From Ben Riley’s 1986 interview in Modern Drummer with Jeff Potter: “In my first experience with [Thelonious Monk], in Amsterdam, we played ‘Embraceable You’ as a very slow ballad. Then he went into ‘Don’t Blame […]
Month: February 2022
Listening: Up Jumped Spring
I started transcribing this, but was too distracted by Ukraine developments to finish more than a page of it. It’s Up Jumped Spring, by Freddie Hubbard, from his album Backlash— I’m listening to a lot […]
Sidebar: Learn to like things
“I thought it was the worst thing I’d ever heard. I said to myself, they’re not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony. Then I listened to it a couple more times, because I […]
Shoutout to Eduard in Odessa, and all of our other readers in Ukraine— stay safe.
Very occasional quote of the day: learning
“I learn something every time I play.” – Philly Joe Jones, 1982 Modern Drummer interview with Rick Mattingly
Stick control in 12/8 – “Afro logic”
Here’s what that page of 6/8 sticking patterns was setting up— and that funny joke photoshopped page from Stone: sticking combinations in 12/8, oriented like the Afro “short bell” rhythm, with one pattern on beats […]
Reed interpretations: 16th notes in a triplet feel
A simple system here, that nevertheless has a number of possibilities, that I was playing using with my own book, Syncopation in 3/4, along with the Bill Frisell / Where In The World loop in […]
What kind of sticks do you use?
Addressing the classic drum clinic question once again. In 2019, under the sway of our friend in Berlin, Michael Griener, after about 10 years of using the Vic Firth SD-11 Slammer (a maple 5B) or […]
Stick control patterns in 6/8
This is part of a larger writing project I’m doing— some things you have to write out to decide if they’re going to be of any use. You can see that the logical sequence here […]
Solo transcription: Elvin Jones – Crisis
Here’s Elvin Jones’s drum solo on that tune Crisis, from Freddie Hubbard’s Ready For Freddie, which we looked at a couple of weeks ago. It contains some classically Elvin stuff, and is good for some […]
CYMBALISTIC: Get ’em while they’re hot
CYMBALISTIC: Service announcement— cymbal business has really been cooking this winter, so if you have your eye on any of the wonderful Cymbal & Gong cymbals on my Cymbalistic site, it’s best to act fairly […]
Max wants you to turn off YouTube
“We used to listen to records and take off the record what the person was doing. You didn’t see the person. You’d just hear it. We’d figure out what was happening with our ears. Then […]