The usual theory of practicing is that as you master really hard stuff, you’ll be super-good at the easy stuff. What often happens is that hard stuff just starts sounding like normal drumming to you, […]
Year: 2015
Brazilian 7
Here’s a short method for getting your Bossa Nova/Samba in 7/4 together. Since it’s not exactly an everyday thing, short is the only way to do it. We’ve discussed before the obvious wrong-seemingness of odd […]
Practice loop: Eddie Palmieri 6/8
Here’s a loop of an Afro 6/8 groove which I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of, lately. It’s a couple of measures of Pancho’s Seis Por Ocho, from Bamboleate Eddie Palmieri/Cal Tjader. The […]
Transcription: Ed Blackwell — Happy House
UPDATE: Download link is now working! Here is Ed Blackwell playing the head of a fairly well known Ornette Colman tune, Happy House, with the band Old and New Dreams. The beginning of the tune […]
Stick Control patterns in 3/4, with flamacues
Another variation on the recent page of Stick Control-type patterns in 3/4, this time making a flamacue-type construction, with a flam right before the accent: Read the description of the previous variation for some technical […]
Transcription: Airto — Partido Alto
If you’ve been reading the blog regularly, you probably know that partido alto is the name of a rhythm used in Brazilian music. It’s also a style of samba, a funk samba groove, and the […]
New Mel Lewis biography
There’s a book I’m reading right now, in preparation for doing a proper review, which a lot of you will want to buy regardless of what I say about it. It’s a new biography of […]
Daily best music in the world: Mozambique
Melao Para El Sapo, a New York-style Mozambique by Eddie Palmieri. I’m finding that my page of Mozambique from 2013 is holding up pretty well as a method for getting some basic fluency with this […]
Three minutes
Following our “3½ minutes” playlist, here are some recordings of songs/tunes that are three minutes long. We are definitely into more of a pop format now, though there are a few jazz examples— mainly vocal numbers, […]
Transcription: Airto — Earache My Eye
Cheech & Chong’s Earache My Eye is just an eternal piece of American teenage rock & roll culture, along with Smoke On The Water, Iron Man, Sunshine Of Your Love… like that. On hearing it […]
Stick Control patterns in 3/4, with flams and accents
A little companion to the page of Stone patterns adapted into 3/4, from the other day— here I’ve added some flams and accents to the sticking patterns from that page: Quite a few of the […]
Transcription: Al Foster — Pannonica
Oh, what the hey, hot on the heels of our Frankie Dunlop transcription of Pannonica, here’s Al Foster playing the same tune, the way I like to play it, in the original slow 4. It’s […]