Straight 8ths in funk Afro 12/8

Something I'm working out, that needed to be written out to do it: straight 8ths on the bass drum within a funk-style Afro 12/8 groove. I work a lot with this whole area of groove. This is worth working through even if you don't have an application for it, it makes you put a fine point on your accuracy with your bass drum. 

Play the accent like a backbeat and ghost the rest of the snare drum notes. At first omit the circled notes on the cymbal with patterns 3-4 and bass drum with patterns 5-16, if it helps you get them. 

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Songo brushup

I have some dates coming up where I need to use a Songo-type groove (the chart says “samba”, but it's really not)— which I don't have to play that often, so I'm brushing up on it a bit, playing through a bunch of stuff: 
 

After learning the three complete grooves at the top of the page, start playing through the other possible combinations of cymbal rhythms, bass drum variations, left hand parts, and linear patterns. My recent rhythm page is good for this as well. 

Use the “subtractive” patterns at the bottom of the page to revoice rhythms from the book Syncopation to fit this style, playing the notes in the book on the snare drum or bass drum, corresponding with those patterns. I've settled on a kind of hybrid system for that— I play the complete bass drum rhythm whether it's sounding in the book rhythm or not. It's a little harder to read, but it works well. 

I'm doing all this with a couple of mp3 loops sampled from Eddie Palmieri, playing a Mozambique rhythm, on the tunes Bamboleate and Azucar Para Te. 

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Guaguanco - two ways

A little more on general fluency with a Guaguanco-type groove on drumset. It's not a style that authentically uses a drumset, but the groove is a hip alternative for non-traditional situations. It has a nice melodic element that is at first a little confusing in how it relates to clave; mainly, it sounds like aligns with the 3 side, but it's really on the 2 side. On recordings of Cuban musicians, usually the melody is on the 2 side. But I've heard some recordings— seemingly authentic situations— where it does actually align with the 3 side.

I'm not expert on Cuban music, and don't regularly play with people who are, so I'm not going to try to draw any conclusions on it. I can say the first way is correct, but sometimes it is done the other way for reasons unknown. With these exercises we'll learn to play it both ways, with some small variations in the melodic part to give it a little life.

For an authentic sound, play the RH/palito part on a dry sound— jam block, rim, floor tom shell, or hihat. Or play it on a cymbal, cymbal bell, or cowbell. You can see that the variations are very small; we're just doubling different notes of the melodic part. Learn to combine them freely when playing the groove. Also see my previous page of Guaguanco, and other related posts.

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Page o' coordination: Rumba clave - hands only

Page of exercises for coordinating the left hand with rumba clave played with the right. It's not pure independence practice in the abstract— most of the patterns are related to the clave rhythm in a specific way. Some of them are actual performance patterns.

Use whatever sounds you like; RH could be played on the shell or rim of the floor tom, or on a jam block, or on the hihat. Short, dry sounds are preferred. Listen to some rumba so we have some basis in musical reality. Play the left hand as rim clicks on the snare drum, or move it around the drums while varying the accents and articulations— use rim shots, dead strokes, whatever.

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Q&A: Cuban for jazz

I got a surprisingly tough question from a reader the other day:

What's a good book for playing Cuban styles in jazz?

Part of the difficulty with answering this is, what do we mean by Cuban styles in jazz? Unlike with Brazilian music, there aren't many tunes from the Cuban literature in the standard jazz repertoire. Some tunes have a Latin section as part of the stock arrangement (e.g, A Night In Tunisia), or are commonly played with alternating swing and Latin feels (e.g. The Night Has A Thousand Eyes, On Green Dolphin Street), or any tune can be played with a Latin feel— whatever that means to the players present. In normal Salsa arrangements, the entire thing is based on clave— the melody and arrangement rhythms, and the percussion and rhythm section parts. With the jazz tunes, there is usually no special effort to follow clave in the arrangement or accompaniment.

