“…and he could play the fastest tempos!” – Jack Dejohnette on Max Roach I thought this one deserved its own post.
Category: jazz
Know your tempos: what’s meant by up
In case you were wondering how fast you need to be able to play, here are a bunch of your favorite tracks spanning the break between “medium up”- where it’s still possible to swing- and […]
Kenny Washington overheard
Or the cyber-equivalent. Mark Feldman at the Bang! the drum school blog features a Facebook post by jazz drummer and scholar Kenny Washington, in response to a question about how to take one’s drumming “to […]
Basic Mambo
I guess I had to eventually post something directly drumming-related on my drumming blog, so here is an older piece I’ll be sharing with a couple of students today- some variations on a generic, very […]
Bill Evans speaks
Here’s a nice, timely (given the last post) find from Ted at Trap’d: pianist Bill Evans talking at length about music:
Tugboatism!
The Tugboat Brewery is a small venue in Portland which has for years been one of the primary places hosting consistently adventuresome music locally. The reason for this is strictly financial- basically, they didn’t want […]
Branford Marsalis on the problem with jazz
In the Seattle Weekly, Branford talks about what’s going on with jazz- here are a few excerpts: You put on old records and they always sound better. Why are they better? I started listening […]
Simple variations on Syncopation, Lesson 4
That’s pages 10-11 for those of you with the old edition– as you can see I’ve given up completely and started referring to the parts by their new edition names. I’ve been working with this […]
Putting some things in
This is me at my most masochistic. I’m back in updating my events band’s book again- it’s a long, tedious process- and thought I would continue to share the gory “thought” process with you. Previously […]
Quick takes
– Jon McCaslin @ Four on the Floor shares this video of Marvin “Bugalu” Smith, who I had actually not heard of before. He was in Sun Ra’s and Archie Shepp’s bands in the 80’s. […]
Different values
I usually keep just one CD in my car for days or occasionally weeks at a time- recently for me it’s been Don Cherry’s Art Deco, an old favorite that had been languishing in the […]
Daily best music in the world
Twice in a row makes this a feature, I guess. Because I don’t have time for much else, here’s Weather Report from 1971, with Alphonse Mouzon on drums and Dom um Romao on percussion. Plus […]