Best books - Even in the Odds by Ralph Humphrey

The classic text on odd meter playing by Zappa/Don Ellis drummer Ralph Humphrey, this book covers swing, funk, and solo patterns in 5/4, 7/4, 5/8, 7/8, and longer odd time signatures. Each meter gets a concise treatment of four or five pages focused on learning its particular terrain. The written text is also minimal but effective- the instruction "repeat each exercise until a casual swing develops" is representative. This is a welcome change from many current books which tend to include way too many exercises, and assume a lot of ignorance (and isolation from real-world sources of information) with overly detailed verbal instructions. It appears to be geared towards college students who are going to tear through it, then run out and complete the process by applying it in performance.

For a partisan (like me) of the modern, interpretive Syncopation-based method of practice (reading a single melody line and orchestrating it for the drums on the fly), the process used in this book is rather old fashioned, in the Chapin mode. This entails learning by fully written-out one measure patterns, eventually adding up to at least a practical vocabulary, if not a lot of understanding. This does work well with the subject matter, though- many of us are back in the stone age (or at least the early days of the Chapin book) when it comes to odd meters, and it's fine to be spoon fed the patterns a little bit while the shape of the meters sinks in. And this book is well-constructed in that at leads you easily into going beyond the written exercises- in a way, it seems like the pinnacle of that approach.