Without the clave element, we can't really say we're playing a Cuban style. What we're more doing is playing straight 8th tunes with a quasi-Latin flavor. What is done on many recordings— especially from the 50s and 60s— is that the drummer plays a repeating groove, maybe with some basic fills. There may be very little else done stylistically to make the performance “Latin.”

The books on Cuban drumming don't address that situation— they are typically about how to play Cuban/Salsa music correctly with Salsa musicians, which is a different set of concerns. The advice and even the rhythms given won't necessarily apply to a normal jazz setting, where the biggest challenge may be adapting your parts to fit with the Latin style as your bandmates (mis-?)conceive it.

Frankly, many or most jazz drummers* do not make a serious study of Cuban percussion. Just like a lot of jazz musicians don't study Cuban music as it pertains to their instrument. Probably most drummers could just learn my Mozambique-related blog items, and whichever Afro-Cuban related items seem applicable, and be covered for most jazz applications.

That doesn't excuse us from learning more about Cuban music, and Salsa more broadly. It's a major percussion art form, which should be interesting to any drummer. And it would just be nice to not embarrass ourselves when playing with good Salsa musicians... or when teaching it... or writing about it...

So here are the major books I recommend:

The Essence of Afro-Cuban Percussion and Drum Set by Ed Uribe
Big, scary book. Read my review of it here.

Afro-Cuban Rhythms for Drum Set by Malabe/Weiner
This was the first serious Cuban music book I was aware of in the 80s. Still good, though I find the notation hard to read, and it's generally difficult to draw a concise drum set lesson from it.

Rhythms and Techniques for Latin Timbales by Victor Rendon
Good book, and it's free. And since the bulk of what's played on the drum set in this music is derived from the timbales, it's extremely useful for drummers.

Afro-Caribbean and Brazilian Rhythms for the Drums by mulitiple authors, released by Drummer's Collective
Concise introductions to a number of Latin styles. Maybe a good place to start.

Conversations in Clave by Horacio Hernandez
Popular book, with an actual method for improvising. Includes interesting studies for acquiring the correct feel.

There are other books, notably Clave Matrix, and the Beyond Salsa series, that are worth looking into. Except for the Drummer's Collective book, none of these are designed for quick study. It's a hard subject to write about and notate, and I find most of the books difficult to work with. It's such a large area of study that, if you're not dedicating your entire life to it, you have to proceed on faith that your playing will benefit from spending a lot of time learning any part of it.

* - Myself included.

Groove o' the day: Lex Humphries afro 6

Hm, Lex Humphries has been coming up a lot lately. I heard this tune played on KMHD, Portland's jazz radio station: Taboo, played by Duke Pearson on his Blue Note album Profile.

I should think about Humphries more— he is on a lot of records, and he's great. Here I've transcribed the Afro 6 feel he plays on the head of the tune, but the reason it caught my attention was the strong groove during the piano solo. He plays the cymbal beat with a strong quarter note pulse. As I listen to it on my computer, there's a pronounced tension between the bass and drums— the bass is on the front of the beat, and the drums behind. The main felt pulse is actually somewhere between them.

He also has a really nice sounding 20" ride cymbal. High pitched, clean, dark sound with sort of a pillowy quality. Mellow bell sound that is just metallic enough to give it some energy. How are you outfitted for cymbals? I sell the things, you know. I have a couple of light 20" Holy Grails in stock with a similar vibe.

Anyway, here's that Latin groove from the intro. The cymbal rhythm is unusual— it's kind of square. You hear more not-that-correct Latin interpretations from jazz drummers in the 50s than perhaps you do later. He only plays the bass drum audibly on the first measure of the tune:

He also plays it just with the snare and high tom:

He varies the cymbal when he does this move to the floor tom:

A couple of variations from the head out:

Page o' coordination: Cinquillo

Here's an easy page o' coordination based on a basic bell rhythm, known in Latin music circles as “cinquillo”— which basically means quintuplet. It's not a quintuplet, it's the indicated 5-note rhythm, but that's what the word means. It's a good rhythm for a variety of Latin feels, or pseudo-Latin feels, especially for bright tempos, R&B situations, show music situations, or situations where the other players aren't real sophisticated, and get thrown off by more complex bell patterns.

