Rock drill

Here's a rock drumming practice system, that is related to my harmonic coordination improved method, and also this post on developing rock fills. I've been using it with students of all ages, and have been doing it myself for getting in the zone for a rock recording session later in the week.

I'm finding it to be an extremely effective method for learning rock as an open texture, moving around the drums and using the whole instrument. The way people learn rock drumming is typically centered around learning beats, learning “parts” to songs, and learning fills. It's all very segregated, and way too nailed down, so I see a lot of students who are afraid to move off of the hihat, afraid to deviate from learned parts, and prone to panicking when attempting fills. This method gets us into a freer, more Keith Moon-like approach, with a driving 8th note pulse.

We'll be playing two kinds of notes in this system:

Cymbal and bass drum in unison. Any cymbal(s), played with either hand, or both hands.

Snare and toms in unison. Any two drums played at the same time, or flams on any one drum. Using both hands obviously.

You can get your practice patterns from several sources:

Using the accented 8th note exercises in Syncopation on pp.47-49. Play the written accents on a cymbal + bass drum, play unaccented notes on the snare/toms. As always, ignore the stems-down bass drum part written in the book.

Using any page of 8th note and quarter note rhythms in Syncopation, e.g. pp. 10-11, 30-32, or 34-45. Play the book rhythm on the cymbal + bass drum, and fill in the spaces in the rhythm on the snare/toms, to make a constant 8th note rhythm:

I also use my special page of 3/4 rhythms, while playing with a practice loop in 4/4.

Using the first pages of Stick Control. Play R notes on cymbal + bass drum, play L notes on the snare/toms:

Since both hands are playing the drums portion, the only sticking decision we have to make is which hand to use on the cymbals. Start by playing them all with the right hand; then all with the left hand:

Then play the cymbal notes both hands in unison, on two different cymbals:

You could also alternate hands on the cymbal notes:

Having your cymbal moves too worked-out looks contrived, goofy— see YouTube “drum cover” star Cobus whatshisface and others like him for endless examples of that. You don't need to work it to death. There are other things to think about than am I able to follow a difficult sticking system on the cymbal portion.

Every drum and combination of drums you play has a specific effect. Spend some time exploring the possibilities moving around the toms, and figure out what sounds cool to you. With only two tom toms, the moves are kind of limited when you have your hands on two different drums. There's more room to experiment when you're playing both hands on the same drum, as flams. For example:

When doing the flams, do them rock & roll style, with both hands at roughly an even volume. I suggest playing them all left-handed— meaning the right hand falls first:

 Then you can turn them into 16th notes just by displacing the left hand a little bit. The entire time you've been doing this system, you've been practicing getting your 16th note fills in time.

The idea here is to cover a lot of easy patterns, that are easy to move around the drums and cymbals, focusing on the timing, the sound, and the energy. I think you should do these with a practice loop or song, alternating measures (or several measures, or partial measures) of the drill with whatever rock beat you like for the song. No pressure at all to make the changes on the 1, or to follow a repetitive practice phrase exactly. Scroll through my practice loops and see if you can find one that is a good tempo and feel for you.

Practice loop: Tunji

Here's a practice loop made from a long sample from Tunji, by John Coltrane. It's from the album Coltrane, which is one of my favorite records in the world— everyone should own it. Also see my transcription of Elvin Jones's playing on this tune. Print version is available in my 2011 Book of the Blog.

Tempo is quarter note = 109. It's an easy and fun loop for working on your triplet-oriented jazz materials.

Transcription: Philly Joe Jones - Let's Cool One

Here's Philly Joe Jones's drum solo on Let's Cool One, from the Clark Terry album In Orbit. Just the rhythm section plays the tune here: Thelonious Monk, Sam Jones, and Philly Joe. It's a rather old fashioned way of soloing, with a lot of rudimental activity played on the snare drum, while the feet keep time, with the bass drum used mostly at phrase endings, and sparing use of the tom toms, and no cymbals at all.

So, it's mostly about the hands, and is pretty technically dense at times. Jones mostly plays the hihat on 2 and 4 and feathers quarter notes on the bass drum throughout— except where I've written something else for the bass drum. I usually don't indicate stickings in my transcriptions, but I've given some here, where it's clear what he's doing. A couple of items are sort of showy, featured drum solo type of things: the fp rolls starting at bar 9, and the running triplets with the left hand while the right hand plays the tom toms, in bars 19-20. Bar 13-14 will require some special attention if you want to learn how to play it.

