I have a number of notes on this one:
Manne often plays bass drum through 16th note fills. I’ve noticed several 70s LA guys do this— Jeff Porcaro and John Guerin, for example. I don’t think this is just a carryover from jazz drumming. The music settles a little bit when you come off the cymbals, and playing the bass drum keeps the intensity of the groove through the fills. Something to think about when playing groove music.
We’re not hearing a ton of funk vocabulary; there are a few basic moves he uses again and again. The three-8th note RRL pattern, or even plain old RLRL played between the hihat and snare drum; a cinquillo rhythm on the cymbal when he’s grooving. Much of this is not unlike things on my EZ Tresillo Orchestrations page, or what we get from my cut time funk drill.
There’s a lot of open hihat here, usually with a half-open sound, indicated with a tenuto mark.
As a personal taste thing— to me many of the 16th notes are kind of gratuitous. The groove is strongest when he’s just doing 8th notes and quarter notes. Drummers generally always want to go to double time, to the hand-to-hand stuff, to prove this is a jazz performance, and the result is… not that great. Here, even with a lot of improvising and playing around, the 8ths and quarters still sound better. And Charlie Haden doesn’t need to play a lot of 16th notes to sound F— KILLER. We’ll talk more about this another time.
Yup. The Charlie Haden/Shelly combo is a bit strange. Makes me curious if say, DeJohnette and ray Brown ever recorded together…..
It couldn't be any more classically Charlie, but it didn't even occur to me that it was him– Manne colored it so differently…
A fav’ track for many years!