Right now I’m working on a couple of very wordy pieces, and since I view words primarily as vectors for self-embarrassment, it’s taking me a long time to finish them. In the mean time, you […]
Year: 2013
VOQOTD: Max Roach on what it’s about
“It’s not about comparative things: who’s the fastest, or… it’s not about that. It’s about someone who, when you hear them, you say, Oh, that’s Tony! Oh, that’s Miles! Ah, that’s John Coltrane! That’s what […]
Groove o’ the day: Take Your Dead Ass Home
This is pretty much definitional as to what funk drumming is. Here are another couple of Funkadelic grooves, from Take Your Dead Ass Home, on the album Tales of Kidd Funkadelic. The drummer is the […]
DBMITW: Togashi
The great Japanese drummer Masahiko Togashi, with Masahiko Satoh and Gary Peacock:
Page o’ coordination: Songo — 02
This is the companion to the recent Songo page, which I thought you might want to work on concurrently— it’s the same set of exercises, with the clave rhythm in the left foot: Reread the […]
Ed Shaughnessy 1929-2013
I couldn’t possibly improve on what Jon McCaslin has said about the passing of this great drummer, so just go read his notice.
“What’s with that constant cymbal tapping in jazz drumming?”
HEY ROACH, what’s with the constant cymbal tapping? “…and why do they use the exact same beat on every song? And who invented this awful, one-man-band percussion concept, with the abrasive and irritating sound of […]
VOQOTD: note to himself
Play at least ten minutes a day on the drum set. — Paul Motian
Page o’ coordination: Songo — 01
Here we’ll develop some bass drum variations for playing Songo, a popular Afro-Cuban/salsa drumset style, in case you’ve never heard of it. The first exercise is the ostinato, played with the hands only— the parts […]
Groove o’ the day: Shelly Manne — Way Out West
Here are a couple of very famous things by Shelly Manne, from the album Way Out West by Sonny Rollins. Sonny could be a little perverse in his tune selections, often choosing things that would […]
Mel Lewis on cymbals
More on cymbals from Mel Lewis’s 1985 Modern Drummer interview. This is pretty much the bible of the subject, as it relates to jazz: Number and type The average drummer usually uses two to four […]
Blocking drumming-related spam
Thanks, we get it: “you’re a restaurant”, now please GTFOOMF. After months of becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the results my drumming-related web searches, this week I installed the Google search results blocker extension to my […]