I have some commitments out of town right the next couple of weeks, and will be posting very lightly, so here's a record I listen to a lot in college, that I need to get back into rotation: Moon Germs, by Joe Farrell, with Jack Dejohnette on drums. I'm hitting the CTI label catalog hard these days.
RANDOM NOTE: I should also remind you that I have two AWESOME 22" Extra Special Janavar jazz ridesavailable at Cymbalistic right now. The first ones sold in 48 hours, these two have been inexplicably hanging around several weeks. We're doing meets in Seattle and central Washington in coming weeks, and they will certainly go away then.
When I will have more in stock is UNKNOWN.
UPDATE: One of them, “Emilia”, has sold— one remains, “Beatrice.”
Some notes on the record Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane. I've been listening to Monk's Carnegie Hall record a lot this week, let's get into this one. I never owned it, and haven't listened to it much. I always gravitated to the Monk records with the bigger name drummers on them, and we used to be more limited to records a) that we could afford, b) that our friends owned, c) that the record stores carried... second-hand, especially...
This record is mostly a quartet with Shadow Wilson on drums; two tracks are septet with Art Blakey, apparently from the same session as the album Monk's Music, which also had Blakey and Coleman Hawkins.
A drummer named Chris Conrade— a very knowledgeable and rather prickly Portland character— once asked me who I thought was Monk's favorite drummer. I said Art Blakey, he told me it was Shadow Wilson. I guessed it was because he was basically a swing drummer; the only thing I knew about him I got from the Dejohnette/Perry book, which mentions him as an example of “updated swing style” playing— swing drumming reflecting bebop innovations, which became the new standard way of playing the drums, with time played on the ride cymbal, less pronounced bass drum, hihat played with the foot on beats 2 and 4, more or less independent snare drum. While generally reflecting a time-keeping, arrangement-playing, big band-like approach to the drums.
Jon McCaslin @ Four On The Floor has written about Wilson, and given some other examples of his playing, that's highly worth reading.
Ruby, My Dear Very famous ballad that doesn't seem to get played as much as it once did. Shadow Wilson playing time on the hihat on the head, with brushes, then on the snare drum during Coltrane's solo, then double time on Monk's solo— notice his left hand is also sweeping the slow 4 feel during that.
Monk's tunes are so well structured— the tunes, and the background/supporting figures, form a very distinct interlocking structure for you to work with. There'a never any question about where you are, and you always have options for what to play off of.
Trinkle Tinkle There's a classic jazz sounding cymbal for you. Probably an 18" K., and he plays it beautifully. Sounds like a 22" bass drum. He is playing it as part of his time feel (“FEATHERING” it, if you insist), in a fairly pronounced way. The things he plays on the head in support of the tune are very slick— on the head he plays extremely smooth rolls going into the second A section, and the bridge. The tune is quirky, and he plays some quirky stuff in support of it.
The cymbal is the main voice we hear from him; the snare drum, bass drum, and hihat, all of which he plays pretty constantly/actively, are balanced underneath it.
Off Minor Art Blakey here. The triplet thing on the snare drum is real distinctively Blakey, as is the strong 2/4 with the hihat. He's really rocking the hihat here. He doesn't play as ferociously as he does on his own records, but he's more aggressive with his dynamics than Wilson. Drummers get into a macho thing where that's automatically thought the better way to be, but I honestly enjoy Wilson's playing on this record more than Blakey's.
Nutty Back to Shadow Wilson. Coming off of Art Blakey, Wilson plays the snare drum and hihat much more discreetly. There's this lovely buoyancy in the way he plays the cymbal. We also get a good picture how he plays the hihats with sticks— another completely classic sounding set of cymbals there.
It strikes me here how much Coltrane was basically not about swinging. He immediately goes into double time on his solo, and plays a lot of stuff. He would play very lyrically at times, and he did play rhythm, but he wasn't really a groove guy, was he? Compare with Coleman Hawkins's solo on Off Minor. Coltrane's like listening to Bach, he's on some other kind of mission here.