Learn all the patterns with your hands only, then add the right and left foot parts, one at a time. Then you can combine the different feet parts. You can move your left hand between the snare (rim click) and high tom for most of these. If you want to get deeper into it, you can do the stock moves I always do with these POCs, and vary your articulations and dynamics— rim shots, dead strokes, buzzes, whatever. Play the right hand on a cowbell, cymbal bell, hihat, or the rim/shell of the floor tom. Play it as rim shots on the snare drum (snares off) for a pseudo-calypso feel.

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Afro 12/8 - funk - updated

This page is an update of something I wrote in the wilds of 2013— a page of bass drum variations for a funk-feel Afro-Cuban 12/8, with a backbeat on 3. I had a student play that page, and I realized I didn't like the last few lines of bass drum rhythms. I tried to get too cute. This page has six lines of performance patterns, and a few optional technical exercises:

Play the unaccented snare notes very softly. Play each pattern many times, and be able to play the entire page without stopping. Approximate tempo goal should be about here— Ndugu Leon Chancler plays drums on that record. You'll also want to listen to Steve Gadd playing this type of groove.

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Page o' coordination: Idris Mozambique

A page of exercises for learning basic performance vocabulary using Idris Muhammad's Mozambique-like cymbal rhythm from this recent groove o' the day.

Play each of the hand patterns many times— if you need to, start with the LH on the snare only, then add the moves to the toms. Then add the various bass drum rhythms. Add the hihat on beats 2 and 4, or put it wherever you want it, or don't. See this page for more Latin bass drum rhythms, or this page to take it a more funk like direction, using pattern 11.

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Groove o' the day: Evolution of Songo - 02

Here is the second groove from the Changuito history of Songo video; Changuito is the drummer for Los Van Van, and is a major innovator in Cuban drumming. The last entry covered a groove created by the previous drummer in that band, Blas Egües. As is explained in the video, this is the first type of groove Changuito developed out of that, that more resembles the Songo groove as it's commonly known in the United States.

This is played on woodblock (or bamboo catá/guagua— it's mislabeled as hihat below), snare drum (rim clicks), bass drum, and tom tom; the 2/3 rumba clave rhythm is included for reference:

These are some variations he plays while demonstrating the groove:

Discussion of this groove starts at 10:10:




Heres' a single by Los Van Van that uses this groove. There's a break after 2:15 with some improvisation— check back soon for a transcription of that. Other recordings of this tune use a different groove with a more pronounced snare drum part.

Groove o' the day: evolution of Songo - 01

First of a mini-series of Afro-Cuban grooves o' the day, transcribed from the history of Songo video below. Grooves are by Changuito, the percussionist who created the Songo drumming style playing with the Cuban band Los Van Van. This is an early version of the groove used by the band's first drummer Blas Egües in 1970.

The groove is played on snare drum (playing rim clicks), tom tom, bass drum, and wood block— here a jam block, originally a bamboo catá or guagua. I included 2/3 rumba clave for reference:

The discussion of this groove occurs starting at about 4:50 in the video:




Here's an early single by the band that appears to use this groove:

Bass drum rhythms for Latin

These bass drum rhythms are lifted from a page of Songo independence exercises I posted a few years ago. I thought it would be good to have them presented by themselves, apart from all the Songo jibber jabber, for use with that Victor Rendon timbale book, and other things.

I've included the 2-3 Son clave rhythm for reference— you can play that rhythm, or not. Use these with the bell pattern practice section from the Rendon book, or with my recent Mozambique page o' coordination, or anything else clave-based, either Son or Rumba clave. Whatever practice materials you use them with, be sure to use the same clave orientation; if you're using materials written in 3-2, you'll have to reverse the order of the measures on one of the sources so they match.

Patterns 1-3 are the ones you should use routinely with all clave-based playing. Patterns 4-6 will give you a little bit of freedom using those rhythms. Patterns 7-12 give you some more basic creative possibilities. Patterns 13-18 are advanced options, for denser, more fusion-like playing.

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Page o' coordination: Afro 6/4 - triplets

Here we have our standard Afro-Cuban bell pattern extended a couple of beats to put it in 6. This page will work well with that Jimmy Garrison loop from the other day. Pairs well with a couple of pages of similar stuff in 9/8 from 2014, too.

Run each pattern many times. I like to move my left hand around while practicing these pages— either every note, or on every single or double. I find it's good to vary your technique, dynamics, and timbres of all the parts.

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Best books: Rhythms and Techniques for Latin Timbales

UPDATE: I just realized we've already shared another excellent free-online book by Rendon, Timbale Solo Transcriptions. Get that too, if you haven't.

Rhythms and Techniques for Latin Timbales by Victor Rendon is sort of the anti-Uribe book. You'll recall from my review that Ed Uribe's Latin book is huge, intimidating, and very demanding; Rendon's book is very approachable, concise bordering on terse, and is learnable in a reasonable amount of time. And timbales are the Latin percussion instrument most similar to the drum set, so all of this can book can be played on the drums by just choosing equivalent sounds, and adding a basic bass drum part.

It's mostly a style guide, showing some ways of playing each of the major Latin styles, including Mozambique, Guaguanco, 6/8 styles, Songo, and Cha Cha— the styles we've been most interested in on the blog. He discusses lead-ins— the abanico— and gives some contexts for practicing it, and fills. There are also longer sections on developing bell patterns, and left hand independence in 2/2 and in 6/8, each of which are several pages long. There are also several pages looking at the playing of Changuito, the timbalero for Los Van Van and inventor of the Songo rhythm.

A nice thing is that this is a free book— at least it's a pdf found multiple places on the internet, that is semi-ethical to download, since the book appears to be out of print and is not available to purchase. You can compensate Rendon for his work by buying his newer book, The Art of Playing Timbales, which is available at the Amazon links below.

Page o' coordination: Afro 6 - “African”

Quite of flurry of POCs lately— a plague of POCs. I like this format. It's good for working on more complex independence; things too hard to do with a melodic line interpretation, which is my usual preferred way of practicing anything.

This page has the hihat played in the middle of the triplet*, and the bass drum where you might normally play a tom tom in a stock version of the groove, which gives this a generically African feel. This hihat placement may be a major challenge, so try this page as a warmup if necessary. The page based on David Cornejo's Afro-Peruvian groove also relates. Anyone is actually working on more than a few of these pages is going to be some kind of triplet/6-8/Afro-Cuban/waltz/Elvin groove badass.

Learn all the patterns, and then drill them with any of my standard left hand moves you want. You can also do moves based on the sticking patterns in Stick Control. Try working it with this Eddie Palmieri practice loop.

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* - We're in 6/8, so the triplet-sounding three note division of the beat is not actually a triplet (three notes played in the space of two notes of the same value), and readers with a musical education will object to me saying triplet. I'll write a whole post on this another time. For now suffice it to say that compound meters have a triplet feel, and triplet is an easier word than compound meter 8th notes for more readers to understand. I'm using convenient terminology that will be understood by my audience even if it's incorrect in the context of a theory discussion. Get off my back.

Page o' coordination: Mozambique - hands only - 01

A page of technical independence patterns for a Mozambique bell part— a hip, very useful bell rhythm. For more practical left hand parts for this bell rhythm, see my updated Page of Mozambique. Also see my other posts about Mozambique for listening and background on this style.

Play the left hand on the snare drum as a rim click, then you can move between the snare and the high tom, or do all my usual tom moves. You can practice this along with this Cal Tjader practice loop— the bell/cascara rhythms are slightly different, but they're both in the 2-3 clave orientation

The hihat part is optional; you could do this page with your hands alone. There are other hihat rhythms you might want to use in an actual Salsa/Cuban-style music setting; this one works best when playing with jazz musicians. If you want to add bass drum, start by putting it on the & of 2 of the second measure, or of both measures.

