A summary of something I’ve been doing lately. I hadn’t practiced for about a week, so to get my act together, I drilled some standard jazz methods using that recent page of practice rhythms. I was playing along with a McCoy Tyner practice loop at ~ quarter note = 167. This Milt Jackson loop is at a more reasonable 125 bpm. I was playing one measure from the rhythm page, all eight ways, then moved on to the second measure.
This forms a pretty comprehensive medium tempo jazz vocabulary. If you can improvise a texture with each of these things, you should have the “what to play” end of jazz drumming pretty well covered. You could play my cliché control pages to get a more bebop thing happening. Of course there’s a lot more that goes into doing it well and being a musician.
It’s funny that this is such core stuff, and none of the common drum media ever talks about it. Contact me via the SKYPE link in the sidebar to get some lessons and learn about it.
To summarize each of those things
1. Jazz rhythm with 8th notes
BD plays practice rhythm, LH fills in 8th notes on SD, RH plays jazz cymbal rhythm. Swing the 8th notes. I add some accents to the snare drum parts here.
2. Rhythm on cymbal / fill on snare, 8th notes
Play practice rhythm on BD + cym, fill in 8ths on SD. RH on cym, LH on SD; also play with alternating sticking.
3. Jazz rhythm with triplets
BD plays practice rhythm, LH fills in triplets on SD, RH plays jazz cymbal rhythm. Avoid playing more than two LH notes in a row by putting a rest on the downbeat.
4. RH lead, triplets
Play practice rhythm on cym + BD, fill in triplets on SD. RH on cym, LH on SD. Avoid playing more than two LH notes in a row by bringing the RH to SD where necessary.
Alan Dawson’s “ruff bossa” system is another sticking you could do with this orchestration. I personally don’t use it much.
5. Alternating triplets
Same orchestration as 4, alternating sticking.
6. Triplet rolls
Same orchestration/sticking as 5, play doubles on SD notes.
7. Paradiddle-diddles
Play practice rhythm on cym + BD, fill on SD with paradiddle-diddle sticking, 16th note rhythm. Where there is a quarter note spacing in the practice rhythm, play RRLL. Where there are two 8th notes in a row in the practice rhythm, play an 8th note on the BD/cym on the first note, then the regular 16th note interpretation on the second— see examples 5-6 at the bottom of the page.
8. Fast tempo prep
Same as 7, leave RH on cymbal.
Thanks for all the great material you share Todd. I'm finding this one really useful.