Epistrophy Blakey, obviously. Big aggressive drum intro, strong hihat again— the hihats dominate the time feel, the way Blakey plays the ride cymbal is fuzzier than Wilson. There's a driving quarter note pulse happening, but the articulated cymbal rhythm is not what's swinging the time.
You hear the contrast between Blakey's and Wilson's playing here— Blakey makes bigger statements, that are more distinctively “modern”, and draw more attention to themselves. He's also not always strictly in time with some things— on the head out, he's playing some percussion/rhythm effects that are not perfectly in rhythm. You can hear what he's basically doing, but it floats a little bit.
Some of the things Blakey plays with Monk are practically part of the arrangement of the tunes, in my mind— at least, they're distinct enough that you can refer to them when you play these tunes, and people will know what you're doing. What he does on the head out here is an example of that.
Functional Solo piano, a blues. Blues is more than just a 12-bar form. Learning to say something real with the form is a major mission for any jazz drummer— everybody should be listening to piano players and copying their moves— however you would make that happen on the drums.
Photo from King Coffey's twitter feed: “Teresa Taylor, seen here in attack mode. My favorite drummer of all time. My mentor, my friend, my sister from another mister.”
Butthole Surfers drummer Theresa Taylor, aka Teresa Nervosa just passed away. She was co-drummer with high school friend King Coffey, aka Jeffrey Coffey— they were in marching band together in high school.
For a time when I was living in LA, working as a messenger, I had four cassettes in my car: John Coltrane Live At Birdland, Coltrane Live At the Village Vanguard... and Psychic, Powerless... and Locust Abortion Technician by the Butthole Surfers.
I've been practicing my fast tempos lately, both with sticks and brushes. I'm talking about jazz, tempos above ~290 bpm. I haven't had to do a lot of it my playing career, so I have to do it in the practice room and in sessions— I haven't had the chance to develop it naturally, on the gig.
I can't/won't approach this as a pure technical thing, by working on my chops for playing the cymbal rhythm fast, and then learning coordination patterns to go with it— the way people initially learn to play jazz, learning a swing beat and adding some comping rhythms from Chapin.
Basically my approach is to play complete phrases, change it up, have a lot of tactics available. This is one tactic for playing brushes: a varying and evolving two handed time pattern.
Play these with brushes on the snare drum, playing each pattern one, several, or many times, before moving directly into any other pattern that connects easily with it. [UPDATE: Or whatever. You can see in the video below, I'm not really doing that at all.] We're in 4/4 the whole time, with the hihat on beats 2 and 4. The 3/4 patterns are generally meant to be connecting the 2/4 measures, you can also repeat them for a meter-within-meter effect.
The left hand is sweeping sideways, so one hit will land in the middle of the drum, and the next one will be closer to the edge. Personally, I play matched grip, and my left hand tends to sweep left to right rather than in a circular motion. Finding your own left hand motion through the changing patterns is part of the deal here. We do need to hear the attack of the LH note as part of the rhythm, even as it's sweeping the drum after you hit it.
I do this at 300 bpm, with a metronome set to 75 bpm— whole notes— while thinking Cherokee or whatever tune.
UPDATE: In the comments, our man in Berlin, Michael Griener, who plays a lot of fast music, asked for some VIDEO of this stuff. So here we go:
This is basically how I practice this— I'm not systematic. I'm looking at the page and trying to work those patterns into a regular time feel, and connect them to each other. I think I'm doing patterns 1 and 3 together a lot, which is the crux of the idea— I'm building a time feel out of mixed RRLs and LRRs. You can hear that when I'm doing that, it basically sounds like the complete spangalang rhythm— the lefts are speaking as part of that rhythm. Though I am playing the complete rhythm with my right hand some times.
The tempo is just under 300, I think. I'm not using a metronome here.
Yeah. This page is kind of a failure. The basic idea works ok, for me, but the way I wrote that page isn't great for working on it, for me. Take it as a sketch pad.
I really do try to practice when I practice, not just do writing sessions for the blog. But these things just come up.
This is yet another small change to the straight-8th right hand lead method (RH plays book rhythm, left hand fills in 8th notes), breaking up the longer runs of 8th notes on either hand.
