In honor of what would have been Tony Williams's 76th birthday, here's the first part of a solo I've been listening to since college— Troyland apartments at USC, 1988, to be exact. I put this on and it just went BOOSH. Tune is Moment's Notice, from McCoy Tyner's album Supertrios. Tony and McCoy are both playing in freight train from hell mode on this. Massive power from both of them.
Begins at 3:42 after the solo piano chorus, ends when the piano comes back in. I'll try to transcribe the rest of it over the coming weeks.
Tempo is 290. Nothing too technical, but lots of overlapping snare drum and bass drum. I haven't really analyzed what's happening with that stuff. Maybe he's doing something of normal difficulty voiced different than normal, or maybe he just has a lot of hard overlapping SD/BD coordination worked up.
Cymbals are very washy throughout; he doesn't wail on them the way he does the snare drum. He's playing them with big ol' sticks so the full cymbal is responding. The sound is interesting, I don't know how to describe it— there was a similar tonality from a 60s A. Zildjian Medium-Heavy I owned, with a dense layer of harmonics in the higher end. Part of that is due to the sticks. What the cymbals lack in definition is made up on the snare drum and bass drum. If you want a unique cymbal sound today, copy that.
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