Transcription: Roy Haynes intro

You know what, I still owe you a BOOK OF INTROS. The thing has been languishing a few short hours from completion for quite a few months now. Perhaps me drawing attention to that fact, as I'm doing here, will help me get off my butt and get it done... stay tuned...

In the mean time, here is an intro played by Roy Haynes on a cool hard bop tune, G.W., from Eric Dolphy's first album as leader, Outward Bound. That's a very in-your-face Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, and Jaki Byard on piano.

The entire passage is played at a fairly uniform, strong volume. The Xs on the snare drum line are played as stick shots. The last two measures are the beginning of the tune, and are approximations— there may be a little more going on than I've written. The 8th notes have a legato swing— don't play an exaggeratedly triplety swing feel— even the 8ths out a bit.

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Transcription: Tony Williams — Hat And Beard

We do all the hits here— this is another very famous piece of drumming, by Tony Williams, on Eric Dolphy's Out To Lunch. The tune is the very unusual Hat And Beard, which is in 9/4 with a couple of beats added/subtracted on the B part. This is a good example of the “jazz percussion” approach I spent a long time trying to get my head around. The rhythmic conception is extremely modern— he handles straight 8th and 16th notes in a way unprecedented in jazz— and there is little in the way of traditional vocabulary. Instead he plays sounds, treating the drum set almost as a multi-percussion set up.

The rhythms are written precisely— don't swing the 8ths. There is a deliberate difference between the dotted-8th/16th swing pattern at the beginning, and the triplet swing pattern he plays on the head out. I don't know what the hell Dolphy was talking about in the liner notes when he says “[The tune] opens in 5/4, but once the whole group is in, the basic count is really 9/4.”, because the whole thing is in 9, except for those couple of odd measures.

I've transcribed the heads in and out only; we'll see about doing the solos sometime soon...

Get this transcription and four more by purchasing my e-book 5 TONY WILLIAMS TRANSCRIPTIONS. Only $4.95.

It's hard to believe it has an age.

Via Larry Appelbaum @ Let's Cool One: today is the 50th birthday of one of the greatest albums in jazz, Oliver Nelson's Blues and the Abstract Truth. Like a lot of other people, the first jazz tune I learned was Stolen Moments (at least that I can put a title to- the first thing I ever played was a Sammy Nestico chart).

Unfortunately my favorite track, Hoe Down, isn't available on YouTube, but here's the opening from MySpace Music.


Audio after the break.