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 […]
Category: Mel Lewis
Transcription: Mel Lewis comping
On Chess Mates, from a 1985 Joe Lovano record, Tone Shapes & Colors— a live recording with Mel Lewis on drums, and Kenny Werner on piano. A lot of what I’d call “non-independent” drumming here, […]
Mel Lewis master class
Here’s a one hour master class lecture given by Mel Lewis in the early 80s at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas). Embedding on blogger is weird now, so you’ll have […]
Mel Lewis intro – One for Pat
I’m just taunting myself now— I’ve got this book of intros sitting around, almost completed, and I keep finding new things that should probably go in it, but I don’t have the nerve to open […]
Building rubadub – 01
For intermediate jazz students, here is a page for learning the basic pattern for Mel Lewis’s rubadub concept (as helpfully explained by Chris Smith), about as thoroughly as possible, while also developing solid execution with […]
1985 Mel Lewis clinic
Surprised I haven’t already shared this Mel Lewis clinic, given in the Netherlands in 1985. He talks about his familiar opinionated subjects: playing the bass drum, drum sounds, fighting with recording engineers. Somewhere in there […]
Transcription: Mel Lewis fours
Here is Mel Lewis trading fours on Stoppin’ at the Savoy, from Bob Brookmeyer’s album The Blues Hot and Cold. These are pretty interesting. Lewis isn’t anybody’s idea of a chops guy, but he’s not […]
Mel Lewis on rub-a-dub
Loren Schoenberg, who conducted the famous Mel Lewis history of jazz drumming interviews, has begun posting excerpts from the interviews on his YouTube page. Which is lucky, because I think the source from which I […]
Syncopation p. 37: rub-a-dub method, mach 1
Now this is the level of drum geekery I aspire to, with the defiantly gibberish post title, and everything. I was writing out a very laborious explanation of the next steps in my evolving quasi-Mel Lewis […]
Developing a method for rub-a-dub
I’ve been working up a practice method for learning what Mel Lewis called rub-a-dub— I hate to use his term, because I only just saw it explained for the first time in Chris Smith’s video. I don’t […]
Mel Lewis rub-a-dub
Well, we ignore the blog Four On The Floor at our peril. I hadn’t visited in awhile, and then yesterday, BLAM, there’s a great post with a video from Chris Smith— he’s the author of The View […]
Very occasional quote of the day: “You shouldn’t be able to do that.”
A pull from Ethan Iverson’s Whiplash/Buddy article, which deserves its own space: A story about Mel Lewis: Mel hated giving lessons, but finally a kid talked him into letting him come by a record session […]