Well, the Internet just got a whole lot smarter about the drums, and percussion in general. I’m very excited to see that the Percussive Arts Society is now posting the archives of their quarterly publication Percussive Notes free online— you can download pdfs of their old articles. For many years, Percussive Notes and Modern Drummer were basically the only periodicals with any serious information about actually playing the drums, PN coming from a professional/academic perspective, and MD being geared towards amateurs and students, as well as pros. This is a sizable chunk of the total available literature of drumming, and it’s now a) available, and b) free.
All professionals and serious students should be eating this up. In just a few minutes of browsing I found a bunch of great stuff:
An interview with Kenny Clarke, and discussion of his career by Norbert Goldberg
Developing Snare Drum Rolls by Sherman Hong
Max Roach’s drum solo on Jordu, transcribed by Paul Garretson
Interview with Elvin Jones by Anthony George Bravos
Polyrhythms: Triplets in 4/4 Jazz Time by Peter Donald
…and much, much more— we’ll be seeing a whole lot more of them in the future…
awesome…YEARS worth of gems. like hitting a library. time to pace myself. "Learning from Jim Gordon
By Andy Newmark" http://publications.pas.org/Archive/May2014/1405.18-19.pdf
Wow, that's awesome! When I was in college I spent hours going through microfiches of old PAS articles (from 1973 through about 1995) and printing out articles of interest. For a while PAS was offering an ePAS membership where you could pay around $35 a year and have access to the archives online, and I did that for one year about ten years ago, but I stupidly didn't get around to printing out much of the stuff. Now I can go back and peruse all this great material for free. Thanks for the heads up!
Microfiche, those were the days. You had to be committed. Now I need to get that Andy Newmark thing!
Holy moly! That is amazing. Kid in a candy store! Thanks for the heads up Todd.
I actually feel a bit guilty. Why have they put it up for free and how are they making their money back? I feel like I should really be paying and that something has forced them into this…any ideas why?
I don't know— why do I post reams of free stuff, for that matter? I have bills to pay just like they do. I think PAS gets their money from member dues, probably from corporate sponsors, possibly from government grants.
This went away…it's back to being pay for access.