VOQOTD: Al Foster's listening habits

 From the Small's interview archive:

“He’s in it all the time. He’s listening all the time. He’s got kind of a small range of stuff he listens to over and over again: Monk, Bird, earlier Miles Davis recordings, Sonny Rollins…he’s addicted to that music. He’s a real student of the music, and a student of the greats. He has no time for anything else. You might put something on that could be killing to you, but he’ll be like, “Eh…I don’t know…” He’s got very particular tastes. I guess as you get older, you develop that. You make your circle a little bit smaller…”

— Bassist Doug Weiss on Al Foster

A follow up question:

Do you think that intentionally narrowing his scope in that manner strengthens his artistic voice?

Yeah, I think so. He’s got a very strong identity, and very identifiable sound and approach to drumming, different than anyone else I’ve played with. Other people share that aesthetic of hearing the “big picture;” he’s hearing the entire piece of music as it’s happening, he’s not just hearing some hip shit on the drums (although he certainly plays a lot of very hip shit on the drums). I think that’s probably the biggest piece- his sense of radar, of being able to anticipate what’s going to happen, and help things go in a certain direction, without being pushy. He’s really not pushy as an accompanist. He’s very giving and selfless in that way, but still able to carry on this little dialogue with himself within the kit. That transfers out to the people that play with him, if they can pick up on it.

DBMITW: Eddie Palmieri

While we're on the Salsa music, here's a Mozambique entitled Comparsa De Los Locos, by Eddie Palmieri, from his Vamonos Pal' Monte album from 1971. Nicky Marrero plays drums, along with several percussionists.




What the heck, let's do another one— there's a modern cha cha  from the same great record after the break:

Clave capers

Please don't ask me about the title of this piece— I just wrote the first two words I thought of. I think there's a Billy Taylor tune called Cuban Capers I played once... it's not important. Afro-Cuban music is not my area of expertise, so I'll just say that what we're about here is getting better acquainted with the triplet “pull” of the clave rhythm by combining its 4/4 and 6/8 versions. Hopefully we'll all come away from these exercises with a little better sense of the malleability of the rhythm.

I thought I was being a very clever student by devising this exercise, but upon consulting my copy of Conversations In Clave, I see that the author of that book has already written something very similar. But I guess that means we're not totally off base with this:

Play the top line with the right hand, and the bottom line with the left. You should also play each exercise leading with the left hand, and with all other combinations of limbs, and do them all with the measures reversed, in the 2-3 position. You might also try playing half notes in the RH or LF, while playing the exercises with all combinations of the remaining limbs. Play the clave rhythm strongly, and the filler softly, so the clave comes through clearly.

Typo alert: the last note on the first line should be played with the left hand.

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Annals of wrong things: ride cymbal technique

I try to run a positively-focused, ah, ship around here, and I hope not to make a regular feature out of this, but occasionally things are put before you that you just have to respond to, and crankily so. In this case, it's a video by someone who wants to help us with our jazz ride cymbal technique:




I was with him 100% until he started moving. After about 0:08, I have some complaints:

• The grip in “position 2” is unlike anything I've seen in drumming, and I don't want to be told that it's “important” to play this way. What he's doing appears to be an exaggerated form of the “whip” stroke some drummers do, in which the arm leads the motion, and the thing that actually contacts the instrument— the bead of the stick— is the last thing to move. I'm not really a fan of it, even when it's done correctly, which I'll go into another time. 
• I'm in favor of a solid quarter note pulse when playing a swing feel, but this thing he's doing with ff quarter notes and a pp 'skip' note, is not musically viable— utterly useless on a real ride cymbal, playing real music. I don't know where the idea that the skip note should be “felt, not heard” came from— it wasn't from listening to music or from speaking to a professional jazz musician. 
• The elbow motion he introduces after 1:55 appears to be totally gratuitous choreography, and not a natural part of the the stroke.  
• The end result does not swing, which is supposed to be the point of all of this. Playing your time feel this way would draw some strange looks from the other musicians in a real playing situation. 

Conclusion: There was a time when you could invent improved ways of doing things and have them utterly fail in anonymity, but now, thanks to YouTube, you get to do it on a world stage, while confusing many more people than was previously possible. The technique described in this video was invented in the practice room, and is only part way through its evolution; the remainder of it— which will occur on its first usage in an actual jazz playing situation— will play out approximately like the aftermath to this photograph:

State of things

Here's an interesting preview of Who Owns The Future?, a new book by tech guy Jaron Lanier, who discusses the current free everything/donated labor/winner-take-all paradigm, and what it bodes for the middle class and democracy in general, using the creative class— you and me— as his Exhibit A.

[A] lot of your book is about the survival of the middle class in the digital age, the importance of a broad middle class as we move forward. You argue that the middle class, unlike the rich and the poor, is not a natural class but was built and sustained through some kind of intervention. Has that changed in the last decade or two as the digital world has grown?

Well, there’s a lot of ways. I mean, one of the issues is that in a market society, a middle class has always required some little artificial help to keep going. There’s always academic tenure, or a taxi medallion, or a cosmetology license, or a pension. There’s often some kind of license or some kind of ratcheting scheme that allows people to keep their middle-class status.

In a raw kind of capitalism there tend to be unstable events that wipe away the middle and tend to separate people into rich and poor. So these mechanisms are undone by a particular kind of style that is called the digital open network.

Music is a great example where value is copied. And so once you have it, again it’s this winner-take-all thing where the people who really win are the people who run the biggest computers. And a few tokens, an incredibly tiny number of token people who will get very successful YouTube videos, and everybody else lives on hope or lives with their parents or something.

More after the break— keep reading:

Groove o' the day: funk samba

Today we have a studio-funk style samba by Ivan Conti of Azymuth, on the tune Manhã, from the group's 1974 self-titled album:

The right hand alternates between the bell of the cymbal, and the regular playing spot. He also plays the hihat with his foot along with the bell notes, but the beat was looking pretty cluttered, so I left it out. Throughout the song he varies this a fair amount— he'll often play the regular spot on the cymbal on the two and four, and play the bell more sporadically.

During the break sections he does this simplified pattern, with the hihat:

From the same section later in the tune, a looser version of that same thing, with some variable ghost notes on the snare drum:

Audio after the break:

Page o' coordination: 5/8 + 5/8 — 01

Another page o' coordination in 5/4. From the amount of time we spend dealing with playing in 5, you might get the impression that I think it's pretty damned important. I really don't, but it just happens to be one of the things I'm working on right now, and there aren't a whole lot of great materials available for that.

Per the title of the piece, the ostinato is composed of two measures of 5/8:

Playing this with a swing interpretation, the second 5/8 sits a little differently than the first one, so don't let that throw you. In fact, you can actually safely ignore the 5/8+5/8 construction when swinging the exercises. This page should also work well with even 8ths, either keeping the triplets, or changing them to whatever 8th-and-16th rhythm makes sense. And be sure to do the tom moves.

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