Dom Irrera talks

If you don’t know who Dom Irrera, he’s sort of the Godfather of road comedians— stand up is a punishing trade, and comedians try to get away from it when they can. It’s also a […]

Studio triplet feel

Here’s a set of basic patterns for making a 70s-style triplet groove, or a moderate, triplety, shuffle,, as you hear on songs like Isn’t She Lovely, How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You, […]

Jazz language?

Great blog post by Bill Plake: “The Problem With Studying ‘The Jazz Language’”: The other morning I was giving a first lesson to a jazz guitarist ( a university student) and was struck by something […]

Phil Austin 1941-2015

Very sorry to hear we lost another comedy legend last week: Phil Austin, from the Firesign Theater— an incredible surrealist satire troupe, if you don’t know them; they’re really the American Monty Python. Austin was […]

Ginger Baker

October 2019 update: Mr. Baker has died, and I’ve updated and expanded this post a bit, and put it in past tense. I’m rather critical of him. If that’s not what you want to read about […]

Vindication, thy name is Buzzfeed

SHUT UP, Einstein, there’s a drummer present. We are so smrt: [R]esearchers at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institutet found that drummers who kept a tighter rhythm also scored better on a 60-question intelligence test. This is a […]