New series, some thumbnail sketches of drummers who matter to me— to us, I’ll be that bold— and why. The title of this list is of Lenny White’s coinage, as far as I know— the […]
Category: Tony Williams
Down Beat Drum Talk 1964: the bass drum
Continuing the talk about the use of the bass drum in jazz, particularly with regard to keeping time, aka “feathering”, here is an extended exchange from Down Beat Magazine’s March 1964 issue, between Elvin Jones, […]
Daily best music in the world: Tony Williams day
Still hard at work on the new Cymbalistic site, which will be going live any minute now. I’m at the designing-cruise-ship-drummer-themed-merch-while-waiting-for-domain-cot-com-to-let-me-log-in-to-my-account-so-I-can-reset-the-domain-to-take-you-to-shopify phase. That old story. In the mean time, in honor of Tony Williams’s birthday, […]
Listening to Sorcerer
Phew, long post here, but the topic merits it. Let’s listen to the Miles Davis record Sorcerer, with his famous 60s quintet including Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. I bought it […]
Transcription: Tony Williams – Cantaloupe Island
A student was asking about Cantaloupe Island, played by Tony Williams on Herbie Hancock’s Empyrean Isles album, so I went ahead and transcribed the whole thing. Why not. The style may get called as a […]
Listening to Clifford Jarvis
Clifford Jarvis was always best known to me as Sun Ra’s drummer, and as the drummer on a number of records I saw in the store, but never bought. A hard bopper turned free guy. […]
Drum solo transcription: Tony Williams – Moment’s Notice – 01
In honor of what would have been Tony Williams’s 76th birthday, here’s the first part of a solo I’ve been listening to since college— Troyland apartments at USC, 1988, to be exact. I put this […]
Transcription: Tony Williams – Life Suite, Part 2
Some more from that self-titled Stanley Clarke album. I must have gotten the record in high school. Nobody ever told me to get it, I was just rooting through the stacks at the used record […]
Lopsy Lu revisited
Someone left a rather odd comment on my old Lopsy Lu transcription, of Tony Williams playing with Stanley Clarke, and I saw that my own notes from that 2015 post are also rather obscure, so I […]
Tony Williams interview
A nice 1983 interview with Tony Williams in Downbeat magazine, by Paul De Barros. Shared on Twitter by Richard Scheinin of SFJazz. Tony talked a little bit about his time studying with Alan Dawson: What […]
Cymbal sounds: Tony-like
I was rooting around in my music listening to ride cymbal sounds, and was surprised to find, in pretty short order, a number of things similar to Tony Williams’s famous cymbal— similar to it, or […]
Daily best music in the world: Tony Williams solo
I’m still having a hard time writing anything, so here’s a really great open drum solo played by Tony Williams, in a concert video with Jean Luc Ponty and Stanley Clarke. This is in 1972, […]