This has been a long term thing: those multiple 8ths on one hand are kind of monotone, and limiting, and day to day I mostly just avoid them, in favor of the parts of the book with no more than two notes in a row with either hand. I've written some exercises like that.
My examples all have cymbal/BD on the book notes, this can also be done with hands only, on the snare and toms.
So: the basic system:
1) Play the notes in the book with the RH, on a cymbal, with BD in unison 2) Fill in spaces with the LH on the SD, to make constant 8ths. 3) ...now with the following exceptions:
Where there are three notes in a row— 8th note spacing, written, or filler— alternate them:
Where there are four notes in a row, play RRLR, or if it's filler, LLRL:
Note that on pp. 30-45 of Syncopation, there are no instances of needing more than four notes in a row of filler.
Where there are five notes in row, play RRLRR, or if it's filler, LLRLL.
Where there are six notes in a row, play RRLRLR, with filler, LLRLRL:
Where there are seven notes in a row, play RRLRLRR, or if it's filler, LLRLRLL:
If you're practicing this with another book besides Syncopation— like Bellson's Reading Text in 4/4, or Chuck Kerrigan's Syncopated Rhythms book— and encounter longer runs of 8ths, you can follow the same formula:
• Even numbers of notes start with a double (RR on the main part, LL on the filler), then alternate.
• Odd numbers of notes start and end with a double, alternate in the middle.
It makes the most sense to do this with the full page exercises, so you have a mix of normal RH lead, with some of this— a lot of one line exercises will end up being mostly alternating, following these rules. I was able to play through all the full page exercises on pp. 38-45 this way, with some stopping because I didn't catch everything. It would be easy to perfect with a little practice, and this will likely become my default way of doing this.
Joey Baron's solo over a 7/4 vamp on Goldfish, from Dave Douglas's 1997 album Stargazer, to which I'm listening a lot this week.
There's not a ton of drumistic content to it, it's more of an attitude— it's a power solo, playing off the structure, for impact. Mostly pretty simple syncopated melodic things on the snare and toms, with big accents on the crash cymbal, with the bass drum or snare drum. You can play this way, solos don't have to be technical.
Actually the vamp is three bars of 7/4 plus one bar of 9/4.
Here we go, tempo is 142 bpm:
He plays quarter notes on the hihat with his foot part of the time, but it's not really central to what he's playing, so I left it out. Play it if it helps you, especially setting up the syncopated rhythms he's playing on the rest of the set.
He's two crash cymbals along with the ride cymbal— one of them is pretty trashy, almost a China sound. The ride cymbal is not the usual taped up thing he was using at the time, every other aspect of his sound is familiar, from that period— punchy toms, very fat snare drum (I still copy that sound, to some extent), he wails on a 16" crash pretty often, 20 or 22" bass drum tuned for a full sound.
There aren't a lot of internal dynamics happening— things are mostly pretty strong, at a pretty even volume. It's a different thing, playing bam-bam style, vs. playing with a lot of soft things mixed in with your loud things.
He does play big dynamics on that single stroke roll at the beginning. That takes a lot of ability.
This is the first four measures of the track— by the third measure he settles on the main groove he'll be repeating throughout this section of the song.
People try to groove like this by hitting the drums harder, and it doesn't work, it just sounds harsh. He's not playing loud, but he's getting a deep sound, a great sound out of the snare drum.
Hihats are played all with the right hand, accenting on the 8th notes. There's some interesting texture happening on the snare drum with the ghost notes, including a 32nd note triplet at the end of the measure.
On the recording you can hear what sounds like concert toms occasionally— they conflict with the ghost notes on the snare drum, so they're either played by somebody else, or they're overdubbed, or another instrument is doing something that reads like concert toms to my ear. I wrote that out so you can emulate that if you want.
We covered this cursorily back in 2011, let's talk about it again, with some more detail.
“Kicks and setups” is big band drummer speak for one of the major jobs of a jazz drummer, or any drummer: playing accents in unison with the rest of the ensemble, and setting them up to help the ensemble play them right, and for musical effect— usually with one note or two notes on a drum, or with a longer fill. So:
Kick* = ensemble accent played by the drummer. Usually with cymbal and bass drum, or cymbal and snare drum, or snare drum or bass drum alone on staccato accents.
