Part three of Branford Marsalis's Housed From Edward, from the album Trio Jeepy, with Jeff Watts on drums. Let's do the whole thing. This begins in the middle of Marsalis's solo at 3:21, and ends at the beginning of part 1 of this series, at 5:15.
Includes the very audacious/goofy displaced time feel, starting at bar 10. To me it takes exceptional self confidence, and faith in the other musicians, to try that on a recording session, but he had been doing some heavy rhythm stuff with Wynton Marsalis's band for several years before that, and clearly had it worked out.
See also the quintuplet lick in bar 24— you can hear how the quintuplet cuts across the groove. It sounds off, but that's the nature of it. You could play that with a Chaffee-type sticking, RLBRL BRLBB.
Part two of Branford Marsalis's Housed From Edward, from the album Trio Jeepy, with Jeff Watts on drums. Let's do the whole thing. This begins at the top of Marsalis's solo, at 1:27.
Trio Jeepy by Branford Marsalis is a long time favorite album of mine, that was very influential on my concept of jazz. It's got Jeff Watts on drums and Milt Hinton on bass. This tune Housed From Edward was a big lesson on playing a form musically— 12 bar blues, in this case.
This is the middle part, beginning at 5:15, where Branford takes a hike and Watts and Hinton play time— very lyrically— for several choruses. Tempo is about 122.
Not much to say, the lesson is self-evident. There appear to be a lot of other transcriptions of this floating around— with videos of people playing them.
Records that were important in my development, that might be in yours, too. Should be a major recurring feature, but very difficult for me to write. My problem is I don't have much intelligent or glib to say about most of these albums. Everything there is to say is on the record itself. I'm not into history, scene, or writing plaudits, or speculating about players' psychology, or grading performances. So this is just a way of directing you to the thing, and saying spend a lot of time with this, if you haven't already.
So: Trio Jeepy by Branford Marsalis, released in 1989. With Milt Hinton (and Delbert Felix) on bass and Jeff Watts on drums. I bought a cassette of this because Wynton Marsalis's Standard Time and Live At Blues Alley records were very hot then, and I wanted to get more of Watts. Most of us who were students in the 80s were trying to find a voice somewhere between fusion and the neo-classic thing, and at this time neo-classic was where most of the energy was. Fusion was declining into fuzak, but its major artists were edging away from that, towards a more acoustic conception. See Michael Brecker's first solo record, Chick Corea's Akoustic Band, Scofield's Time On My Hands, Metheny's Question & Answer.
This is a nice, loose little recording with a lot of blowing and a lot of great featured drumming. They included some outtakes and talking in between tracks, which adds to the spontaneous vibe. Marsalis is doing his Dexteresque thing that is nice to listen to. The record introduced many of us jazz neophytes to some tunes we would play a lot in coming years: Doxy, Makin' Whoopee, UMMG, Three Little Words, The Nearness of You. Now I realize that it took some nerve to put Doxy on a record in 1989, and present it with an attitude of THIS. IS. THE. SHIT.
There's always an element of doctrinal pronouncement in recordings by any Marsalis; you come away feeling like you've been told how you're supposed to play. I don't know to what extent mainstream jazz was actually dead when the Marsalises came around— but they needed to declare it so, so they could bring it back. There was still jazz education, and a professional culture where people were still playing old tunes. But maybe all the big records were in the fusion arena, before they came along.
Jeff Watts is fantastic of course. He has a much deeper, more muscular sound here than we're accustomed to today. Similar to post-60s Tony Williams, but less outrageously aggressive. Listen to Watts if you want to find a sound different from the current twitchy, trebly thing. There's also a great example of “melodic” drumming, with his playing on Housed From Edward— hearing that was an unavoidable instruction to get a concept of playing blues.
On that track he does a big time displacement thing, which is a pretty audacious move. It doesn't add anything, and is kind of crass, showing off his fearlessness of blowing a take— and also Milt Hinton's unshakability. I wrote a page on how to do it. Good luck ever finding musicians you can do that with, or on having the courage to actually attempt it in a critical situation.
Here's Housed From Edward— listen to the video, but the proper way to do this is to buy the physical record, and play it many, many times.
