UPDATE: See the page of practice suggestions for more on this! Someone on the internet asked me to explain what Roy Haynes is doing on the Chick Corea tune Windows, from the album Now He […]
Month: August 2020
Syncopation in 5/4 – another format
A little throwaway item, as I continue working out the formatting for my upcoming book, Syncopation in 5/4, to be released God knows when. The problem is how to deal with phrasing the measures 2+3 […]
Transcription: Elvin Jones – Survival Blues
Hey, we haven’t done any Elvin Jones in a while. This is the beginning of Survival Blues, from McCoy Tyner’s album Extensions. I started where McCoy begins the vamp, and did as much as I […]
Three little-known books
For a long time Steve Weiss Music has been my go-to site for unusual and hard to find drum books. Their warehouse must be full of stuff that never quite caught on, that has been […]
Chapin exercises in 5
This is what you do during quarantine when it’s too hot to practice or doing anything else serious: capture jpegs of a well known drum book, open it up in Paint.net, and cut it up […]
Mainstream Records on Bandcamp
Just directing your attention to the Bandcamp site for Mainstream Records— an independent record label in the 60s-70s. Founded by Bob Shad in ’64, folded in ’78. There’s a lot of 70s jazz in a […]
Very occasional quote of the day: you figure it out
“I hired you because of who you are & what you do, so DO it. I’m having a hard enough time playing my instrument, so you figure out how to play your own.” — Reggie […]
Groove o’ the day: Art Blakey tom tom groove
This is a fast Latin groove played by Art Blakey during a solo on a concert video filmed in Japan, posted on Twitter by jazz writer Ted Gioia. I’m sure Blakey plays it on his […]
Alternating flam rudiments tree
Just a little throwaway graphic illustrating the connectedness of flam rudiments. People think of them as “omg a bunch of different things”, but they use very similar motions. The key rudiment here is the Flam […]
Afro 6 warm up patterns
This is how I operate, after about ten years of writing the really hard stuff, I get around to giving people the easy way in. These are some preparatory exercises for playing an Afro 6 […]
Syncopation rhythms in 5/4
Hey, who wants some practice rhythms in 5/4? Here are several pages of them. I’m working on a new book, Syncopation in 5/4— companion to my other book Syncopation in 3/4. There are some formatting decisions […]
Daily best music in the world: Buck Hill
Here’s a really nice 1978 recording of some 70s powerhouse bebop by Washington DC saxophonist Buck Hill. Wikipedia says about him: Hill began playing professionally in 1943 but held a day job as a mailman […]