This is pretty amazing. Rough sounding live tape of Charlie Parker in 1951, with Roy Haynes on drums… sounding basically like any other subsequent time in his career. Incredibly modern playing for 1951. h/t to […]
Category: bebop
Practice loop: Dexterity / Bird’s chorus
UPDATE: If you want the loop archive, you should get it fast— my ISP is complaining about the large files stored on my account, and I’ll probably have to delete it soon. I assume everyone is […]
Rub-a-dub lesson: Au Privave
Something a little more challenging to try rub-a-dub style. Since it’s not just a lick, but a way of playing figures and setups, musical context is important— we’re trying to make some written kicks, so just […]
Billy Higgins trading 4s
This is from the same tune as the recent post Comping The Billy Way— Things Ain’t What They Used To Be, with Hank Jones and Ray Drummond, from the album The Essence. Here Higgins is […]
Very occasional quote of the day: cymbal selection for bop
Roy Haynes talks about what cymbal used to go with what soloist in the 1940s: “I just liked the sound of a cymbal with the sax. It was cool with a trumpet, too. Back in […]
Daily best music in the world: Sonny plays Surrey
Sonny Rollins and Philly Joe Jones play Surrey With The Fringe On Top, duo, on Sonny’s record Newk’s Time. This has got to be the purest essay on bop drumming ever.
Kenny Clarke at 100
[Oh heck, this is from 2014— oh well. Just saw it on Famoudou Don Moye’s Facebook feed today. Whatever.] Good of NPR’s Kevin Whitehead to take notice of Kenny Clarke’s (“inventor of modern jazz drumming”) […]
Transcription: Connie Kay – Billie’s Bounce
Here’s a basic bebop study, looking at how Connie Kay plays the head of Billie’s Bounce— we’ve got the drums transcribed, along with the melody rhythm so you can see how they intersect. Kay was […]
Transcription: Billy Higgins / Tears Inside
Tears Inside, from Pat Metheny’s album Rejoicing, is such a favorite track of mine, I’m surprised we haven’t done anything with it before. I did transcribe the drum intro for the forthcoming[!!!] Book of Intros. So […]
How to play Jordu
About time I did another one of these: here’s Jordu, by Clifford Brown, as played on the definitive recording, Clifford Brown & Max Roach, on EmArcy. It gets played a lot at the high school […]
Kenny Clarke plays an intro
Putting together a bebop podcast (which we’ll see here whenever I get it finished), this intro from 1941 by Kenny Clarke jumped out at me— the tune is Hot House, and the playing feels more […]
Transcription: Philly Joe Jones — Locomotion
I’ve been working through Philly Joe Jones’s intro on Lomotion, from the Coltrane album Blue Train; a student was given the fairly nutso assignment of learning this verbatim off of YouTube. We worked through it […]