An extended quote— extended is the only way to quote him— from George Lawrence Stone’s Technique of Percussion, which has been on my mind a lot lately: An instructor inquires what to do with a […]
Month: April 2021
Know your tempos: Ballads
Once every dozen years of blogging, I like to write about ballads— slow tunes you play on jazz gigs. They do exist. Possibly I don’t write about them much because I learned to play them […]
Daily best music in the world: Mingus
Please forgive the light posting— in honor of Charles Mingus’s birthday, dig this record:
Very occasional quote of the day: master from the beginning
I’m just thinking about a VOQOTD from 2017 today— from the painter Robert Henri: “An art student must be a master from the beginning; that is, he must be master of such as he has. […]
Transcription: Roy Haynes – It’s Time
Roy Haynes playing behind Herbie Hancock’s solo, on the title track of Jackie McLean’s record It’s Time. There’s a lot of what people call “broken” time here, and meter-within-meter playing. The tune is in 4, […]
A player’s analysis of drumming
For a long time I’ve been thinking about developing a system of analysis for drumming, like the harmonic analysis you do in college theory courses, deciding the function of every note in a composition. Doing […]
Cliché control
A little writing experiment, like my old Funk Control pages, and my Philly Joe solo page. Here we have a lot of jazz soloing clichés, to practice in combination with each other. Similar to a […]
Bothadiddles
A small item for your consideration and experimentation. On a drumming forum, a user was complaining that practicing paradiddles didn’t seem to improve his hand independence— he was working on some Chapin Advanced Techniques […]
John and Nate’s jazz drumming page
I wrote this for a couple of my younger students— it’s a collection of simple jazz patterns that we went over verbally in a lesson. It’s meant to be very loose introduction to a type […]
Youtubed: practicing Syncopation
I’m feeling a little irked at the existence of YouTube drumming videos today, so let’s do a search of a subject near and dear to me, practicing the book Progressive Steps to Syncopation, and see […]