Not quite the sense of menace I was hoping for, but that’ll have to do… One of the effects of this new Internet wonderland of information is that now everyone feels they are in competition […]
Month: May 2014
Todd’s tom tom thing — part 1
This is something that has come up organically in my own playing, which I’ve been trying to get a handle on more systematically— we saw a little bit of this before with my “quasi-African” tom […]
Melancholia
Sometimes it can be really hard to just do the the obvious unfinished work in front of you. A fairly unproductive week put me to mind of this famous engraving by the artist Albrecht Dürer, […]
Page o’ coordination: Afro 6/8 — a hard one
This is something I wasn’t going to post until I had made decent headway with it; which I have, at the cost of some misery. If you’ve been keeping up with current events, the Afro […]
Here it comes
Another clip from the jazz education melodrama Whiplash has been released: Pretty soon you’re going to be able to pay money to see the whole thing.
Groove o’ the day: Neftali Santiago — Too Late
Because I don’t think your funk is 70s is enough, here’s some more Mandrill, with one of the greatest-named drummers ever, Neftali Santiago. And just a great drummer, period. This is Too Late, from the […]
Page o’ coordination: Afro 9/8
The “Afro” feel in 9/8, or 3/4, is not exactly a standard feel, but it does come up. Like, in Portland, a tune by the drummer/composer Lawrence Williams gets called quite often, among several different […]
Gordon Willis 1931-2014
Still from Manhattan, by Gordon Willis When thinking of an era in the arts where there’s a strong zeitgeist, I always feel that there a large field of people working within a style, doing this […]
Stone method for uptempo jazz — 01
Most of the regular drumming literature is poorly adapted to the special conditions of very fast tempos in jazz; the practice materials are either too dense, or are triplet-based, which obviously isn’t going to work. […]
Partido Alto variations
The partido alto rhythm, in this case; it’s also a Brazilian song style, a type of funk groove, and a tune (see below). It’s one of the major rhythms in Brazilian music— several of the batucada […]
Very occasional quote of the day: new music
“And I said, ‘How about you? Who’s your favorite drummer?’ He said, ‘Tony Williams.’ And I didn’t know who Tony Williams was, so the next day I went to a record store, and on the […]
DBMITW: Tom Zé
Busy week here, moving my girlfriend Casey Scott to Ashland, Oregon for the summer, where she will be acting and playing bass in Family Album, the new play by Stew Stewart, part of the Oregon Shakespearean […]