“Oh! How ordinawy.” A little bit of an business/economics side track here: In the USA the word ordinary is rarely a compliment. It’s usually taken to mean unexceptional, uninteresting, not that good. It’s not a […]
Author: Todd Bishop
A concise straight 8th / pseudo latin system
It’s remarkable how long you can work with a book like Syncopation, and still come up with new things to do with it. Newish. This isn’t actually new, it’s a specific variation on existing things. […]
Touch and grace
Combining two different posts I was working on, because they overlap, and are fairly inextricable: developing good touch on the drums, and developing some physical grace in playing. Sounding and looking like a musician and […]
Todd’s jazz drill
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 […]
Philly Joe’s early career
“When I got to New York I joined a rhythm-and-blues band right away, with Joe Morris, Johnny Griffin, Elmo Hope, and Percy Heath. It was an 8-piece group. We barnstormed all over the country, from […]
CYMBALISTIC: heads up
UPDATE: All the videos are up! CYMBALISTIC: Just letting everyone know, the latest shipment from Turkey has been delayed YET AGAIN— so we won’t be seeing a big new batch of cymbals until later in […]
Cliché control – 5 stroke singles
Another Cliché Control page for learning to solo in jazz, combining stock licks. This time centered around 5-stroke singles: RLRLR or RLRLB. We’re squarely in Philly Joe / Art Blakey territory here— and a lot […]
Sidebar: open and closed
As long as I’ve been playing, with the people I’ve been around*, open and closed were understood to refer to, respectively, double-stroke, rudimental-style rolls, and multiple-bounce, orchestral style rolls. Double strokes = open, multiple-bounce = closed. That […]
Groove o’ the day: Afro 10/8
An interesting groove by Billy Kilson, on A Seeking Spirit, from Dave Holland’s Prime Directive album, one of the big records of the late 90s. If you’re not familiar, he had a very high powered […]
Transcription: Roy Haynes 8s
Hot on the heels of that “too perfect” post, here’s a great example of what I’m talking about in terms of playing with an edge: Roy Haynes trading 8s with Chick Corea on Rhythm-a-ning, from […]
Too perfect
Perfect and boring For a long time I thought robotic perfection was basically impossible to achieve for people not practicing massive hours… so you may as well just try your best to achieve it. Lately, […]
Thelonious’s ballad test
From Ben Riley’s 1986 interview in Modern Drummer with Jeff Potter: “In my first experience with [Thelonious Monk], in Amsterdam, we played ‘Embraceable You’ as a very slow ballad. Then he went into ‘Don’t Blame […]