Billy Higgins playing on a funky vamp with some kicks in it, on Blackjack, from Donald Byrd's album of the same name. It sticks with the rhythm figure all the way through, and Higgins plays a lot of different stuff over it, rather than a repeating groove, so we get to see how he handles that.
The transcription starts at 1:50, with the trumpet solo, ends at the piano solo. Tempo is 174, but the vamp suggests a half time feel.
Here's the rhythm figure he's playing off of, usually filling to set up the syncopated accents starting at the beginning of the second measure, or on beats 4, 3, or 2 of the first measure:
It can make you kind of tense vamping relentlessly like this, if you don't vibe your way into some kind of groove with it. Which is not easy to find all the time.
A student was asking about Cantaloupe Island, played by Tony Williams on Herbie Hancock's Empyrean Isles album, so I went ahead and transcribed the whole thing. Why not. The style may get called as a Blue Note beat, a boogaloo beat, a Lee Morgan beat, a Cantaloupe Island beat— it's a very well known tune, and was heavily sampled in the 90s. This should probably go in a future transcription collection on Amazon, so get it free while you can.
The tempo is around 115; it's starts a little slower, and ends a little faster. The form is 16 bars long:
4 bars F min | 4 bars Db7 | 4 bars rhythm figure | 4 bars F min
It's pretty straightforward, with a lot of repetition. He'll do variations on the main groove, which he will repeat for several measures in a row. I could have used more one measure repeats, but I've been pretty strict about notating subtle variations and dynamics.
He's following the dynamics of the soloists pretty closely— even within a repeating pattern, he'll build or back off in a subtle way. He's also not punching hard in obvious places, like at the beginning of phrases. Despite the repetition, he's not playing it like a groove drummer, he's playing color. He's also deliberate in how he uses the hihat, playing it with his foot mostly just during Freddie Hubbard's solo— the strongest part of the track.
Eaaasing back into blogging after an eventful couple of weeks, with some grooves by Billy Higgins, from Lee Morgan's album The Rumproller. First, the groove from the title track:
Often he'll accent the & of 4 on the tom tom with his left hand, or omit the note on 4, and just play the &— listen through and you'll catch a lot of variations he does around beat 4. There is basically always a single rim click on 2— no variations in that part of the measure.
The tune Eclipso, always my favorite from this album, is faster, and most of the activity is with the left hand; his right doesn't come off of the cymbal much, and he doesn't accent on the cymbal as much as on Rumproller. He plays this on the intro:
During the tune he plays a bossa rhythm, with variations, with his left hand— he'll move this around the drum quite a bit at times:
The feet aren't real important on any of these: The bass drum is played very softly, with occasional accents; there may be hihat present, but I wasn't hearing it. Do whatever feels right; you could go to a bossa rhythm in the bass drum if you want, and you can always add the hihat on 2 and 4 to anything.
If you don't already have it, you'll want to go buy this record. Here's the Rumproller:
Here are two different Blue Note/soul/boogaloo-type grooves on the tune Cantaloupe Woman, from albums by Grant Green.
First, from the great session drummer Ben Dixon (who also wrote the tune), as played on the 1965 Blue Note album His Majesty King Funk:
Then on the 1971 album Visions, played by Idris Muhammad (or possibly Harold Caldwell— I think it's IM, though):
In both examples the bass drum notes in parentheses are optional— those notes are played maybe 50% of the time. The snare drum hits are played at roughly an even volume, with the buzzed note in the second example maybe a little lighter. None of them are loud.
Let's do an easy one. Here's Billy Gene English sketching out a simple, Blue Note-y, quasi-Latin waltz on the tune Wavy Gravy, from Kenny Burrell's Midnight Blue:
Swing the 8th notes. You can think of this in 6/4, if you want. The bass drum on the track is basically inaudible, but it's fairly safe to assume it's there— after the opening vamp the bassist puts a big emphasis on 1, and I think English's bass drum is hiding behind it.
From Jazz Wax, here's a nice piece about Thelonious Monk's Genius of Modern Music Vol. 2, recorded for Blue Note in 1952. The album included the first recordings of the horrifying Skippy, the underplayed Hornin' In, and the beloved Let's Cool One- that latter a delicate tune that is nevertheless a session favorite, often ending up something like a kitten petted to death.
