Cousin Mary

Working with the John Coltrane tune Cousin Mary. I feel about some of his tunes the way Jon Krakauer felt about Mt. Everest— too chunky, too broad of beam, too crudely hewn— and almost as imposing. Giant Steps, Central Park West, Moment’s Notice, Mr. PC somewhat, and this one. It’s hard for me to hear a drum contribution that isn’t just the tune itself, or just time with ordinary comping.

Cousin Mary is a blues built on a riff, in a sort of clave rhythm. If you’re reading Billy Hart’s autobiography, he talks a lot about clave as a rhythm sense in jazz— this is the kind of thing he’s talking about. The rhythm here is an inversion of a tresillo rhythm, that we’ve seen before played by Idris Muhammad.

Here’s how it’s played, with a break on beat 1 at the beginning (though the drums do play it as a set up on the snare drum sometimes), the notes of the riff as kicks, and then time through the end of the second measure:

And the tempo is medium up, about quarter note = 216, so there’s not room to do a whole lot. Here’s the real book chart for the tune— in bars 10-11 the rhythm section hit the 2 and 4:

So to try to open it up a bit, I’ve written some Syncopation type rhythms in two measure phrases— the book itself is very thin for this exact structure of rhythm.

You can practice any of the usual things that will fit at this tempo.

Get the pdf

Happily, WordPress let’s me directly embed audio, so here’s the practice loop I’m using, of the head of the tune— for some reason it starts in bar 9 of the tune:

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