Practice loop: basic cascara

Here's a little non-traditional Latin jazz practice loop, sampled from the intro of the tune Mi Montuno, from the Bamboleate, by Eddie Palmieri/Cal Tjader. There are a couple of caveats about it, but it's not a bad, moderate-tempo groove for working on your basic Salsa parts.




Clave is 2:3 Son, which is actually being played by on one of the musicians. You can play this as a rim click on the snare drum with your left hand:

 And there is a standard cascara rhythm being played on the shell of a timbale, as well. Play this with your right hand on the rim or shell of the floor tom, or on a cowbell, or on the bell of a cymbal:

I should write up a new page of stuff for working on this style, but for now you can experiment with adding the various left hand parts from my Reed generic Latin method, and pull some bass drum rhythms from the recent page of Mozambique. There is also an old page of LH coordination parts to go with that cascara rhythm— they are pure coordination exercises, and not necessarily stylistically correct.

A couple of notes on the track: There's a little hiccup in the parts at the seam in the loop, but the time is basically steady, and you won't really notice it when you're playing along with it. The time breathes slightly, but I don't think that's a bad thing— you do have to listen and adjust a bit.

You'll notice they've borrowed a Guaguanco-type melody, played on the congas, and that it's oriented so its rhythm lines up with the 3 side of clave. Which, to my understanding, is not traditionally correct if you're actually playing Guaguanco. I went into this a little more thoroughly before; the point is, don't get too attached to hearing that melody on the 3 side.

Mozambique listening

Here is a YouTube playlist of the tracks cited in the Mozambique variations post, plus a few things:



After the break I'll give some brief notes on some of the tracks:

Mozambique variations

With apologies for the late lack of posting, here is a little bit of a retread/refinement of my earlier Page of Mozambique. I've been working with this feel quite a bit, but have struggled to come up with a reasonable method for developing it; which is not shocking, me being the Salsa/Cuban music tourist that I am. The patterns here are based on the New York/Eddie Palmieri classic version of the style— apparently it has not a lot in common with the original Cuban Mozambique, which was a craze for a little while in the 60s, and then died out. The clave orientation here is 2-3 Son— that's usually the case on Palmieri's recordings.

Learn all the patterns, listen to (and play along with) the suggested tracks at the bottom of the pdf, and then improvise your own variations— mainly, moving the left hand more freely, using different sounds (especially rim shots and dead strokes).

Do the listening and you'll learn how to prioritize the variations to stay with the style; there's a sort of hierarchy to the notes you play on the drums:

• & of 2 (“bombo”— primary) of the second measure — always present, always strong
• & of 2 (bombo— secondary) of the first measure — often/usually present, usually strong, or pretty strong
• 4 of either measure (“ponche”)  — emphasized, but not as strongly as the prior two; usually stronger in the second measure
• 1 of the first measure — usually not played on the drums, definitely not strongly (this is contrary to the popular Steve Gadd/fusion version of the groove, which plays the one strongly).
• 1 of the second measure — same, but even less so

You might also try running the bell part and bass drum variations with the left hand parts in our generic Latin method— as written they fit with the 2-3 clave orientation of these patterns. Review all of my previous posts on Mozambique, as well.

Get the pdf

Practice loop: Eddie Palmieri 6/8

Here's a loop of an Afro 6/8 groove which I've been getting a lot of mileage out of, lately. It's a couple of measures of Pancho's Seis Por Ocho, from Bamboleate Eddie Palmieri/Cal Tjader. The complete track is good, but it speeds up quite a bit, and it's not great to practice doing that. You should absolutely own that record; it's got one of our main textbook examples of a New York style Mozambique on it, too.

Use this to practice the piles and piles of Afro 6 Pages o' Coordination I've been posting over the last couple of years. If you download the audio— there are browser extensions that will allow you do extract mp3s from videos— it repeats seamlessly if you set your player to loop it.

Daily best music in the world: Mozambique

Melao Para El Sapo, a New York-style Mozambique by Eddie Palmieri. I'm finding that my page of Mozambique from 2013 is holding up pretty well as a method for getting some basic fluency with this groove, which also serves well as a generic Cuban-style Latin groove when playing jazz. I suck at identifying Cuban song styles, but NY Mozambique seems recognizable by the bell pattern, the tumbao (the & of 2 and 4, especially on the 3 side of clave) played strongly by the timbales, and the vocal “Mozambique” riff.

Transcription: Raymond "Monchito" Muñoz — Caminando

Here we have a Latin percussionist funking out a little bit on Caminando, a hip cha cha* recorded by Eddie Palmieri on his great album Vamonos Pa'l Monte. The drummer, Raymond “Monchito” Muñoz, brings very much a percussionist's sensibility to the drumset; almost the entire track is played on the hihat alone, with little variation, and with very sparing use of the bass drum and snare drum. The funky parts happen at the end of the first interlude, and on the outro.

There is little information about Muñoz online, and I had never heard of him before. From what I gather, he is a Puerto Rican percussionist active in New York and PR since the 60's, or earlier. Apparently he studied with Henry Adler. From his Facebook page, it appears that he was seriously ill recently.

It seens that Muñoz's primary instrument is timbales, and he plays the drumset with what I imagine to be a timbalero's touch— for whatever that observation is worth. He draws a variety of sounds out of the snare drum (and hihats, to a lesser degree), playing loosely and not very loud, blending volume of the drumset with the congas. You never get the feeling that he's playing into the drums, the way many funk drummers do. I would be tempted to approach this by just learning and playing each measure— or group of two measures— as a groove in its own right.

* — If you're better than me at IDing salsa styles, please let us know in the comments.

Get the pdf

Audio after the break:

Conga to Mozambique

Let me say up front that I'm always a little paranoid about venturing into Afro-Cuban music on the blog— I don't have a lot of field experience playing it with knowledgeable people, and have had to get my information on it mainly by inferior means— by listening and reading. But looking at the Wikipedia entry for the topic here, after I had this piece mostly written, I was relieved to see that I was not horribly wrong in my own research, and that the entry confirmed some things I had surmised, but wasn't going to hazard putting in the piece.

So, I want to look at the background of what is for drummers basically a semi-popular Latin groove, the Mozambique. In Afro-Cuban music, Mozambique is a style that evolved when Conga de Comparsa— a folkloric parade style— was moved into the popular music and then Latin jazz realms.

With Pello El Afrokan, the originator of the style, the connection with the original Conga is pretty overt, with similar instrumentation— percussion, voice (lead and chorus), horns— and, seemingly, much of the flavor of the parade music:




In New York soon after, people like Eddie Palmieri were developing their own version of the style with a regular salsa band instrumentation, and we start getting the elements that are more familiar now, including the bell pattern that appears to be definitive:

The very emphatic bombo rhythm in the percussion and bass also seems to be a feature of the style:

Continued after the break:

DBMITW: Eddie Palmieri

While we're on the Salsa music, here's a Mozambique entitled Comparsa De Los Locos, by Eddie Palmieri, from his Vamonos Pal' Monte album from 1971. Nicky Marrero plays drums, along with several percussionists.




What the heck, let's do another one— there's a modern cha cha  from the same great record after the break: