Here are the next 30 seconds / 32 bars of Duo, played by Peter Erksine and Bob Mintzer, from Mintzer's record Hymn. The whole track is about three and a half minutes long, so there will be three more of these before we're done.
Here they're trading fours— every second line is Erskine's solo. It's interesting, normally you might think of Erskine as being a very deliberate player, and therefore working with a lot of set patterns? It would be an easy stereotype to make. Here I feel like we're seeing how patterns evolve in the hands of players like this.
Let's look at those Erskine's fours line by line:
Line 2: Hahahaha, he's doing “my” pattern! He plays a three-beat pattern three times— starting on beat 4 at the end of line 1. The second time the notes got shoved around a little bit, if you're going to learn it, just play the straight pattern: RLL-RLR-LBB. In the third measure he does another pattern, RRL-LBB.
Line 4: Again he starts his solo before the 1. There's some overlapping snare drum and bass drum here— at the time I would have associated that with a “New Orleans” kind of thing. The tempo is fast so you don't really hear it, but it was a thing of the time that people were cultivating.
Line 6: Just linear rhythm here, showing you how a couple of small changes in rhythm and dynamics can have a big effect.
Line 8: Some not real particular stuff. You could practice that move going into the second measure, connecting alternating singles with a SBSB pattern, via a double on the bass drum:
||: RLRL :|| RLBB ||: RBRB :||
It's a good idea to practice soloing with alternating singles, and developing some options for varying them and getting out of them, and connecting them to something else.
On each one of those breaks you can hear how the end of his solo is very clear, always setting up the horn in the last two or four beats.
Blogger won't let me embed the video directly, click through to hear the tune on YouTube.
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