A page of meter-within-meter phrases— three beat rhythms played over four measures of 4/4: You’ll want to be very familiar and comfortable with this kind of rhythm— it happens a lot in jazz, and if […]
Category: meter-within-meter
Triplet burnout with the jazz waltz telephone page
Here are some things I do over the course of 15-20 minutes playing that jazz waltz telephone page, in addition to just playing repeating measures as written, in 3/4 time: 1. Play each measure in […]
Solo ideas in 3/4
We’ll be seeing more with this format— solo and fill ideas for a certain amount of space between cymbal/bass drum accents. It’s the normal frame for fills, but I don’t see fill studies written that […]
Transcription: Elvin Jones – Foolin’ Myself – 04
UPDATE: Boy I suck. This is of course the third solo chorus, and the fourth total entry in this series. I’ll fix that… sometime. Continuing that Elvin Jones transcription from late last year— Elvin Jones playing […]
Best books: The Art of Modern Jazz Drumming – Dejohnette / Perry
“As our mental image becomes more precise, we are better able to select muscle movements which will achieve our goals quickly, efficiently, and accurately.” I’m surprised I haven’t written much about this book already— The […]
Transcription: Roy Haynes – It’s Time
Roy Haynes playing behind Herbie Hancock’s solo, on the title track of Jackie McLean’s record It’s Time. There’s a lot of what people call “broken” time here, and meter-within-meter playing. The tune is in 4, […]
Extended shuffle stickings
This is just a little exploration of a special set of stickings for drum set. I wrote it to practice myself, and see if it’s worth developing as a concept. A lot of what we […]
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 […]
Max’s rubadub – triplets added
Wow, slow posting in August. This is something more to do with that Max Roach rubadub-like system I’ve been writing about recently. Here I’ve added some filler triplets to the original transcribed phrases I posted before— […]
Dannie Richmond comping
Dannie Richmond is one of my favorite drummers, who we don’t talk about much mainly because he’s often hard to transcribe, and a lot of what he plays is so context dependent that it can […]
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 […]
Meter-within-meter: 5/8 in 4/4 rock – 01
This is something inspired by Joey Baron’s playing on Bill Frisell’s Child At Heart— I always come back to the same few things, and that’s a particularly fertile, mainly simple, piece of drumming. Some of […]