Guitarist John McLoughlin on recording In A Silent Way with Miles Davis. Classic art can be very instantaneous: […] I had gone to New York to play with Tony [Williams] and Larry [Young], and I […]
Year: 2015
Daily best music in the world, again: TOM TOMS, MAN
Here’s Billy Cobham playing with Ray Barretto in 1973. The tom toms are just outrageous— really exciting: You never hear that sound any more— Steve Gadd just wiped everybody else out for fusion tom tom […]
Daily best music in the world: Hal Galper Trio
Here’s my brother, John Bishop, playing with Hal Galper, with Jeff Johnson on bass, at The Blue Whale in LA: Post by The Hal Galper Trio.
Page o’ coordination: basic — 05
Here’s another basic funk/rock page o’ coordination, this time using a series of es and as on the bass drum— to me this exact rhythm is a very 70s thing, and doing it with an […]
Very occasional quote of the day: Herzog’s 24 maxims
From a Salon.com, here are 24 pieces of life/work/career advice from the filmmaker Werner Herzog: 1. Always take the initiative. 2. There is nothing wrong with spending a night in jail if it means getting […]
We tweet!
Would that we were actually talking about Paul Klee’s painting “The Twittering Machine”, and not social networking. By the way, we’ll be making a fresh effort at getting going with the Twitter machine… I’m going […]
Truth and negativity
This has been sitting in my drafts folder awhile— some thoughts on an older piece from George Colligan’s Jazz Truth blog, a collection of thoughts about negativity, positivity, realism, “telling it like it is”, and […]
Billy’s best
Here’s some more essential Billy Higgins listening for you. I hesitate to declare anything the best— because a) the man played on over 700 albums, of which I have been exposed to, what, 5-7%? And […]
1/2 of a concert with 3/5 of the Four & More band
First I want to acknowledge that headline… that just happened… OK… Does it seem like we’re in a Billy Higgins trough right now? I don’t feel like he’s getting talked about a lot— the current […]
Variations on Stone flam patterns — triplets and 16ths
Lately I’ve been doing a lot with modulating between triplets and 16th notes, using similar stickings/coordination patterns. I’ve observed that it’s a thing with Elvin Jones’s drumming that he will play similar things in either […]
Groove o’ the day PLUS: Roger Hawkins — Mustang Sally
Another Groove o’ the day on steroids, from the studio drummer Roger Hawkins, of the famous Muscle Shoals rhythm section— we last checked him out on him on Aretha Franklin’s Chain of Fools. Here we’re […]
The Lulu line
Here’s a little four measure phrase by Thelonious Monk, which has been a big influence on my thinking, in playing the drums. It’s a little microcosm of the way you develop a melodic idea in […]