Roy Haynes trading fours with Kenny Burrell on Well, You Needn’t, from Burrell’s 1959 album A Night At The Vanguard. They’re playing trio, with Richard Davis on bass. The whole record is really cool— nobody’s […]
Category: jazz
Transcription: Art Blakey – Safari
A little drum break and Latin groove from Art Blakey, on Safari, by Horace Silver, originally on Horace Silver Trio, vol. 1, on Blue Note. Originally a 78 release, actually— the recording is less than […]
Comping: triplets to 16ths – 01
A little companion to that butchery of the Chapin book I committed the other day. Here we’re starting with a single ordinary triplet pattern, and then showing some ways of converting it to straight 8ths […]
Transcription: Art Blakey – Boomerang
A left handed drum solo by Art Blakey, on Boomerang, from Blue Mitchell’s album Out Of The Blue. The solo is 32 bars long, with a stop on bar 32 for the horn pick ups […]
Chapin cut and paste – triplets to 16ths
I am a writing machine right now, people. Having redone my Cymbalistic site, and moved this site over to WordPress, I am now editing a new book, which I stand a chance of actually finishing […]
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 […]
Conductor of form
The general topic here is jazz comping— some general concepts thereof, getting into what I think is missing from a lot of students’ playing, even as they do the basic thing pretty well. The following […]
Transcription: Mickey Roker – Essence
I’ve gone a little nuts with the ghost note notation, but it’s accurate— a lot of the comping activity is very soft. We can assume he’s feathering the bass drum most of the time; I’ve […]
Very occasional quote of the day: epic
From Hal Galper on Facebook: “I’d heard a recording of an interview with Coleman Hawkins that stuck in my brain. He said you had to go to the city twice. The first time to learn […]
Bill Stewart
I’ve been listening to a lot of John Scofield this week, and realized I basically never talk about Bill Stewart here. It’s weird, he’s on anyone’s short list of top living jazz drummers, particularly of those […]
Transcription: Max Roach – Commutation
Here’s Max Roach soloing with his left hand on Commutation, by J.J. Johnson, on Johnson’s record First Place. A nice little self contained lesson item— there’s some trading after this solo I didn’t bother with. […]
Daily best music in the world: a good first jazz album
If we learned about music in a nice orderly way, where everything started at a logical beginning with music that was clear and expository, this would be a good first record for finding out about […]