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, […]
Author: Todd Bishop
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 Hackman playing the […]
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 […]
Hey, follow me on Bluesky
SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: I have now abandoned that festering hell site formerly known as Twitter, and invite you to follow me on Bluesky, a vastly more friendly environment for good and sane people. There’s a nice […]
Expanding a concept – 01
This is connected with all the fill related jive we’ve been dealing with lately. I share it with you to illustrate a thought process, not a particular set of licks. These are some things I […]
Transcription: Mickey Roker – Essence
Here’s Mickey Roker playing behind Donald Byrd on Essence, from Byrd’s record Electric Byrd. It’s vibey modal thing, in a slower 4/4 swing feel. It looks busy on the page, but this is mostly about […]
Reed tweak: RH lead triplets – fast within slow
This has been an item of interest for a long time— playing fast in a slow tempo. In a master class Peter Erskine mentioned that Jack Dejohnette was the only drummer he knew who could […]