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Groove o' the day: Chico Hamilton waltz

Here's Chico Hamilton playing his version of an Elvin-type waltz in 1962. I've always assumed it was Elvin's thing, that everybody else was copying. Maybe it was a type of groove everyone hip was doing, and Elvin just did it best. Chico Hamilton was an LA player who was not particularly highly thought of as a drummer, but he was a successful bandleader and had a lot of high profile people pass through his group in the 50s and 60s.

This is from the first section of the tune Lady Gabor, from the album Passin' Thru. I found this in my dad's record collection, and was surprised to meet the trombonist on it, George Bohanon, in the jazz department at USC. George was a grad student at SC when I was there, about 25 years after this recording.

Swing the 8th notes. That third tom tom note on beat 1 of the second measure happens occasionally; often he plays it almost inaudibly. Hamilton plays this pretty repetitively.

CYMBAL OF THE MINIT: 20" Leon Collection Ride - “Serge” - 1600g

A new recurring item, featuring individual cymbals available on my Cymbalistic site. Mainly I sell CYMBAL & GONG cymbals; the Leon Collection cymbals are a special line made by C&G's master cymbal smith. They're generally on the brighter side, with a very dense, full harmonic profile. I delivered several of these cymbals to Germany in June, and the drummers who played them concluded that Leons are “like Paiste 602s, only better.” It's hard to find a good bright-sounding cymbal.

Most of the Leons I have played at C&G HQ have been crashes, but we're been seeing more rides recently, and I really dig them. There are also some 18 and 20" light flat rides on order.

So, today's CYMBAL OF THE MINIT:

20" Leon Collection Ride “Serge” - 1600g - $410.00
Beautiful, lush, pleasingly-bright extra-light ride. Complex but smooth harmonic profile. Great left side cymbal, or main cymbal for acoustic applications. Handles surprisingly well as a ride cymbal despite the very light weight. This will be a great cymbal for recording.



Our friend Michael Griener bought “Hector”, the slightly-funkier companion to this cymbal. Hit that link to compare them. Michael is an excellent and very active jazz drummer and college instructor based in Berlin. He bought a complete set of Leons (as well as a couple of Merseybeat rides), and now says “Who wants to buy my Spizzichino? I don’t play it anymore!”

Hit the EMAIL TODD link in the sidebar if you want to purchase this fantastic cymbal.

Visit CYMBALISTIC to check out a lot of other great cymbals by Cymbal & Gong.

Harmonic coordination improved - triplets

Here's the triplet-based companion for the harmonic coordination improved warm-up. It's a less miserable and soul-destroying, more musically relatable way of playing exercises of the type found in the harmonic coordination section of Dahlgren & Fine's 4-Way Coordination. A famously painful book. Most of our practice methods are based on finding the easiest, most natural, most economical ways of doing things. This harmonic coordination thing is about practicing inconvenient ways of doing things. We're training our limbs to expect the unexpected. 

This is a rapidly developing body of stuff, and I'm still settling on the best way of presenting it. With triplets, the best way seems to be as follows. This method has two elements: 1) orchestrating a written snare drum pattern on the drum set, 2) playing the resulting drum set pattern using a variety of stickings.  Read the voluminous notes on this method here and here. 

I've been teaching this method using the triplet accent pages from Syncopation— pp. 53-57. There are a lot of patterns, and a lot of stickings to use with them, and if you just take them in order you'll never finish. You could start with patterns 1, 3, 11, 12, 17, 25, 26, 27, 29, 35, 61, 62.

