Granted, we may have gone overboard in the past… There’s a long blog post called Teaching Lefty Drummers, written by Illinois percussionist, drummer, and teacher Don Skoog, about the importance of handedness in drumming. I’ve […]
Month: April 2016
Why Syncopation is so great
Here’s a question that comes up often, and which I always I feel I have to address every time I have a new student buy Ted Reed’s Progressive Steps To Syncopation: “Whuh— this is just […]
Transcription: Joe Chambers – Granted
Here’s a transcription of some jazz comping with a 3/4-within-4/4 feel, by Joe Chambers. This is from Granted, on Joe Henderson’s album Mode For Joe. It’s sort of a companion to the Elvin Jones Groove […]
Orchestrations of a figure: Groove Elation
Today we’ll do a little survey of ways of orchestrating on the drums a rhythmic figure— the bass line from the tune Groove Elation, by John Scofield. It’s a bright New Orleans-influenced thing, with a […]
Daily best music in the world: Spirit of ’86
Funny how dramatically the zeitgeist can change in a few years. Did you know that fusion was actually a serious thing, for many years? Until Wynton Marsalis hit us with his thing in the mid […]
Jeff Watts on Billy Higgins
This is from Ted Panken’s memorial drummers’ roundtable on Billy Higgins, broadcast on WKCR after Billy Higgins’s death in 2001. Here Jeff Watts talks about what Higgins meant to him: I first began to collect […]
Very occasional quote of the day: Max Roach – how you build a solo
Max Roach by Jean-Michel Basquiat “What makes a piece an art piece is design. Design. If you play any instrument, if you don’t create design…. If the artist doesn’t know how to utilize space and […]
Best books: Odd Meter Calisthenics by Mitchell Peters
Odd Meter Calisthenics for the Snare Drummer by Mitchell Peters – 79 pages I own several books by Mitchell Peters, and though they’re mostly excellent, I approached this one with caution. I was not wild […]
Chaffee linear phrases in 3/4 – 16th notes – 01
I’ve been trying to figure out why I never did that much with Gary Chaffee’s linear system; I find I’m a lot more interested when I vary the rhythm, and when I’m not always starting […]