World's shortest jazz solo exercise

A quick little item— I know I've posted it before in other forms, maybe this time will be the best. For jazz students, this may be the most useful thing on the site for soloing and filling.  

This is a summary of a very well known right hand lead solo method used with the book Syncopation. You play the rhythms in the book with your right hand, accented, in a swing rhythm, and fill out the triplets quietly with the left hand. Following that rule, the first triplet exercise below is an interpretation of this rhythm— this is background, it doesn't even matter if you get this part:  

So practice this: 

Move your right hand around the toms however you like: 

Also play with your right hand on the cymbal, with bass drum in unison: 

Then improvise— play the RLL portion for as long as you like, transition with a RLR into the LLR pattern, which you can then play as long as you like, going straight back to the RLL sticking whenever you like: 

Add hihat on beats 2 and 4. 

The actual solo method using the book is a little more involved, but this will be extremely useful even without doing that. Practice trading improvised 2s, 4s, 8s, and Blues choruses this way, with all of the moves, and bango, you're a jazz soloist. 

John and Nate's jazz drumming page

I wrote this for a couple of my younger students— it's a collection of simple jazz patterns that we went over verbally in a lesson. It's meant to be very loose introduction to a type of playing that is different from the rock/funk they've already done, in which I've included some things they can get quickly. 

In the lesson we run the patterns, and I tell them a few basic, important things, and I give them a listening assignment, including things like: 

Freddie the Freeloader - Miles Davis / Kind Of Blue
Blue Seven - Sonny Rollins / Saxophone Colossus 
Moanin' - Art Blakey / Moanin' 
Stolen Moments - Oliver Nelson / Blues And The Abstract Truth

The next steps might be my recent easy jazz solo page, or any number of my EZ methods, as is appropriate. The idea is not to try to form these kids into jazz drummers via drum lessons— I don't believe that's possible, or desirable— it's to acquaint them with the music and the way it's played, so when they (hopefully) get into jazz band in school, they'll have some idea of what to do. Give them a chance to get interested in it. Then they can begin becoming jazz (or jazz-capable) drummers, if they choose, by playing music.   

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EZ jazz solo method: alternative triplet stickings

Let's begin expanding the quick and easy jazz solo lesson from the other day— here are some alternative triplet stickings you can use with it. You'll recall that it consisted of a “stock” pattern element and a “reading” pattern element— use these stickings with the reading element, using pp. 14-15 of Syncopation.

Wherever there is more than a single beat of triplets, substitute these for the repeating RLL or RRL sticking. Of course you could also do the triplets with an alternating sticking, which I didn't bother writing out.

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