Very sorry to have lost comic legend Rik Mayall yesterday. He was best known in the US for The Young Ones and small parts on Black Adder, but my favorite thing of his was The […]
Year: 2014
Stick Control on the drums: RLRL and LRLR
UPDATE: The link is now working. All reet, I’ve gotten my hallway and kitchen painted, and finished getting my teeth and gums viciously probed, if only for the time being, so let’s get back to […]
Groove o’ the day: The Bomb Squad — Night of the Living Baseheads
There was a period in time when hip hop really rocked. This is the groove from Night Of The Living Baseheads, from Public Enemy’s album It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. […]
DBMITW: Bernard Purdie
Posting will continue to be a little light this week, as I’m occupied with other projects, so here’s an obscure track featuring Bernard Purdie, recommended by Rick Marotta: [h/t to Geoff Gil]
Bears
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 […]
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 […]