As long as I’ve been playing, with the people I’ve been around*, open and closed were understood to refer to, respectively, double-stroke, rudimental-style rolls, and multiple-bounce, orchestral style rolls. Double strokes = open, multiple-bounce = closed. That […]
Groove o’ the day: Afro 10/8
An interesting groove by Billy Kilson, on A Seeking Spirit, from Dave Holland’s Prime Directive album, one of the big records of the late 90s. If you’re not familiar, he had a very high powered […]
Transcription: Roy Haynes 8s
Hot on the heels of that “too perfect” post, here’s a great example of what I’m talking about in terms of playing with an edge: Roy Haynes trading 8s with Chick Corea on Rhythm-a-ning, from […]
Too perfect
Perfect and boring For a long time I thought robotic perfection was basically impossible to achieve for people not practicing massive hours… so you may as well just try your best to achieve it. Lately, […]
Thelonious’s ballad test
From Ben Riley’s 1986 interview in Modern Drummer with Jeff Potter: “In my first experience with [Thelonious Monk], in Amsterdam, we played ‘Embraceable You’ as a very slow ballad. Then he went into ‘Don’t Blame […]
Listening: Up Jumped Spring
I started transcribing this, but was too distracted by Ukraine developments to finish more than a page of it. It’s Up Jumped Spring, by Freddie Hubbard, from his album Backlash— I’m listening to a lot […]
Sidebar: Learn to like things
“I thought it was the worst thing I’d ever heard. I said to myself, they’re not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony. Then I listened to it a couple more times, because I […]
Shoutout to Eduard in Odessa, and all of our other readers in Ukraine— stay safe.
Very occasional quote of the day: learning
“I learn something every time I play.” – Philly Joe Jones, 1982 Modern Drummer interview with Rick Mattingly
Stick control in 12/8 – “Afro logic”
Here’s what that page of 6/8 sticking patterns was setting up— and that funny joke photoshopped page from Stone: sticking combinations in 12/8, oriented like the Afro “short bell” rhythm, with one pattern on beats […]
Reed interpretations: 16th notes in a triplet feel
A simple system here, that nevertheless has a number of possibilities, that I was playing using with my own book, Syncopation in 3/4, along with the Bill Frisell / Where In The World loop in […]
What kind of sticks do you use?
Addressing the classic drum clinic question once again. In 2019, under the sway of our friend in Berlin, Michael Griener, after about 10 years of using the Vic Firth SD-11 Slammer (a maple 5B) or […]