Roy Haynes playing behind Herbie Hancock’s solo, on the title track of Jackie McLean’s record It’s Time. There’s a lot of what people call “broken” time here, and meter-within-meter playing. The tune is in 4, […]
Category: comping
Accents on 8/8 jazz rhythms
A background project lately has been to create some ways of practicing feathering the bass drum as part of a modern, varying, organic jazz texture. This page is related to some things I’m hearing in […]
Page o’ coordination: feet in the gap
Another little item inspired by the ongoing Chasin’ the Trane transcription— in which Elvin Jones does this a lot. Here we’ve got both feet in unison, played on the &s of 1 and 3, in […]
Three Camps for drum set – inverted quarter note triplet fill – 07
I’m telling you this is a good system. It gives you the thing, some basic variations on it, starting on 1 or 2, straight and syncopated, and it makes you do it for as long […]
Page o’ coordination: jazz / RLRR
Working on this Elvin project the last couple of days, I noticed that, similar to Max Roach on another recording, he plays the snare drum in the gap in the cymbal rhythm a lot, for […]
Another Reed tweak
Another minor tweak on a normal Reed method, in a jazz feel. It’s good to have some easy options to relieve the tedium, and to bring more of the texture of real playing into it. […]
Three Camps for drum set – quarter note triplet fill – 06
I started doing these because I wanted a composed drill, like Alan Dawson’s Rudimental Ritual, that I would actually play. It has worked out really well. This entry is the same as the first one, […]
Two minor Reed items
Two jazz comping practice suggestions, which aren’t big enough to merit a full-fledged treatment, for the full-page exercises in Progressive Steps to Syncopation. Play these on the snare drum (with bass drum added in the […]
Listening: Idris Muhammad grooves
Hey, I’ve concluded that Idris Muhammad is awesome. There’s a lot going on with him, that doesn’t necessarily give itself up to the casual drumming listener— it’s a very deep fusion of jazz, R&B, funk, […]
Reed method: bass drum with quarter note triplet filler – key
See, this is what I’m talking about— writing/organizing materials a certain way, you get practice ideas you wouldn’t have gotten just practicing the books. I could have used this 30 years ago, but it came […]
Syncopation exercise: two notes per measure – 01
Another syncopation exercise written with a special set of parameters— this one just has two notes per measure, with quarter note or greater spacing. Last year I did a page of one-line exercises that way. This […]
Three Camps for drum set – inverted – 05
Another page working on normal jazz drumset vocabulary using Three Camps— we’re sort of inverting the basic version, except I’ve taken a few liberties with it to make a normal Elvin-like texture out of it. I […]