Showing posts with label Everybody Digs Bill Evans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Everybody Digs Bill Evans. Show all posts

Sunday, October 01, 2023

Transcription: Philly Joe trading

Here is Philly Joe Jones trading eights and fours with Bill Evans on Minority, from one of my favorite records, Everybody Digs Bill Evans. It's a good tune to learn. 

I've written just the drum breaks. Transcription begins at 2:51. The tempo is quarter note = 247. 


No tom toms at all here, just snare drum, bass drum, a cymbal, and hihats. A lot of stick shots. There are a few passages of straight 8th notes— at this tempo the 8ths don't swing a whole lot anyway. Note the rhythm in bars 3 and 5. Bar 5 is the “intended” rhythm, in bar 3 he spreads it out a little bit, so the notes are evenly spaced— I've notated it pretty accurately. 

It's basically non-technical— you could do a rudimental sticking on the triplets— and much of it is linear, between the snare drum and bass drum. The rhythms could have been pulled from the book Syncopation, and give a clue for how to look at the phrases in that book— a subject for another time. 

The melodic idea for each break is pretty clear— listen for that, and how he repeats it and changes it, and listen for what sounds like the ending— the last bar, or two bars. The structure is logical, but the structure didn't come first, it's the natural result of thinking musically when you're improvising, and of doing your job, where you set people up to come back in out of your solo. 

Get the pdf

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Transcription: three Bill Evans intros

Here are my new transcriptions of a couple of famous Philly Joe Jones intros from Everybody Digs Bill Evans, plus one not-so-famous by Marty Morell, from But Beautiful, Evans' great live record with Stan Getz. Night and Day is a little sketchy- sorting out the part between the rim clicks, rim shots, regular notes, pitch bends, and muffled notes was quite tricky. I had always assumed the beginning was out of time, but it does fit into 4/4, only breathing slightly on the rests.




Get the pdf