The orchestration works as follows. Using this pattern from the book as an example:

Ignore the written bass drum part— the stems-down part. Play accented notes on the cymbal, with bass drum in unison. Play the unaccented notes on the snare drum, with hihat (played with the foot) in unison, like so:

You can also do this system without playing the hihat:

Play the accent patterns from the book applying the above orchestration, using the following stickings:

RH only
LH only
Four beats all RH / four beats all LH
Two beats all RH / two beats all LH  

RRR LLL 

LLL RRR

RH plays cymbal notes, LH plays snare notes (I call this “natural orchestration”)
LH plays cymbal notes, RH plays snare notes 

Alternating, starting with RH
Alternating starting with LH  

RLL LLL
LRR RRR
RLL LLR
LRR RRL

These one-beat stickings will be a little more challenging:

RLL RLL
LRR LRR
RRL RRL
LLR LLR
RLR RLR
LRL LRL

 This method generates a lot of material to play through, so you have to use your head, and think about which starting patterns you're going to use. Many or most of the patterns from pp. 53-54 of Syncopation are functionally duplicates for the purposes of this method. Rather than worrying about completing the system, you should just try to do this method for a set amount of time, striving for moderate discomfort the entire time. You should be able to get through the exercises, but it should be hard enough that you have to concentrate. If you don't strongly feel like doing something else, maybe you should try some harder patterns. 

Using this Melvin Sparks practice loop will make this rather tedious method a lot more tolerable, and help demonstrate the musical purpose of what we're doing here.

Vashkar

The other day I listed some often-played tunes that had some kind of an mystique, at least in my mind. Here's a tune that nobody ever plays, with a lot of mystique. Apropos of nothing— I've just been thinking about it a lot.

Vashkar is a rather impenetrable, hardcore, short little tune— almost a miniature— written by Carla Bley. It has been recorded several times by Paul Bley, and Gary Burton, and Tony Williams Lifetime.

It's like an 8 bar blues written on a gas planet, with a Giant Steps-like air of pitilessness about it. It's not designed to be easy to play on the drums, and it's not amenable to just playing it and getting it by vibe. But it's also weirdly attractive, and seems readable enough to make you want to learn it. Then when someone calls it sometime in the next 15 years, you can be the hard case who insists that you follow the form and make the hits on the solos.

It's not hard to whack out the notes. It is hard to just follow your nose and end up with a good performance. It doesn't develop in a normal way, or give you any room to do normal drummer things like fill, set up figures, or establish a groove.

Above is the lead sheet from Carla Bley's site. The best known chart is found in the original Real Book.

It's eight bars long— six bars of melody plus two bars of space. The opening theme is repeated in bar 5, sometimes with a subito mp dynamic change. Usually no repeat on the head in. Meter is 6/4, phrased as 4+2/4, but there's never a strong feel of being in 6. Often the 2 side is anticipated, so several measures are phrased like this:

In the fourth measure there's the hit on 2, which makes it feel like there's an odd measure. It actually makes the whole last half of the tune feel random.

The Gary Burton and Steve Swallow version on Hotel Hello is best known. On that arrangement the main punches are hit without any kind of set up, which emphasizes that random feeling. The live version below, with Bob Moses on drums, follows that same arrangement, maintaining the form and rhythmic structure during the solos. Bob doesn't set anything up on the head in, either.





Here are some different recordings of it, starting with Hotel Hello:





So, the Burton version is the hard one, where you have to actually know the tune, and be able to blow over form while catching the rhythmic stuff. It's easier when the solos are free— you can read/fake your way through the head and then just wing it. Most of the other recordings do that.

On Paul Bley's record with Pat Metheny, and Jaco Pastorious, Bruce Ditmas plays it in a more aggressive fusion-era way, which is great. In this arrangement there are some added kicks in the last two bars. The other version with Ditmas is basically completely free.

The version from Paul Bley's Footloose has the tune with a normal light rhythm section accompaniment, and more open solos. Pete La Roca is on drums, and maintains the 6 feel throughout. I imagine a lot of people give it this kind of Ida Lupino-like treatment.

The Tony Williams version uses a different arrangement to feature the drums, and him slaughtering the universe on it is part of what gives the tune its aura. He plays it faster than usual, and the melodic phrases are spaced out. Cindy Blackman's version is kind of strange— it's like a tribute rendition.

Hopefully, the tune eventually begins to feel like a long, strange vamp or repeating A section. You learn to follow its little moves, and gradually you're able to get through the tune without stepping on the other parts, and maybe actually make a creative contribution, and take it somewhere interesting on the solos.

Max's rubadub - transcribed phrases

Some excerpts from a very large transcription I'm working on— Max Roach's entire performance on Freedom Suite, by Sonny Rollins, which I plan on releasing as an e-book. All 19 bloody minutes of it. These excerpts from the first section of the piece highlight Max's rubadub-like thing I mentioned in the linked post.

