Groove o' the day: Zigaboo Modeliste - People Say

Today's groove o' the day is Zigaboo Modeliste's part from People Say, by The Meters:

The 16ths are half-swung in the New Orleans style ("in between the cracks", as Stanton Moore calls it). Listen to the recording for variations in the bass drum part- often he'll add it on the "&-a" of 1 of the first measure. The variations in the hihat part are basically optional- it would sound just as good with 8th notes all the way through.

YouTube audio after the break:

Look, just take whatever they want to give you

Something no one needs,
yet strangely not free.

What better way to welcome a new (he's actually been doing this longer than me) colleague to my blogroll, and thank him for linking to my Playing Quieter post, than to disagree with him vehemently about something else? I came across Steve Goold's blog, and was about to dive into his nice fat list of archive topics-- which includes a lot of substantial pieces about just the sort of stuff we're interested in here-- but I got waylaid on his front page by this post about whether you deserve to get paid:

"Listen, the world doesn’t owe you anything. Just because you practiced and studied and composed doesn’t mean that what you do is valuable to anyone besides you. The worst thing you can do for your music career, from my humble perspective, is to adopt a sense of entitlement. That is the fast track to becoming jaded and burnt out and a failure.

Music is not a business. It’s not a good or a service. It’s an ART. Art expresses, art probes, art challenges, and art entertains. Expression/challenge/entertainment are not things that anybody really NEEDS. The entertainment industry is by definition expendable.

No one NEEDS entertainment, but many people WANT entertainment. And it is from that angle that I humbly suggest to you that your job as a musician is to demonstrate to anyone and everyone that you have what they want." 

Hmmmm. More of this, and my comments after the break:

Learning Wilcoxon with Philly Joe

Another thing I stumbled across completely by accident here. Writing in Modern Drummer in 2011, Jim Payne tells about studying with Philly Joe Jones- specifically, on working on a Charles Wilcoxon solo with him, Rolling in Rhythm, from Rudimental Swing Solos:

"We broke the solo into four-bar phrases. Philly Joe was very particular about the accents. He played them about twice as loud as the other notes, which were treated more like filler.

The first two bars of "Rolling In Rhythm" are based on 16th-note double-stroke rolls. Starting on the "&" of 3 in bar 3, we have three successive five-stroke rolls. Each roll takes up three 8th notes, creating a three-over-four feel. This motif is used throughout the solo and is a very useful technique for adding rhythmic interest to any style of playing.

Philly Joe would also play the solo on a pillow so there was no bounce at all, or he would use brushes. Practicing that way definitely helps strengthen your hands and wrists.

Measures 5 and 6 are pretty straightforward. Just make sure the accents come out strong. Measures 7 and 8 are fairly easy to play because of the long roll in bar 7. The three-beat five-stroke roll happens again in measure 8. The phrase ends with an accent on 4. The two 16th notes at the end of the line are a pickup into the next measure. When I practiced this solo. I repeated each four-bar phrase until I got it down.

Philly Joe talked about how you don't hit down to make the sound-you pull the sound out of the drums."

Continued after the break...

A treasure trove: WKCR Soundscape project

I just googled this up, from the WKCR 89.9 New York radio site: a duo performance by Ed Blackwell and saxophonist Charles Brackeen, recorded in 1980 at:

Soundscape[,] a New York performance venue founded and curated by Verna Gillis. Between 1979 and 1983, Soundscape offered specialized programming of Latin Jazz, Afro-Cuban music, avant-garde improvised music, and “world music” performers from many nations. Many Soundscape shows were recorded and the library of recordings has been donated by Gillis to the WKCR permanent archives, for broadcast on air and to be made available on the web.

There are a bunch of other interesting things- a group called Commitment, featuring Denis Charles, who we talked about a few days ago, a Sunny Murray solo performance, a Rashied Ali duo concert, a very cool Tito Peunte concert, and more.

And digging a little deeper into the WKCR site, there's also a page of interviews and in-studio performances by people like Don Cherry, Milford Graves, Archie Shepp, Lee Konitz, Dewey Redman, and others. Definitely worth spending a bunch with this one.

DBMITW: Jazz at the Philharmonic

This is from a Jazz at the Philharmonic album from 1949 that I dug out of my father's record collection back in the early 80's, and I've been carrying it around ever since. It's got Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Roy Eldridge, Hank Jones, and Buddy Rich playing some pretty honking jam session style stuff. That trombone player is a guy named Tommy Turk.



That's what they used to call dropping bombs, what Buddy is doing there.

The record is labeled "New Volume 7 (formerly Vols. 12 and 13)"; you probably can't find the LP, but you can get it from Amazon. 

After the break is Lester Leaps In, from the same record, which I have to include because I love Lester Young's solo on it.

Your own drumming blog: final thoughts

...or on the blog. Thanks Librarian.net
and Timothy Vollmer.

A few final thoughts on writing your own drumming blog, and things I forget to mention in our previous entries. I know I promised to outline my workflow for a downloadable post, but this writing-about-non-drumming stuff is getting to be a grind. If you want to know about it- how to use ftp, or accomplish any of the obscure Finale tasks you need to know to make a decent-looking pdf- email me your question and I'll do a dedicated post about it in the future.