Setup = what the drummer plays before the kick to support it. One to three 8th notes, or a longer fill.
* - Not to be confused with the “kick drum” itself— on this site I say bass drum.
Some examples of how kicks and set ups are indicated in big band charts or other arrangements:
The major kicks in those examples are the offbeat tied notes and dotted notes, which typically call for a set up by the drummer.
So: get out your mark up copy of Syncopation, and go to p. 10, and on the fourth measure of lines 1-8, add a tie to the last in any series of 8th notes. Here's my current working copy, which has a few other extraneous marks:
Notice on line 8 the tie will be at the beginning of the fourth measure. I don't know why I put it there on line 4, I could have put it the end of the line.
We're only concerned with the tied notes, and the 8th notes right before them. Interpret the rest of the line as slash marks, meaning: play time. So we would read lines 1 and 8 as:
The tied note is the kick, the other 8th notes are the set up. Play the kick on cymbal, with bass drum in unison, play the set up notes on the snare drum. Play swing time for the rest of the line.
Here's how you would play lines 1 and 2:
Play lines 5-8 with all three untied 8ths on the snare drum, or leave the first 8th note on the cymbal, for a two-note set up— which is extremely common. So line 8, both ways, goes:
Also invert that basic orchestration, with the kick played on cymbal and snare drum, and the set up played on the bass drum. On lines 4-8, put only the last set up note on the bass drum:
So the first step is to play lines 1-8 both of these ways, including counting the four measure phrase correctly, coming back into the time feel after the kick correctly. Next we'll look at some ways of embellishing this basic framework.
Phew, long post here, but the topic merits it. Let's listen to the Miles Davis record Sorcerer, with his famous 60s quintet including Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. I bought it around 1987 as a vinyl reissue— I never heard of it before I saw it at the store, and was real excited to find another Miles record with Tony Williams on it.
Recorded in 1967, mostly. Several of the tunes appear in the original Real Book, but are not often played. Among records by this group (and the George Coleman iteration) Sorcerer is a little bit of a dark horse— compared to Nefertiti, Miles Smiles, Four & More, for example. Maybe there's more stuff music students get excited about on the other records.
Overall the frame here is very loose, very open— nobody's nailing down the time for much of it. The time modulations of the earlier records have evolved into a general floating feeling. Much of it is straight 8ths, but we're not yet getting into the rock direction we hear evolving on Filles de Kilimanjaro and Miles In The Sky. This one is more about time areas, sketched out by everyone together— the time often seems like it's somewhere in between what everyone's playing. Same with the form.
Lots of beautiful playing here, individually and as an ensemble, my focus here is on what I'd be thinking if I were playing or learning these tunes.
Put on your record, or run this, and read on:
Prince of Darkness 16 bar tune, played twice. Tempo is about 239. Nominally a samba, played with very open modern jazz language. You can broadly hear the form going by, but they're handling it in a very open way, no piano comping, and not a lot of firm markers being played. It kind of hangs off those dotted half note accents in bars 11 and 13— listen for who suggests that during the solos. Wayne Shorter wrote some tunes like this— El Gaucho is another one— very concentrated, distinct forms. Like Giant Steps but way more interesting, speaking as a drummer.
Ron Carter's foundation groove is a samba rhythm, but much of the time he's playing off of dotted quarter notes or half note triplets. Tony is supplying the regular pulse, but a lot of angular stuff too. Texture opens up on Herbie Hancock's solo.
Pee Wee I forget if Tony Williams actually composed this, or if Wayne did, and they wanted to give Tony a writing credit. Low key waltz, tempo is about 124. 21 bar form. This may be the most commonly played tune on the record? Miles don't play at all on this track.
Phrased 8+7+6— though my hear hears the melody itself as 6+9+6. It lays across the chord structure in a funny way. But it's 8+7+6— on the blowing there are two measures of the same chord at the end of the first 8 bars, and a big change in bar 9, beginning the odd phrase. The key spot is in bar 16, the one measure that has two chords in it— it's easy to hear even if you're lost the whole rest of the time, and easy to finish the form from there. It's worth listening through a couple of times just listening for bar 16, while not otherwise keep tracking of the form. The change at bar 9 is also distinctive, get that in your ear.