The concept and underlying pattern is almost exactly the same as Mel Lewis's thing*, except Max maintains the complete cymbal rhythm, which stays in 4, or shifts backwards/forwards once or twice in a four bar phrase— it doesn't have the running 3/4 feeling of Mel's thing. Max's thing really seems to hang off of a RLRR RLRR sticking pattern, in swing 8th notes; there are a lot of snare hits on the & of 1/3. Hit the link above to see that broken down.

* - That is, Mel Lewis's thing as we've been exploring it on this site— which is entirely based on Chris Smith's very helpful explanation of it. I need to make some transcriptions of Mel's thing and get a clearer idea of how he actually played it.

To highlight the idea we're studying here, I've removed all dynamics and articulations, and edited a few of them slightly. Many of the four bar examples can be played two bars at a time, repeating. On the recording there is very little audible hihat played with the foot; you can play it on 2 and 4, or leave it out.

I've been focusing on how this connects to Mel Lewis's playing, but also see Billy Higgins's playing for something very similar to this. Higgins was a generation later, and was very influenced by Max.

Get the pdf

Ten tunes: heavy standards

Ten more tunes. These are some standards that have kind of a serious aura, that are reasonably-to-very likely to get called. They're not necessarily very hard, but they demand to be approached with respect. It's a subjective thing. Several have unusual forms; I don't feel like any of them just play themselves. Maybe this category only has meaning to me, I don't know.


All or Nothing at All

Alone Together

Central Park West

Chelsea Bridge

I'll Remember April

Invitation

Mr. PC

The Night Has a Thousand Eyes

Old Devil Moon

Upper Manhattan Medical Group


For example: I'll Remember April is a commonplace tune with a deeper vibe happening. Alone Together has an odd form. There are several trio recordings of Joe Henderson playing long versions of Invitation that are very hardcore. Strayhorn ballads are very deep and always demand special treatment.

These tunes are most likely to come up with better players. I'll Remember April and Alone Together are the ones you'll mostly likely encounter first. The Night Has a Thousand Eyes also seems to be real popular these days.

Daily best music in the world: Bruce Ditmas

Honoring a new Facebook friend: Bruce Ditmas, an American drummer living in Rome.

Here's something he played on with Paul Bley, Jaco Pastorius, and Pat Metheny:



He's also on some Gil Evans records, including the Jimi Hendrix album, and this bananas version of the Brazilian tune Nana, from Where Flamingos Fly. He shares drumming credits with Lenny White on that album.

Groove o' the day: Philly Joe Afro 6

From the Sonny Rollins album Newk's Time, another individualistic version of an Afro 6/8 groove, played by Philly Joe Jones on Asiatic Raes, a Kenny Dorham tune.

On the snare line, the x is a rim click. It sounds like he's playing with just a snare and floor tom, no small tom. They continue the 6/8 feel for part of Sonny's solo, and it feels a little labored; you get the feeling that in 1957 it was still a pretty exotic style. 

Page o' coordination: Max's rubadub?

This is a page of jazz comping exercises based on Max Roach's playing on Sonny Rollins's Freedom Suite, which I'm transcribing right now. There's a lot of interplay between the snare drum and bass drum, and there's clearly a concept happening; everything seems to hang off of comping notes on the & of 1/& of 3. It jumped out at me immediately like “this is a thing”, very similar to Mel Lewis's rubadub thing, but not.

How many pages of jazz coordination patterns does the world need? I don't know. This isn't about writing more patterns, it's about forming a concept. Max's playing on Freedom Suite, Mel Lewis's thing, those are concepts. Also with John Riley's thing, with all the things we do with Syncopation, there's a concept. You don't really get that by just playing through the endless junk in Advanced Techniques, or whatever jazz book.

Swing the 8th notes. Use patterns 1, 7, and 13 as your key. Think of them as a sticking pattern played in a swing rhythm: RLRR RLRR. Or RBRR RBRR. Or the two combined with ex. 13-18. Use those as your foundation, learn them well, and hang the added notes off of them.

If you listen to the recording there's a lot more happening than is represented in this one little idea. I'll probably rewrite this page, or at least add to it, if I can deduce any kind of formula to Max's thing.

