SF: Some of the tempos that you play are lightning fast. MR: That’s done through combinations though! No one limb is overworking. There’s a way that it works itself out so that all the weight […]
Category: jazz
Reed interpretations: 5 stroke rolls with stick shots
At a certain point in our pratice journey with the book Syncopation, restricting ourselves to things that can be done by a single set of rules becomes limiting. I was workshopping this with a student— […]
Very occasional quote of the day: time and feathering
“[T]here are certain things that will never change. Good time is good time, whether it’s Baby Dodds riding on a snare drum or Jack DeJohnette slammin’ a full kit. Time is time whether you put […]
Things to listen for – ballads
Some things aren’t easily dealt with in transcriptions— you just have to listen a lot and notice things, and use them when you play. Here we’ll look at ballads, and the information you want to […]
Free triplet game
Free in cost, free in method. A jazz drumming exerise for getting some variety into your playing, free of meter concerns. The parts here are written two or three beats long, but play them over […]
Transcription: Roy Haynes – Well, You Needn’t
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 […]
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 […]