You see how my mind works on these things. I don't want to count, and I don't want to fight my ears, I want to know how to recover from getting lost. Learning this tune, I would first learn to orient myself around what's obvious to my ears, however feeble, and then learn to hear the parts where I don't know what I'm doing— which I've here narrowed down to bars 13-15.
Tony plays light time and textural stuff with brushes through the first chorus of Wayne's solo, after which he switches to sticks. Mostly plays off a quarter note pulse, double timing and playing off a dotted quarter pulse in a few spots. Phrases are broad swells or arcs, both in dynamics and density.
Masqualero The very dramatic 2001 recording of this tune on Wayne Shorter's Footprints Live! is possibly more famous now, with Brian Blade on drums, channeling the whole world's love and enthusiasm for this band. Very loose playing from everyone here, but there is a clear tempo and they mostly follow the form... with modifications.
The tune is a modal ABA, with a short form that is very drawn out. Played with a straight 8th feel. Below is a chart from the Jazz Ltd fake book, illicit pdfs of which are widely distributed digitally. The choice to write it in 4/2 is strange to me, playing it I would count it in 4/4— one measure of 4/2 on the chart = two measures of 4/4 @ 134 bpm.
The first line is the intro, the second line is the A section, and the third line is the B section. The last A section is indicated by the “D.S. (first 4)” at the end, and by the sign at the beginning of the second line, and by the fine at the end of the second line. So the form is 4+3+4 bars of 4/2, or 8+6+8 counted in 4/4. The whole thing is played in the key of G. Phrygian, except the B section. On the blowing Ron also implies a change in bar 4 of the A section.
The intro is very loose, with Tony playing free, and settling on the tempo as the A section begins.
During the blowing, except on his own solo, Herbie always hits the first dotted quarter figure in the last bar of the B section— Ron hits it during Herbie's solo. That really sounds like the end of the form, and sometimes it is treated as the end of the form. Like the last chorus of Miles's last chorus is just AB, then Wayne's solo's begins with a fresh ABA.
The end of Wayne's solo gets a little flaky; Herbie drops out at the beginning of his last chorus, from there they seem to play AB+AB+mystery phrase. Herbie's solo starts very fluidly, though it's still in time and still adhering to normal phrase lengths. At some point the bridge is cued, and they finish it on the form from there, including a final A section before going into the head out— where the play AB-AB and out, with no horns on the second AB.
If you get lost in space on the A sections you should be able to hear when they go to the B section; at least the end of the B section is always 100% clear. And the top of the repeated A sections is clear as well— they don't just play 8 (in 4/2) bars of vibe. And you can hear the implied chord change in the last bar of the A section as well.
Listening to it I would learn to first hear those markers when they happen, and notice how they're handled. Sometimes they're the one definitive thing in the phrase, other times they're touched lightly, sometimes dramatic, sometimes not. Generally not everyone is hitting them at once.
The Sorcerer Uptempo through-composed Herbie Hancock tune, 16 bars, AB, 8+8. On the blowing Miles and Wayne trade 8s, then play the head again, twice.
Form-wise, there's not a lot for me to grab onto, aurally— the chords don't really allude to the melody, and we never feel like we've arrived anywhere, which is deliberate. From my perspective it might as well be free bop. You can't play it looking to resolve to a big down beat, because it's not going to be there, you have to leave everything open. Counting 16 bar phrases from when they play the head after the trading, the horns come in with the head out on bar 9, so something off the form happened there.
In terms of learning this tune, I would listen to the version on Herbie's record Speak Like A Child. It's still real ambiguous, but they play more conservatively, and there are some arranged figures on the head that give you a little more to hang onto.
Limbo Another taken from the Jazz Ltd book— who knows how similar it is to how Wayne wrote it. Form is basically 8 bar AB, with two extra beats in the middle. Kind of a funny choice writing it the way they did; on the head Tony plays a fast 3, based on the quarter note triplet on the written chart (listen to his hihat), then on the solos they go into that double time samba like on Prince of Darkness. They play a medium 4/4 on Herbie's solo, then back to the fast 3 on the head out. Tempo is ~ quarter note = 123.
