This is how it is, I get busy teaching, doing my taxes, preoccupied with other stuff, and not able to hit the drums for a week, and everything dries up. No ideas and I feel […]
Transcription: Jimmy Cobb fours
Jimmy Cobb trading fours with Wynton Kelly on Gone With The Wind, from Kelly’s self-titled (plus an exclamation point) trio album from 1961. There’s a lot of very standard vocabulary here, the type of which […]
Three bloggers: technique
“Technique we always think of as being a thing having to do with fastness, [but] technique is, in its highest sense, is the ability to handle musical materials.” “You could get to a point where […]
Very occasional quote of the day: ectopic pulse
Film editor Walter Murch talks about Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, conducted by George Solti, used in the famous “Charlie’s Point” scene in Apocalypse Now. Late in post-production Decca denied the filmmakers the right […]
Three Camps for drum set: 16th notes – SSBB
More of Three Camps adapted for drum set, with a 16th note SSBB pattern, in a jazz feel. Let’s call this an advanced page, because there’s a little extra 16th note filler on the snare […]
Very occasional quote of the day: gabby pupils
An extended quote— extended is the only way to quote him— from George Lawrence Stone’s Technique of Percussion, which has been on my mind a lot lately: An instructor inquires what to do with a […]
Know your tempos: Ballads
Once every dozen years of blogging, I like to write about ballads— slow tunes you play on jazz gigs. They do exist. Possibly I don’t write about them much because I learned to play them […]
Daily best music in the world: Mingus
Please forgive the light posting— in honor of Charles Mingus’s birthday, dig this record:
Very occasional quote of the day: master from the beginning
I’m just thinking about a VOQOTD from 2017 today— from the painter Robert Henri: “An art student must be a master from the beginning; that is, he must be master of such as he has. […]
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, […]
A player’s analysis of drumming
For a long time I’ve been thinking about developing a system of analysis for drumming, like the harmonic analysis you do in college theory courses, deciding the function of every note in a composition. Doing […]
Cliché control
A little writing experiment, like my old Funk Control pages, and my Philly Joe solo page. Here we have a lot of jazz soloing clichés, to practice in combination with each other. Similar to a […]