Been having a minor existential crisis in the last week or so— I played my first session in over a year last week, was feeling really unpracticed and generally out of touch with music… and […]
Year: 2021
Page o’ coordination: pseudo-Latin in 7 – 01
A page of independence patterns for a quasi-Latin groove in 7/4. The cymbal part is based on a Mozambique rhythm, and there the similarity to any real Latin music ends. This is not a style, […]
Transcription: Al Harewood comping
What the hell, I’m on a roll, waiting for this weekend’s blanket of suffocating heat to descend on the entire Pacific Northwest. Let’s look at some more of Al Harewood, on yesterday’s same record by […]
Transcription: Al Harewood – All Blues
I’ve been looking into Al Harewood quite a bit lately. He’s one of those drummers who’s on a lot of stuff, but is still easy to overlook. He’s on a lot of Blue Note records in the […]
A needlessly difficult book
This has been sitting in my drafts folder for a few weeks. I wasn’t going to post it, but I’m having a hard time finishing anything lately. So here we are: A book I’ve never […]
Dejohnette-like method
The cosmos gave me a couple of instances of Jack Dejohnette yesterday— I got to work on that Jack Dejohnette transcription, and also happened to also catch him on the radio (KMHD.org, The Afternoon Bridge, […]
Syncopation exercise: p. 38 with ties added
One minor gap in the rhythms covered in Syncopation— that’s a drumming book, hahaha omg— is that there aren’t so many syncopated long notes on the “weak” beats, 2 and 4. There are relatively few ties […]
Three Camps for drumset – jazz / uptempo – 01
I wrote this to isolate some things used in my main uptempo Reed method— which I continue to find an excellent method. This is good if you need to polish a few of those bass drum patterns […]
Daily best music in the world: So What
I’m going to transcribe some part of this— you can give it a listen while I figure that out. It seems worthy of a pretty full treatment, and breaks down cleanly into funk, medium swing, […]
EZ ECM feel – 01 – unisons
This is the first part of a little method I used in a lesson recently, for introducing what has become known as an ECM-type feel— a modern, non-repetitive, quasi-linear, straight 8th jazz feel. See Jon […]
Linear 8ths in 9/8 – 02
We’re doing a lot with triplets and compound-meter 8th notes these days— here with a linear pattern in 9/8, with inversions. See this last similar page, and my page of linear double paradiddles/paradiddle-diddles— still one of […]
CYMBALISTIC: a few new Holy Grails
I picked up a few more cymbals from Cymbal & Gong HQ last week, for sale on my Cymbalistic site. I’ll be posting those and adding video… shortly. Four Holy Grail series, two 20″ rides, […]