Another one of my little photoshop gags— I edited a jpeg of the first page of exercises in Stick Control to follow the logic of the Afro “short bell” pattern*, which has beats 1 and 4 […]
Month: February 2022
Very occasional quote of the day: you have to be there to play every night
“You have to work with the people for a while. I was talking to Jo Jones one day. He commented something like, ‘It’s very important how a person develops his own musical personality.’ He says, […]
An Elvin-inspired lick
A page inspired by something that came up on Elvin Jones’s solo on the tune Crisis, which I partially transcribed last week. It’s not even a lick, it’s something funny that happened with his timing, […]
Reed tweak: paradiddle fill in
Some of these Reed systems are so sprawling that you can spend months working your way through them. This one is nice and limited. There’s exactly one thing to do, and relatively few lines from […]
Practice loop: McCoy swing
Here’s a crushing new practice loop I’ve been playing with a lot lately, sampled from the tune Little Brother, from McCoy Tyner’s album Song of the New World. People get so precious about their approach […]
Syncopation rhythms – dotted quarter note spacing
A page of practice rhythms, with dotted quarter note spaced notes, and no more than two notes in a row with an 8th note spacing. Most of these are already scattered all over the book […]