Another Jeff Watts transcription, from Branford Marsalis's album Trio Jeepy. The audio is not available on our usual YouTube; but, you, know, that's OK. Music isn't actually supposed to be free. So get thee to your local used record store and track down the double LP, or ask the guy at the desk to order the CD from the distributor. Or go to your favorite tech conglomerate web site and purchase the download.
This is pretty straightforward. The most technically difficult thing he does is in measure 31, where he plays a couple of one-beat closed rolls, which begin with the hands in unison on the crash cymbal and snare drum, and end with a stick shot. The 8th note-duration rolls which occur several times— like in measure 23— are played as a triplet, like so:
As near as I can tell, he uses three different cymbals in addition to the hihats: a ride, a crash, and a chinese/trash-type cymbal. I may not have distinguished between the three with 100% accuracy, but it doesn't matter. An unaccented note is a tap, a regular accent is a light crash, and a housetop accent is a full crash. On the drums, the given accents are generally relative to the neighboring notes; all of the accented snare drum notes through out the piece may not be of the same volume. Watts is typically thought of as an aggressive player, but his volume here is very controlled, with a solid touch. He generally accents more strongly on the cymbals than on the drums.
Here is Jeff Watts's 32-bar solo on Upper Manhattan Medical Group, from Branford Marsalis's album Trio Jeepy. It's a sign of the times that Watts, a virtuoso himself, comes off as kind of un-technical compared to a lot of things you hear today. And his sound has a lot of weight, compared to the often trebly, hyperactive-sounding, newer breed of players. There's some real bass in there.
The 8th notes swing, but there are a couple spots where he straightens them out a bit; we're at a tempo where the difference is fairly subtle. He uses three different crash cymbals, and at least three tom toms, but I've notated the toms as either high or low, except in one spot where he's obviously playing three toms in the course of one lick; otherwise the difference between them is not significant for the purposes of the transcription.
The audio isn't available on YouTube, and I don't have time to make a video right now, so if you don't already own the record, you'll have to either buy the track, or buy the album. Buy the album.
I feel like I've been pretty unimaginative with my filler lately, but what am I going to do that's better than this?
That's from Branford Marsalis's late 80's record Trio Jeepy, with Milt Hinton and Jeff Watts. Listen for Watts's crazy displacement chorus somewhere in the middle-- you need a really powerful bass player to pull that kind of thing off without causing a trainwreck. Hearing this track-- along with Sonny Rollins' Blue Seven and the album Coltrane Plays The Blues-- really got me thinking about blues as more than just a twelve bar form.
From Branford Marsalis' NPR show Jazz Set, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins, Joe Lovano, Max Roach and others talk about Ed Blackwell. Glad to see this resurface- I remember being glued to this, and cursing having missed parts, when it aired in 1998 or so. In eight parts.
In the Seattle Weekly, Branford talks about what's going on with jazz- here are a few excerpts:
You put on old records and they always sound better. Why are they better? I started listening to a lot of classical music, and that really solidified the idea that the most important and the strongest element of music is the melodic content.
I have a lot of normal friends. 'Cause it's important. [When] you have a bunch of musicians talking about music and they talk about what's good and what's not good, they don't consider the larger context of it.
When laypeople listen to records, there're certain things they're going to get to. First of all, how it sounds to them. If the value of the song is based on intense analysis of music, you're doomed. Because people that buy records don't know shit about music. When they put on Kind of Blue and say they like it, I always ask people: What did you like about it? They describe it in physical terms, in visceral terms, but never in musical terms.
In a lot of ways classical music is in a similar situation to where jazz is, except at least the level of excellence in classical music is more based on the music than it is based on the illusion of reinventing a movement. Everything you read about jazz is: "Is it new? Is it innovative?" I mean, man, there's 12 fucking notes. What's going to be new? You honestly think you're going to play something that hasn't been played already?
So, you know, my whole thing is, is it good? I don't care if it's new. There's so little of it that's actually good, that when it's good, it shocks me.
So much of jazz, it doesn't even have an audience other than the music students or the jazz musicians themselves, and they're completely in love with virtuosic aspects of the music, so everything is about how fast a guy plays. It's not about the musical content and whether the music is emotionally moving or has passion.