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Ruff bossa on the drums

This is something I was working on with a Skype student* recently: ideas for practicing Alan Dawson's “ruff bossa” method on the drum set.

...first, nobody ask why it's called ruff bossa, because I don't know. It doesn't make any sense.

But, it's a really handy method for soloing, kicks and set-ups, and modern, textural playing in jazz, using Syncopation by Ted Reed. It has an easy hand-to-hand motion that that seems adapted to the snare drum, so it's especially good when playing brushes. Here I'll give a few ideas for practicing it. Hit the link above to get a summary of the basic method.

* - Did you know I teach lessons online via Skype and Facetime? I do. Hit 

the email Todd link in the sidebar to inquire. 

Anyhow, for the following examples we'll use the rhythm from line 3 on p. 34 in Syncopation:

Here's the ruff bossa pattern for that rhythm, as it would be played on one surface:

1. Play the accents on the cymbals:

2. As above, add bass drum on all of the cymbal notes:

3. As above, but add bass drum only on the accents corresponding with the long notes in the book rhythm— anything longer than an untied 8th note. The example rhythm has long notes on the 1, 2, and & of 3.

4. Play only the accents corresponding with long notes on the cymbal, plus bass drum. So the remaining accents are played on the snare. This is a way for playing kicks and setups, but is usable also in soloing.

5. Play on the snare drum, except the accent on the 1, and the last accent in the measure; play those on the cymbal and bass drum:

A lot of the patterns in the book don't give you an accent on 1, so obviously that won't work for all of them.

6.  Play the last accent in the measure on the cymbal/bass drum:

An obvious thing I didn't mention is to move the accents to the tom toms— or any part of the pattern to the toms. This method has such a strong RLRL motion (albeit with occasional doubles on either hand) that the possibilities for moving to the toms are kind of limited, and not real interesting to me.

You could play through the entire system all of these ways— running the interpretation while reading pp. 34-45 in Syncopation. Or just use this as a guide for different things to try while you work your way through it.

Protecting your business

Maybe not.

This is a situation I had recently, which is common for teachers working with music stores, teaching studios, or other services. Many of those businesses require teachers to sign contracts to keep them from poaching students, sometimes to stop them from competing with them generally.

I worked with a business like that, where I would get paid half my normal rate to teach at students' homes. Presumably it would be worth it if they were able to fill out my schedule a bit. During the two years I was with them, they never provided me with many students. They students they did refer to me were good kids, in supportive households, but retention was poorer than in my own practice. When the following thing happened, I was teaching one weekly half hour student through them.

The company owner called me for a meeting. I thought he was just checking in to see how I was doing, and that we would talk about how to get me more students. So we can all make some more money. When we met I told him my own teaching business was doing well, and answered all of his many questions.

Increasingly it became clear that the non-compete contract was the primary reason for the meeting. There were probing questions about my recent business activities, the relationships between my ongoing students and my new referral students; about me teaching piano to some beginner students, which we had discussed doing with his business. I had been keeping a marimba for them, which they had previously been paying to store— he wanted to know if I was teaching anyone on it. He wanted to know about my activities in “his” part of town.

Basically, he was taking a proprietary interest in things that were none of his business, trying to find out if I was taking money out of his pocket.

Obviously, it was way out of line. No rational person would expose himself to this kind of scrutiny, and possible legal action, in exchange for $17.50 a week— that's what I was making with him at the time. Him thinking that employing me for $17.50/week entitled him to do that was very troubling.

This was my response to that meeting:

Hi [the business owner]— 

I was very surprised at the nature of our meeting yesterday— I was not expecting an interview about contract enforcement, and was very surprised to learn what you were construing as possibly infringing on my contract with [the business].  

It made me wonder if I understand our relationship correctly. I believed our arrangement was that I provide services at a substantially discounted rate in exchange for a) students in bulk, b) reduced office work. At present, with you offering a) negligible employment, and b) interviews about contract enforcement, it is objectively little more than an agreement for me not to compete with you (interpreted sweepingly) in exchange for very little. 

I sympathize with your business needs, but there is obviously no incentive for me to agree to a relationship on those terms. I can't conduct my own business while worrying about whether anything I do could be construed as conflicting with my contract with you. It would be very difficult if you were providing substantial employment for me; it is obviously impossible when you're giving me nothing.  