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Page o' coordination: linear pattern for Latin soloing

The 5+3 note phrase is one of the easiest and most useful of Gary Chaffee's basic linear phrases. If you start phrase on the a of 2, the bass drum part makes a Latin tumbao rhythm, which makes it very useful for soloing in music where you want that type of bass drum ostinato. It's easy enough to just play the pattern and move it around the drums, but we can do a lot more with it by making some small changes in the right hand or left hand parts, which is what we're doing here:

The first two things at the top of the page show the basic pattern in book form, and displaced. The numbered exercises show the pattern with the right hand on a cymbal and left hand on the snare drum, with variations. Pay special attention to exercise 2; I've added accents and moved the right hand to the floor tom on some notes to outline 3-2 Rumba clave.

You can do the usual left hand moves, or just improvise moving both hands around the drums. It'll be more stylistically correct to mix up the articulation/timbre with the left hand— rim shots, rim clicks, doubles, buzzes, dead strokes. You should also vary the accents.

Add the left foot on quarter notes, on the &s, or on 8th notes. Or don't play it at all. It's also a good idea with any Cuban-style Latin patterns to practice getting into the pattern starting on any note of it— don't always start playing it on 1. You may also want to alternate the solo phrases with an equivalent number of measures of a time feel— Songo, Mozambique, or Guaguanco, for example.

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Groove o' the day: Ignacio Berroa 12/8

Another funk Afro 12/8 groove, played this time by Ignacio Berroa, on his record Codes, on the tune Woody'n You. From the intro:

As you can probably see he's playing rumba clave on the cowbell. The hihat foot part is not present on the recording; I've included it to emulate the shekere, which is played. What he plays in the first measure is the foundation groove— practice that by itself, too.

Ignacio is on tour with Chick Corea right now, which you'll want to catch if you can.

Simultaneous clave triplet pull exercise

Here's something you can do with that silly “both clave directions at the same time” idea. In clave-based Latin music, the clave rhythm is often not played with a strict march-like execution; the 4/4 version often pulls in the direction of a triplet rhythm. It's a feel thing. With the simultaneous claves thing it's easier to get the rhythms precisely accurately, and easier to find the subtle gradation between the 4/4 and triplet versions. These exercises will help you develop some flexibility with it, so you can find the correct thing through listening to music and playing the style with people.

This exercise requires combining the duple and triplet versions of clave, usually written in 4/4 and 6/8; I've written it in the form I'm guessing will be most understandable to the most people: as dotted 8th-16th and 8th note triplet rhythms in 4/4. Not a big deal, it's just not usually how the rhythms are written.

Nail the exact rhythmic changes of the exercises, with both hands at an even volume, then practice them emphasizing the right hand, de-emphasizing the left. Then do them emphasizing the left hand, de-emphasizing the right. You can start the exercise on the first or second measure; starting on the second measure will give you 2-3 clave with the right hand, and 3-2 with the left. Keep in mind that there's really only one clave happening; the off hand rhythm is really just a check pattern to help you play the rhythm accurately. To actually state both clave directions at the same time is a mistake— a big enough and common enough mistake that they have a word for it: cruzado, meaning crossed. At best consider the off-hand, backwards clave part to be an entry point for developing independence with that hand.

Note that exercises 5 and 10 have a tenuto mark on the first note of each measure— usually that means to hold the note to its full value; here we want it to actually distort the triplet rhythm a bit, pushing it a little closer to the 4/4 version of the rhythm.

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Best books: Timbale Solo Transcriptions by Victor Rendon

Just a link share today for anyone interested in Salsa, Cuban music, and related musics. From Unlocking Clave's Facebook feed, here's a nice free book, Timbale Solo Transcriptions by Victor Rendon.

Do give Unlocking Clave and Rendon a follow.

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