Fantastic, I hadn’t planned it this way, but here’s yet another thing you have to buy— a Latin groove by Mickey Roker, on the tune Woody’n You, on McCoy Tyner’s album Live At Newport:
Roker plays a Brazilian-style bass drum pattern (very softly) under his quasi-Afro-Cuban bell and tom part— a very common thing for many years, but which doesn’t really fly these days. I really think we should lose that part of the American drumming literature. You could play the bass drum lightly just on 1 and 3, or try this more contemporary-sounding pattern:
That seems a little closer to an authentic salsa pattern. If the band were actually playing off of clave, this bell pattern suggests a 2-3 orientation, in which case we’d be wanting to punch the bass drum on the & of 2 of the second measure instead of (or in addition to) the written b.d. part here. It doesn’t matter; we’re not playing salsa, we’re just trying to make a reasonably hip Latin groove for a jazz context.
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