I am happy to continue offering my services as a feature of [the business's] product, with a verbal agreement to work ethically and respect that [the business's]contacts/clients are not my contacts/clients; I can't do it under the cloud of a sweepingly-interpreted non-compete contract. 

Please let me know how you want to proceed.  

Todd Bishop

His response was to refuse to continue the relationship without a contract, and I responded to agree to end the relationship. I have a fairly robust teaching business of my own, and it was not difficult to walk away from the speculative income they offered, but showed no sign of being able to deliver.

Just because there's some small amount of money involved, you do not have to tolerate any conditions people want to impose. Especially when it involves a contract— which always carries a background threat of legal action.

At some point, you have to move out of the just-out-of-college mindset, where you will take anything, and start acting like a professional, and protect your own interests. You are the talent, without whom they have no business. Beware of people who see you as simultaneously their employee and their competitor.

Transcription: Jack Dejohnette - Tennessee Waltz

Jack Dejohnette plays Tennessee Waltz! One of the most cursed tunes in the standard repertoire. I don't know what's going through his head here— maybe he's having a wonderful time. I know a couple of guys who will confidently tell you what Jack Dejohnette or anybody else is feeling based on what he's playing. I find that annoying, so let's leave it at this: for me it would be a bit of a struggle making a jazz performance out of this tune. There are a lot of funny tunes on Sonny Rollins's records. This is from Falling In Love With Jazz— made in 1989, which certainly has to be the low ebb for that tune as far as jazz musicians are concerned.

Here he's playing behind Jerome Harris's guitar solo, starting at 2:03.

There's a good amount of variation in the dynamics on the ride cymbal— quite a few accents with the shoulder of the stick. To me, that's a modern, post-Tony thing— I feel like I don't hear as much of that with drummers in the 50s. I notice at the end of phrases he'll accent before the 1, but still play the 1 with the bass drum. Not a lot of independence happening here; usually he's playing one foot or the other. There are a couple of standard Dejohnette licks near the end— similar to what he plays in this very old John Scofield transcription.

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Ten tunes: solid standards

Continuing our little ten tunes series of often-played tunes to learn— today's theme is solid standards; standards that are called a lot, that everyone still likes to play. Some things you play a thousand times and you want them permanently flushed (a list for another day?), but these are extremely durable— inherently pleasing and rewarding to play, for players of all levels.

There are multiple great recorded versions of all of these:


All the Things You Are

But Not For Me

Have You Met Miss Jones

I Could Write A Book

I Hear a Rhapsody

If I Should Lose You

If I Were a Bell

My Romance

The Song Is You

There Will Never Be Another You


There Will Never Be Another You may draw out a few whiners— it has to be one of the half dozen most played tunes ever— but it's still great. I get a little tired of playing All The Things You Are, but nobody else seems to.

CRUISE SHIP DRUMMER! rhythm guide

Everyone has seen things like this polluting the internet:

What fun. I get that I'm the only person who thinks these are the trashiest possible associations to attach to anything musical— judging from the delighted responses that always accompany someone reposting them. I just don't get the concept of this as a teaching aid. What, the student is going to remember to associate particular rhythms with a laundry list of quasi-food items, and then remember the notation like it's a hieroglyphic? And this is easier than just teaching them to count 1&2&?

And who says “grape, soda” anyway? “I'll have some cheese. Ravioli, please.”

Come on. If you're going to do this, do it right with this fun and educational, non-inane, CRUISE SHIP DRUMMER! approved “rhythm guide”:

3/4 rhythms - a special set

See, this is what I'm talking about: no matter how much drum stuff gets written, no matter how many thousands of pages of drum books I have in my studio, and even after having written a book on this very subject... I always need something else.

I was playing with a rumba practice loop in 2/2, doing a basic thing out of Syncopation, and began playing some variations in three-beat groupings— a basic meter-within-meter thing I/we do all the time— and it occurred to me that I could use a page of *all possible 3/4 rhythms with a note on beat 1, and no more than two notes in a row on consecutive 8th notes. It's easiest to do this one thing, at the speed I was doing it, with rhythms with those parameters. So:

At the bottom of the page there's a summary of the thing I was doing. I also marked with an * the patterns that have no more than two filler notes in a row. That's helpful when playing a rhythm on the cymbal, and filling in with the left hand. Another thing we do all the time.

