Gary Chaffee’s Patterns series of books was a thrilling discovery to me as a student— a new, very modern system of stuff, that fit my ideas of what I wanted to be doing at the […]
Category: books
The Freedom Principle
I used to think I was a free jazz drummer, now I just want to play tight arrangements.– Todd Bishop The book The Freedom Principle, published in 1984, by John Litweiler, was my my listening […]
Best books: Oceans Of Time – The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart
Oceans Of Time is an oral autobiography of the drummer Billy Hart, from interviews by the pianist Ethan Iverson, assembled and edited by Iverson. You’re going to want to get it, and have it in […]
NEW BOOK: Rants – vol. 1
All right, here we go, my new book is DONE: Rants – vol. 1. Drummers, drum media, and the internetby Todd Bishop. 290 pages. Get it: on CYMBALISTIC | on LULU All right, here we […]
Tailoring the game to your talents
An extended quote from the book Moneyball, about the baseball player Scott Hatteberg, and his approach to hitting, and his experiences with the lavishly funded Boston Red Sox and the meagerly funded Oakland As organizations: […]
Best books: Working Space
Here’s an old favorite, by the painter Frank Stella, who died this week: Working Space— you can read it online at that link. It’s pretty dense, but there’s a lot to learn about art in it. […]
On Effortless Mastery
Service announcement: the next couple of months will continue to be very busy for me, so I’ll be posting irregularly for awhile longer. Quality of language will be unpolished, wisdom coarsely hewn, logic poorly articulated, […]
More on New Breed
Since that last piece about the book The New Breed, by Gary Chester, I’ve been working with that book fairly seriously— I can already play the drums, it won’t kill me to spend some time […]
Book review: Note Groupings and Combinations for Drumset
Giving a shout out to, and a few comments about, a new book by Jeff W. Johnson: Note Groupings And Combinations For Drumset. Johnson wrote another good book, The Level System— pretty much the definitive […]
On the massive overabundance of things to practice
A nagging question with every single thing I post: Am I putting up too much, am I part of the problem— the problem being: there’s way too much stuff to practice on the drums now, […]
Surveying styles of drum notation
I was recently critiqued on my notation style, by someone who knows their stuff— who also knows their stuff— and I got paranoid that I was writing in a stupid way, so I went to […]
Wilcoxon’s Junior Drummer
I’ve had this copy of Charley Wilcoxon’s book The Junior Drummer* lying around for some time, let’s take a look at it, see how it holds up for modern usage. I have the Ludwig Masters […]