Having just played a weird gig, let’s talk about weird gigs. The kind gig where everything seems basically in place, but for whatever reason, nothing is happening. There’s nothing grossly wrong, but nothing feels right […]
Category: performance practices
How to stop – 01
Kind of a mundane item here— a multi-parter, believe it or not— mainly for teachers, about handling ordinary materials in a more real-life musical way, including how to stop in the conversation. Younger students and […]
HOT TOPIC: beat displacement
Make them all go SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: I’m about to finish my out of town project that has been consuming a lot of my time, so hopefully we’ll resume regular posting soon. …aaaand I just got a […]
Categories of what we’re doing
Following is a very half-baked item that has been in my drafts for a long time. It’s a broad-ranging subject, and not the kind of thing you can just bang out, and have it be […]
Non-mistake mistakes
“Honor Your Mistake as a Hidden Intention.” – Brian Eno, Oblique Strategies “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.” […]
What’s with resting the sticks on the drum?
Item just in from the pet peeve department: there’s an extremely slovenly practice, apparently done by half the drummers in the world: resting the sticks on the drum head before playing. I have students who […]
Dealing with it: bad time
We’ll see if this becomes a regular feature: dealing with it. If anyone has thoughts, ideas, frustrations in real life playing situations, mention them in the comments, and maybe I can write something about it. […]
On having done a LOT of transcriptions
I guess I’ve probably transcribed as much drumming as anyone. There have got to be some other lunatics out there, but not that many, and they’re not publishing their work regularly. In this past 9 […]
Soloing on a form
don’t let this happen to you “My idea of a drum solo is that you play like you sing. It comes from different things you listen to. And the beauty is always in the simple […]
Playing weird tunes
You go through stages of learning jazz repertoire. In high school I would play Charlie Parker tunes on the snare drum— just the melody rhythm. Then I learned about some standard forms, like 12-bar blues […]
The leap to playing
I feel like this A big problem for many students is how to get from practicing exercises in a book to real playing. It’s actually an issue for everyone, but in this post we’re just […]
Jazz stick roundup
these 5Bs are kind of like One thing my German friends made me realize is that I use really big friggin’ sticks. For many years I’ve used one stick: the Vic Firth SD-11 Slammer. It’s […]