Copyright, fair use, and just not being a jerk
This is largely a sharing medium, so it's a good idea to get at least a passing acquaintance with this, so you do it legally, ethically, and gentlemanly-ly. In general:

• Credit and link to non-original material- both the original author and your online source- or chain of sources. Like if someone on the Drummerworld forum posts a link to something written by someone else, published in a magazine, and posted on the Four On The Floor blog, it's good to credit and link to the referring DW user, FOTF, the author, and the magazine.  
• Don't copy the whole thing. You're allowed to excerpt; you're not allowed to republish without permission.
• Don't link to copyright-infringing sites. I've mostly stayed true to that one, though I've bent it occasionally for the greater good, when it's basically harm-free. That's what I tell myself, anyway. But linking to pirated material that is currently available commercially, especially by living artists, does actually hurt people. And by people, I mean artists. Not corporations.  

Quite a bit more after the break:

I love my records

And yes, that is a copy of Judas Priest's Hell Bent For Leather in there...

Elvin's Afro-Waltz: in 5/4, part 2

Man, I've been writing way too many words recently. Let's get back to the drums. I'm still spending most of my time with page one of this series, but here's another variation on the Elvin Jones Afro-Waltz, again adapted into 5/4, this time using "my" hihat part  (it's just a little unusual and I happen to play it a lot) of dotted quarter notes starting on beat 2:

I'll say again that it's I strongly advise doing these with the tom moves. It's had a not-insignificant effect on my playing, in areas and ways I did not expect.

Get the pdf

Your own drumming blog: software

Continuing our little series on getting your own drumming blog going, today we'll look at the software I use , and that might be helpful to you. I try to use free software whenever possible. Your computer OS may include acceptable versions of some of these; and if you don't like my choices, you can look for free alternatives on Sourceforge. Lifehacker is also a good source for software recommendations.

Apart from routine web browsing, and things that can be done within the Blogger interface, the tasks I have to do include writing (text and music), transcribing, notating music (is it still called copying when you do it on the computer?), generating pdfs and jpegs of notation, editing pdfs, editing images, uploading files to the server, editing audio, and creating/editing videos. Here's what I use to do all of that:


Transcribe! is the best transcription software I've found. Not free, unfortunately. There is an open source program which came bundled with my new Free Geek Linux box, Transcriber. It's made for transcribing speech, but could easily be used for music.

Audacity. Audio editing software. Can replace Transcribe!, though it may be a little more ungainly to use for transcribing. I mainly use it for making sampled playalong loops, for assembling podcasts, and for making excerpts of recorded music.

Finale, Sibelius, or the free MuseScore. Or other music notation program. I use Finale, and frankly the program is a behemoth and all-around big PITA, but I've figured out how to do most everything I need to do fairly quickly, and it will likely take me more time than I will save to relearn it all with another program so, so it looks like I'll be with Finale for awhile. People say Sibelius is easier to use. I haven't heard a lot of feedback about MuseScore, but it's free and open source, which we like.

CutePDF is what I use to generate the pdfs you download from the site. It operates like a pseudo-printer- you print the file in Finale, selecting CutePDF as the as the printer instead of your regular hardware printer.

Continued after the break:

Metronome perspectives

There's an excellent piece on the Modern Drummer site getting views on metronome use from a number of top drummers and educators. I've excerpted some of the best bits, but go read the whole thing.


David Stanoch:
One tip for making friends with your metronome, which comes directly from a 1984 Modern Drummer interview with [Andy] Newmark, is to imagine the click to be your friend. Andy said he thinks of the late, great studio percussion icon Ralph MacDonald playing a cowbell. By making that his mindset, he could relax and play comfortably with the metronome’s time.



George Marsh:

As a practice tool, I like to use the metronome as a guide to help check rhythmic accuracy. And it can be used in creative ways. Back at a recording session in 1973, I had the pleasure of hearing African master drummer Kwasi Badu play a bell pattern using a metronome to mark the third note of each pulse in 12/8 meter. He heard the metronome as a representation of the beginning of one of the supporting drum parts, which didn’t start on the downbeat. Badu then proceeded to build on the bell pattern with the metronome still playing in its displaced position. The piece was a version of the West African dance Adowa. Kwasi overdubbed all of the parts this way.

From then on, I tried to think of many ways to make use of the metronome more creatively. One way is to set the metronome to any tempo and then play completely freely, with the only rule being that I keep listening—but not adhering to—the metronome. I just let myself fly around the beat. After doing this for a few minutes, I then land on the beat and play in time.


Jeremy Hummel :
Going around the turns. Most drummers, at some point, struggle with speeding up when playing fills, especially in transitional moments (verse to chorus, chorus to bridge, etc). Fills should be played in time, with taste and musicality. I find the best fills to be an extension of the groove, rather than a disruption. Practicing beats and fills with a metronome will help to keep the heads bopping—and not stopping.

More after the break: