UPDATE THRICE: The Seattle meet is TODAY, 5-9pm. If you’re in Seattle and want to come hang out with some great drummers, text me at 503.380.9259, and I’ll give you the details. UPDATE AGAIN: The meet […]
Year: 2021
Very occasional quote of the day: the hands are like monsters
From the late Barry Harris: “Are the hands doing something they’re used to doing, or is the mind leading the hands? Because the hands are like monsters— and they have a separate entity— and they […]
Drum solo transcription: Tony Williams – Moment’s Notice – 01
In honor of what would have been Tony Williams’s 76th birthday, here’s the first part of a solo I’ve been listening to since college— Troyland apartments at USC, 1988, to be exact. I put this […]
Transcription: Billy Cobham – More
Billy Cobham playing a swing tune in kind of a show band setting here, on Stanley Turrentine’s album The Sugar Man. A lot of it hardly merits a full transcription, except it’s good to see […]
Everything you know about drumming is wrong
Sometimes I get really cranky about drumming conversations on the internet. My paranoid tone here is half in jest. Tune in to the Firesign Theater recording on the left for more laffs. BELIEVE IT NOW: […]
Daily best music in the world: Freddie Hubbard – Jodo
Absolutely killing tune here— Jodo by Freddie Hubbard, from his album Blue Spirits. Pete La Roca is on drums. Soloists are Hubbard, Hank Mobley, McCoy Tyner, and La Roca. I sometimes forget La Roca is […]
Feel and style
Just a brief discussion of the musical terms feel and style. In normal professional musician usage they are often interchangeable, referring to the type of accompaniment to be played by the rhythm section. What kind of a […]
Transcription: Ralph Penland ensemble figures
From Freddie Hubbard’s Keep Your Soul Together album, here’s Ralph Penland playing an ensemble section from a very nice tune, Brigitte. I saw Penland play a couple of times in Los Angeles when I was […]
EZ Reed method: Jack’s way
This is a very basic method improvised by a student of mine— for younger students, or as a remedial thing for others. It’s good for orienting students in the Reed thing, playing full drum set […]
Metal in 6/8
Following up on this post about that 80s Heavy Metal triplet groove— a student who is mainly a Metal drummer requested some help working out some vocabulary for a song in 6/8, and these are some […]
Robyn Flans fundraiser
Scott Fish has shared a fundraiser for fellow former Modern Drummer writer Robyn Flans— her name was all over MD in the 80s, and she’s a major contributor to the literature of drumming. Please read […]
World’s shortest jazz solo exercise
A quick little item— I know I’ve posted it before in other forms, maybe this time will be the best. For jazz students, this may be the most useful thing on the site for soloing […]