The 2/4 bar and the chord changes every two beats suggest that this could have been written as a fast 2/2, or a fast 3/4, with one chord change per measure, 9+8 bars long. That's probably how I would think of it.
Figuring out how closely they're following the form on the blowing takes better ears than I have. There is harmonic movement, but they might as well be playing totally open, if they aren't. They bring it around to some semblance of the form on Herbie's solo. It takes some nerve to try to do what Tony's doing here— it's well beyond routine combo intensity.
Vonetta Cool walking ballad by Wayne Shorter, I can't locate a chart for it online or in my books. Too bad.
The form is 14 bars long, let's call it AB, 8+6. Bar 4 of the B section is in 5/4.
Rubato on the head, Miles plays the first half, both horns play the second half. On the solos they play a medium 4, and Tony makes the interesting choice of playing the solos on the snare drum with sticks. Miles and Wayne solo, Herbie gets two half choruses, with the horns playing the head on the B sections, ending the tune on the second chorus.
Great tune, maybe I'll write a chart for it.
Nothing Like You Recorded in 1962 with the singer Bob Dorough, who was very much in the Blossom Dearie/Dave Frishberg cute/hip mode. With Jimmy Cobb on drums, arranged by Gil Evans. I like the opening, Jimmy Cobb is all over that. He has a real particular sound, that's very staccato and on the front of the beat, distinct from other players like that— maybe Roy Haynes or Charli Persip, or Alan Dawson.
Part 3 of Roy Haynes playing Bad News Blues on his record Cracklin'. Booker Ervin's tenor solo includes a chorus of stop time, two choruses of blowing, then he trades choruses with Roy. This is the two choruses of blowing, starting at 3:59. I've included the two measures of fill leading into the blowing, and what he does at the beginning of the trading.
Here are links to part 1 and part 2 of this transcription.
Haynes gives the impression of being very linear with his snare drum and bass drum, but this is very layered at times— he'll play the snare and bass at the same time, accenting the bass and ghosting the snare. He accents the snare before or after the bass drum. See measures 10-12 and 18-20.
So he has very fine control of his left hand dynamics independent of what else he's doing. Interestingly, his left hand rhythms are largely non-indepenent— often they're simply in unison with his right hand.
I guess you could do this with Reed— or just practice the page below by itself and start using it.
NOTE:After completing this post, I see that I wrote two very similar things back in 2014— I like this way better than either of those— hit those links to check them out.
This is based one of the basic Reed systems, right hand lead triplets— swing the book rhythm, played on a cymbal with the RH, with BD in unison, filling in the triplets on the snare drum with the LH.
Here we're going to fill the spaces in the book rhythm with 16th triplets— each triplet partial of filler gets a 16th triplet. We'll play them as singles, always starting with the RH.
With a couple of modifications:
• Let's catch the second cymbal hit with the left when they're on adjacent triplet partials (see exercises 3-5, 9-10). Use a cymbal on the left for that. On some of those you hit the cymbal with the R the first time, with the L on the repeat.
• We want the singles to start and end with the RH, so where there's just one triplet of filler, stick them RLL or RRL, or just play a left handed flam (see ex. 3-4). Where there is a full beat of filler, play 32nd notes instead— eight notes (exs. 6-7, 8, 11).
I'm not even going to spell out again how these exercises connect to the rhythms in Reed— if you should doing this, it should be obvious:
We see hear some of this kind of thing from Jack Dejohnette on John Scofield's Time On My Hands record— playing fast on a slow tempo. Peter Erksine, who produced that record, gave a master class at the U. of Oregon about this time, and remarked that Dejohnette was the only person he knew who could do that. Of course you have to be able to hear it as well as do it.
I was doing this with a loop of Mr. Syms, from Coltrane Plays The Blues, tempo about 98 bpm, and that's getting close to the practical speed limit on this idea. You can do it faster, hyper speed singles just start sounding ridiculous at some point.
