Friday, July 03, 2015

Basic jazz method with varying cymbal pattern

Please forgive the lack of posting here— it's been in the high 90s/low 100s in Portland for over a week, and it's putting a serious damper on my productivity. The climate in the Pacific Northwest is extremely mild, and there's about a 30° window in which we Cascadian types will not feel oppressed by the weather for being too cold or too hot.

I like using the early easy parts of Syncopation (Progressive Steps To... by Ted Reed, of course) as well as the harder middle part, with which jazz students spend so much time. This is a basic method for doing some different things with the left hand along with a varying ride cymbal pattern, using pp. 10-11 in Reed, called Lesson 4 in the new edition of the book. We'll be playing the book rhythms on the cymbal, adding hihat on 2 and 4, and filling in with the left hand in various ways. To save space on the page, I'm not writing out examples as they appear in the book.




Swing the 8th notes. Some of the patterns will have the left hand quarter note triplets crossing the barline, which is a little difficult to read at first. You can also do the left hand moves we normally use with the Pages o' coordination.

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