Basic left hand variations with a basic form of the an Afro 6/8 groove, with the “short” bell rhythm. Finally updating a page I did way back in 2012, that I still use all the […]
Year: 2024
Comping: triplets to 16ths – 01
A little companion to that butchery of the Chapin book I committed the other day. Here we’re starting with a single ordinary triplet pattern, and then showing some ways of converting it to straight 8ths […]
Transcription: Art Blakey – Boomerang
A left handed drum solo by Art Blakey, on Boomerang, from Blue Mitchell’s album Out Of The Blue. The solo is 32 bars long, with a stop on bar 32 for the horn pick ups […]
Chapin cut and paste – triplets to 16ths
I am a writing machine right now, people. Having redone my Cymbalistic site, and moved this site over to WordPress, I am now editing a new book, which I stand a chance of actually finishing […]
Page o’ coordination: Afro 6 – BD variations
OK, first new content post on the new platform. WordPress handles images a little differently, and it’s messing with my usual post design, so I’ll be fiddling with that a bit. I’ve been working with […]
Welcome to the new site
UPDATE: Naturally, there are some problematic things— a lot of my images from the old site are behaving strangely, so the older posts might not look real great. I’m probably going to be forced to […]
Daily best music in the world: Tony Williams day
Still hard at work on the new Cymbalistic site, which will be going live any minute now. I’m at the designing-cruise-ship-drummer-themed-merch-while-waiting-for-domain-cot-com-to-let-me-log-in-to-my-account-so-I-can-reset-the-domain-to-take-you-to-shopify phase. That old story. In the mean time, in honor of Tony Williams’s birthday, […]
CYMBALISTIC: Shopify store coming!
UPDATE: Soft launch time— the new store is now active— I’m writing an official announcement as we speak. Feel free to swing by, check it out, ask questions. No doubt lots of little things will need to […]
Very occasional quote of the day: technique
What if you think of something to play that doesn’t have a standard technique? That’s what jazz cats have been doing since jazz was born. All of a sudden, you want to play something that […]
Drummers as an inferior class
Savoring the persecution “Drummers are known to be a race on their own.” – Joe Morello “General Browning, I am a Pole, considered by some to be smart.” – First line spoken by Gene […]
Mel Lewis stuff!
A flurry of drumming activity of actual interest on Bluesky this morning. So far much of the drumming content there has been pretty mundane, but they’ve added ~ ten million new users in the last […]
Conductor of form
The general topic here is jazz comping— some general concepts thereof, getting into what I think is missing from a lot of students’ playing, even as they do the basic thing pretty well. The following […]