You can buy them all in one collection now. Hey, we haven’t done one of these in a while. All the tempos from four very famous Miles Davis records, with his very famous quintet from the […]
Year: 2023
Groove o’ the day: Ed Blackwell – Love
Here’s a fast 6/4 Afro type of groove from Ed Blackwell, on the track Love, from a duo record with Wadada Leo Smith, The Blue Mountain’s Sun Drummer. There’s no tune, it’s just free blowing […]
Daily best music in the world: early Weather Report
I have a lot of writing projects going right now, and seem to be unable to finish any of them, so let’s listen. Here’s Alphonse Mouzon playing on the first Weather Report album, doing what […]
Very occasional quote of the day: artificial excitement
“I think there’s a tendency to overplay with most young drummers. Rushing is common in trying to force things to swing by playing on top a little bit. If things weren’t swinging by forcing it […]
Finessing Reed funk phrases
A baseline thing to do with Reed funk methods is to practice in two measure phrases. For example: one measure cut time funk* / one measure RH lead**. * – CUT TIME FUNK: Reading from […]
CYMBALISTIC: 20 BLOW-OUT
5/26 UPDATE: OK gang, the special is OVER, but, happily, the cymbals are still a tremendous bargain considering that a) they’re great, b) you’ll use them forever, c) they’re not that expensive to begin with! By […]
Transcription: Max fours
I am not screwing around people, this is now an ALL Max Roach site. Here he is trading fours on Minor Meeting, from the record Sonny Clark Trio, from 1960— there’s another record by that […]
Reed tweak: alternating triplets in 3
This came up while I was practicing out of my book, Syncopation in 3. An extremely ordinary practice system used with Syncopation is to a) swing the top line rhythm, b) fill in the remaining […]
WSRHWL addendum!
A couple of pages to go with my wild, sprawling, scattershot world’s shortest Roy Haynes waltz lesson. That contains a lot of raw concepts for someone who is listening to a lot of Roy Haynes to […]
Transcription: Max soloing
On this second of two days of major acts of white supremacist violence here in this paradise we call “the USA”, let’s retreat into art, with part 2 of the thing from the other day: […]
Three camps: four variations
Four alternative ways of playing the rudimental piece Three Camps, that I’m practicing this week, accented 5 stroke rolls, flam accents, flam drags, and flammed 5s. Learn each measure individually, then play them in the form […]
Transcription: Max comping
That’s the theme of the week now: jazz comping. Here’s Max Roach playing on the horn solos on A Little Sweet, from his record The Many Sides of Max. Each solo is 24 bars long, […]