* - I see I left off straight quarter notes. Oh well.

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Transcription: Mel Lewis fours

Here is Mel Lewis trading fours on Stoppin' at the Savoy, from Bob Brookmeyer's album The Blues Hot and Cold. These are pretty interesting. Lewis isn't anybody's idea of a chops guy, but he's not dumb. The fours begin at 3:49 in the track.

There are a couple of funny items— at one point he's throwing a stick down on the floor tom, hitting the rims. The part on the sixth line with the ruff right before the stick shot will take a little practice. Play this by itself, a lot, and work it up to speed:

It's a natural motion; you have to get the left stick onto the head to make the stick shot, so you just press it into the head on that note. We're not going for a quality buzz stroke there. I have a feeling Mel didn't practice it, but just played it on the job a few tens of thousands times.

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Page o' coordination: Simple 3:2

Coming at that 3:2 hemiola polyrhythm from the triplet side— all of our recent hemiola funk stuff has been using it in a duple subdivision. Here we'll use the 2 side as the primary pulse, played with both feet in unison, and the 3 played on the cymbal, felt as a quarter note triplet— the 12/8 rhythm here is equivalent to a quarter note triplet in 4/4.

I've written a hundred pages like this, and if you've done one of them, you know the method: learn the whole page as written, then drill it with my set of stock left hand moves.

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Groove o' the day: John Von Ohlen - Love for Sale

A Latin groove played by John Von Ohlen on Love For Sale, arranged for the Blue Wisp Big Band by Carroll DeCamp. From their famous album Butterfly. This was one of the first serious big band arrangements I ever played, in high school. It's funny, I barely remember working out a Latin groove for this, but I must have played something.

The groove is another quasi-Mozambique— at least Von Ohlen settles on that standard bell pattern by bar 5. He plays the bass drum lightly throughout; I've only written the accents. By the third measure he's playing half notes, then quarter notes around the fourth measure. The ending fill is played with both hands almost in unison on the same drum.

There's no YouTube link for this, but you should already have it. If you don't you'll have to scrounge it up from somewhere.

Q & A: Turned around

I received this question in the comments a while ago:

I wanted to ask you a quick question about listening to (not playing) up tempos. I find that sometimes my brain shifts the hi-hat 2&4 so that I am hearing them as the downbeats 1&3. I find it hard to correct this once it “settles in” and the music is flying by, unless there are some clear accents on the 1, for example. Do you have any tips for correcting my brain if this happens? Also, should I continue to listen if I know I'm not hearing it right? I know that sounds strange, but I feel like listening in the “wrong” way is training my brain to hear in the “wrong” way.

It's probably not a good idea to just go along hearing it wrong.

Although it's not a wrong instinct, if Michael Longo's book is any authority. Those are the accented beats. The problem is how we resolve what you're hearing with the real agreed-upon rhythmic structure, which says those beats are the 2 and 4.

You can try actually saying “2” (or “2, 4”) along with the hihat. Hopefully your counting instincts are developed enough to tell you that the 1 is therefore somewhere else. Or you could say “&” along with the hihat. That should really drive it home that these are not the downbeats. That would be counting the fast 4/4 in 2/2— 1 & 2 & instead of 1 2 3 4, both at the same rate. You could also try saying 4-1 or &-1 out loud.

I find that lapses like that happen to me less often as my rhythm and time improve— a not-insignificant part of which has centered around developing a healthy relationship with the 1 and 3. And with quarter notes in general. For many years I thought myself too hip to be thinking about that, and it ended up being a point of weakness in my playing.

Practice loop: slow blues

Here's a loop you're going to need this week, as I finish writing the 6/8 prep for my patented(?) Harmonic Coordination Improved™ method. Sampled from Melvin Sparks's Blues for JB, the tempo is a stately 66 bpm which should give you ample space to work out the coordination— for my thing, or anything else you need to do slow with a triplet feel.

The drummer here is playing a Midnight Special-type groove, with the hihat on the &s of the shuffle— on the skip notes. Maybe that beat has a name, I just know if from that tune.