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 […]
Category: jazz
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 […]
Transcription: Jack Dejohnette – Boo Ann’s Grand
Jack Dejohnette open drum solo from Boo Ann’s Grand, on the Jackie McLean 1967 album Demon’s Dance. Tempo is about 241— about as fast you can do this kind of stuff. This is burning for […]