Swing coordination: Dahlgren & Fine format — 01

In the swing section of their book 4-Way Coordination, Marvin Dahlgren and Eliot Fine created a fairly ingenious framework for writing related exercises in multiple time signatures. With my Pages o' Coordination I've been following their basic approach— writing an ostinato for cymbal, bass, and hihat, plus independent snare drum parts— but in one meter only. So, I thought I would try writing in their actual format, using here an ostinato we've explored before, distilled from Elvin Jones's groove in 6 on Out Of This World.

I should mention that reading single measures of fully mapped-out drum parts is not the ideal way to practice— it's not the way we read and play actual music. What we are doing here is acquiring things that can't be arrived at through more practical/realistic Syncopation-based methods; the patterns are a little too hard, or are too irregular.

Swing the 8th notes, and do the tom moves. Play each measure individually, then combine measures to make other meters; the main ones are given on the first line, but there are other possibilities. There are a couple of ways of making 7/4, for example.

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