to keep going to the club, and the idea of drumming again stagnated.

When Brisbane first approached the B.O.N.E. Squad about Beamon early last year, Stix wasn’t completely surprised. He knew Beamon. They had met at some of Brisbane’s family functions, and Beamon had said he played drums. He heard Beamon was once a good athlete, but that was about it.

“He was just Al’s cousin who had been in the Olympics,” he says.

Stix wasn’t really adding musicians to the band, but Beamon was such a nice guy and Brisbane was so enthusiastic about the idea that Stix agreed to try. In the spring of 2023, the band had a session at a club on the west side of Manhattan called Funkadelic. Beamon flew up from Myrtle Beach to join them.

“He wasn’t very good,” Stix said.

Beamon couldn’t keep up; his timing was off. At the end, he remembers Oyewole saying: “If you’re going to be in this business, you better get your act together. You better get your hands together.”

That night, Stix drove Beamon back to his hotel. In the car, Beamon was disconsolate. Oyewole’s words played in his head: You better get your hands together. He knew Oyewole was right, but the coldness of his delivery felt like a challenge. Get his hands together? Oh, he was going to get his hands together, all right.

“Stix, will you help me?” he said.

Something in Beamon’s tone led Stix to agree. A few days later, they got started with a Zoom session — Stix in the studio he built at his home in Queens, not far from South Jamaica and the 40 Projects, and Bob in the loft in Myrtle Beach.

Stix showed Beamon how to use a metronome to measure beats. He scheduled three Zoom sessions per week, each from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., prerecording his own drum work and making Beamon listen on headphones to account for the online lag. Beamon never missed a practice. When they finished, Beamon would spend two more hours on another video call with Robert Thomas Jr., who had been a percussionist in the band Weather Report.

In two months, Beamon went from 50 beats per minute to 150. “It was like being back in my training again, preparing for the Olympics,” he said.

Stix kept thinking of the scenes in “Rocky IV” in which the boxer trains relentlessly in an icy wilderness.

“Now I see how Bob made that jump,” he says.

In early August, Stix brought Beamon with the B.O.N.E. Squad to a festival in Branford, Conn. It was the first time Stix had seen Beamon play in person since the night at the Funkadelic, and he couldn’t believe what he heard. Beamon was smooth, poised and confident. Already Stix had decided the B.O.N.E. Squad’s next album was going to include Beamon. After Branford, he was sure it was the right thing to do.

Stix had been writing music for what would become “Olimpik Soul,” and the band recorded at Stix’s studio, one or two members at a time as Beamon played from the alcove in Myrtle Beach.

They made plans for the album release party at the The Cutting Room and started rehearsing inside clubs. Pressure was building. “I felt that I had to be ready to do something onstage,” Beamon said. They scheduled some shows to prepare. During the first, in a small New Haven, Conn., club, Beamon found himself so transfixed by the band around him that he forgot his solo. As the rest of the band looked over, he sat behind his drums staring into space.

“Um, Bob, do you get it?” he remembers them saying, enunciating each word as if he were too old to understand. “It’s. Time. For. Your. Solo.”

Everyone liked Beamon, even though he was two or three decades older. He told jokes. He made them laugh. He was so earnest. They found he was actually a decent drummer. One day, as the B.O.N.E. Squad was practicing “Leap,” Brisbane realized the rest of the band had never seen Beamon’s jump. He pulled it up on YouTube and noticed that, when you play “Leap” over a video of the jump, the music matched perfectly.

On the night of the album debut, Beamon nervously prowled The Cutting Room’s floor. Afterward, he said it was like Mexico City again.

“You’ve rehearsed with the best,” he kept telling himself. “Now all you have to do is deliver.”

He climbed the stage, adjusted his drums, stepped down, then climbed back up and adjusted his drums again, then stepped down once more. He shook hands with anyone who walked past. He introduced the band members to old friends. He had an old neighbor from Florida meet one of the agents for former New York Yankees center fielder Bernie Williams, a guitarist himself. He made circles around the room.

Then the show started. As they played, Stix kept looking at Beamon, his eyes alive, a smile on his face, at one point turning a baseball cap sideways, shaking his head, his hands slapping the drums in perfect rhythm.

“I never knew how much it meant to Bob until then,” Stix said.

A few weeks after the show, Beamon sold his gold medal, auctioning it through Christie’s. For half a century, he cherished that medal, storing it in a safe-deposit box. But last year he started wondering what would happen to it when he died. He had been thinking about what he could “leave behind as a legacy.” He wants to start a foundation or a trust to help nonprofits that support people in need. By selling the medal, he could fund the foundation.

The medal sold in February for $441,000 after premium fees were added to the winning price. Neither Beamon nor Christie’s will name the person who bought the medal.

“It’s in good hands,” he says while sitting in his Myrtle Beach alcove.

Possession of the medal was never what preserved the memories.

“Guys like you still allow me to keep reliving it,” he says to a visitor in the room.

He thinks more about drumming anyway. “Olimpik Soul” has done well. In mid-February, it was Jazz Week’s 71st-most-played jazz album on radio stations and has been in the 100s through the spring. There has been talk of a Broadway show based on Beamon’s life.

Late one evening, in his Myrtle Beach alcove, Beamon places “Olimpik Soul” on his turntable and turns up the volume. The frantic drums of “Leap” fill the room. He sits behind his congas again and begins pounding, Bob Beamon playing along to Bob Beamon.

With his wall of records behind him, he stares across the room toward a poster that says “Mexico68,” a framed “certificate of recognition” from Mexico City and a black-and-white photo of him on the podium, the now-sold medal around his neck.

“You’ve squeezed all the juice out of life,” Brisbane is constantly telling him.

Beamon nods slowly to the beat. Then the holder of one of the Olympics’ greatest records closes his eyes as he slaps the top of his drums, lost in the music of another kind of record with his name on it.