“Make a mistake and make it loud.” – Art Blakey, 1978 Modern Drummer interview with Howard Howland
Author: Todd Bishop
Very occasional quote of the day: now
“I defy any painter to say ‘Now I can paint a picture!’ A master is a man who can, to be sure, but he never knows from one picture to the next whether the […]
I answer questions: rhythm analysis
Answering a question from a drumming forum— I can give a longer answer here, because a) it would be pompous to do that on a forum, and b) I don’t want to waste my time […]
CRUISE SHIP DRUMMER! zoom call
This except not with these idiots.
SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT SLASH FEELER: I’m thinking about doing a group zoom call— you join me in an online conversation about all matters pertaining to drumming, teaching, playing, whatever anyone wants to talk about.
Other things besides speed
A lot of us have very limited imaginations about how to get better playing the drums— basically, do it faster and that’s it. There are other things— sound, dynamics, touch, a number of musical considerations. […]
Very occasional quote of the day: one way
“I’m one of the cats that used to start them playing like lightning. We used to play like lightning all night long up at Minton’s sometimes. I got tired playing fast all the time. You […]
Scale, purpose, context, and economics
Random artistic/critical concept time, about assessing a piece of art or design, or anything else in life. Assessing meaning “liking things or not.” Everything, all around us, every day, we’re surrounded by little things we […]
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 […]