Subtractive method: an alternative approach

I just saw this from brother writer Jon McCaslin, over at the excellent and much hipper-named Four On The Floor blog: a Syncopated Stick Control method, which he's using to bring some rhythm interest to practicing Stone. It's sort of a parallel thing to my “subtractive” method. 

Both things are similar to the natural sticking idea, in which you stick mixed 16th note rhythms with the RH on all the #s and &s, and the LH on all the es and as. As if you were playing alternating 16th notes (an RLRL pattern), and dropping out notes to make the rhythm. We're just doing it with sticking patterns other than RLRL. 

It's hard to explain just in writing, much easier— and very worth it— to actually do it. 

Jon is basically eliminating the first note of any doubles, and the third note of any multiples, on either hand, or both hands— and some other things. Read his post, he illustrates it well. 

It's good to have slightly different angles on the same thing— it takes us to a total understanding of the basic materials and ideas we use in learning and teaching the drums, and the different ways might be better for doing some specific things. 

Four on the floor: Stone meets Ghana

Here's something very rare, an idea to base your whole life on: Stone-type patterns based on Ghanaian bell patterns. This is from Jon McCaslin over at Four on the Floor, given to him by the percussionist Russell Hartenberger. Just go over there and get them, and print them, and keep them in your notebook forever.

Very occasional quotes of the day: from Elvin

Jon McCaslin at Four On The Floor has posted a collection of quotes from Elvin Jones, collected by Adam Nussbaum. Here are two of my favorites; there are many more at FOTF:

“Thad told me this many years ago and it got to me when he said it. He probably doesn't even remember saying it to me. He just said: 

Whenever you play, imagine that it's the very last chance or opportunity you'll ever have. 

So just that thought is enough incentive to at least not be wishy-washy or do something insignificant. At least it will bring out whatever honesty is in you to be applied to your instrument at that time.  hat's the only philosophy I know - just to do the very best you can at all times.”

---

“When I start, I keep the structure and melody and content of the tune in my mind and work up abstractions or obbligatos on it. I count the choruses as I go along, and sometimes I'm able to decide in advance what the pattern of a whole chorus will be, but more often five or six patterns will flash simultaneously across my mind, which gives me a choice, especially if get hung up, and I've had some granddaddies of hang-ups. If you don't panic, you can switch to another pattern.  

I can see forms and shapes in my mind when I solo, just as a painter can see forms and shapes when he starts a painting. And I can see different colors.  My cymbals will be one color and my snare another color and my tom toms each a different color.  I mix these colors up, making constant movement. Drums suggest movement, a conscious, constant shifting of sounds and levels of sound. My drumming can shade from a whisper to a thunder. 

I'm not conscious of the length of my solos, which I've been told have run up to half an hour. When you develop a certain pattern, you stay with it until it's finished.  It's just like you start out in the evening to walk to Central Park and back. Well, there are a lot of directions you can take - one set of streets going up, then in a certain entrance and out another entrance and back on a different set of streets.  You come back and maybe take a hot bath and have some dinner and read and go to bed. You haven't been somewhere to lose yourself, but to go and come back and finish your walk.”

Mel Lewis rub-a-dub

Well, we ignore the blog Four On The Floor at our peril. I hadn't visited in awhile, and then yesterday,  BLAM, there's a great post with a video from Chris Smith— he's the author of The View From The Back Of The Band, an invaluable book about Mel Lewis's career. If you've listened to the recordings of Lewis's jazz drumming history, you heard him mention something he calls “rub-a-dub.” He doesn't talk about it in detail, except to say it's a way of playing figures while filling in around the drums.

I was wondering about it, because the recorded example in reference is pretty bad ass. In this video Smith explains it:



It's very much the kind of thing we're into here at CRUISE SHIP DRUMMER!: a simple idea that sounds great and is easy to improvise with. It's actually very similar to something I've been doing for many years, that I picked up from Jack Dejohnette's book. The explanation and context is different, but it's the same idea. I always felt it was covered pretty poorly in Jack's book, so I'm working up a way of practicing it using Syncopation, of course. Stay tuned for that...

Be sure to follow/subscribe to FOTF, and Chris Smith's Drum Hang channel on YouTube. Hell, follow me while you're at it. Scroll down to where it says “followers” on the right.

Massive brain dump

Blogger is acting funny this morning, not letting me upload images, so instead maybe you should visit Jon McCaslin's Four On The Floor for a trove of great stuff he has posted under the innocuous heading Monday Morning Paradiddle— surely just a little routine light reading? Included are several clips with the great, late, Steve Berrios, Carl Allen talking about the ride cymbal, and a great clinic video with Adam Nussbaum, which is so good in the first 60 seconds I'll go ahead and post it myself:

 

He says some really important stuff in that first minute, like:

“Every time I get a chance to play with good people, I learn something.” 

I would say I learn something in any playing situation at all, which I think he would agree with, as he refines that a second later:

“In any situation there's something to be learned.” 

 As much great music as Nussbaum has played, for so many years, you would think he has seen everything and would know everything, but I believe him. Early on you learn obvious things you could state verbally, like: “Oh, Star Eyes has that little figure attached to it.” or “Oh, I guess I need to learn how to play a cha cha.” Or “Oh, I guess sometimes there's nothing I can do to make the music sound good.” On a higher level, you're just adding to your playing intelligence— the thing that functions in the intersection of your ears, your nonverbal mind, and your limbs. That happens any time you negotiate a musical interaction with other musicians, while paying attention and trying to make the music sound good— any situation, with any players, good or bad.  

Also, he states the Cruise Ship Drummer! credo, if there ever was one:

“There's no such thing as a stupid gig, just a bad attitude.”

That's an easy one when you're a comfortable distance away, but people have a hard time following it in the field.

Anyway, go pay Jon a visit while the Blogger people finish dealing with, I don't know, software pixies, and I can post normally again.

Ed Shaughnessy 1929-2013

I couldn't possibly improve on what Jon McCaslin has said about the passing of this great drummer, so just go read his notice.

Googled: “Elvin Jones triplets”

What the heck, we haven't done a “round up” style post in awhile. Here's a quick survey of Internet lore, briefly reviewing some of the information returned when you google “Elvin Jones triplets”:

First, the unambiguous winner:

Four on the Floor — Elvin Jones Independence Exercises
Extremely valuable piece in which Jon McCaslin shares some insights into Elvin's approach, learned in a clinic from the master himself. Revealingly, the concepts are fairly simple, at least by current standards of drummeriness. I won't summarize it here— just go read it and live it for awhile.


Drum! Magazine —Inside the Drumming of Elvin Jones
Transcription of the drum performance on the Jones composition Three Card Molly, with a lead sheet for the tune. The tune is found on the recording Genesis— the author neglects to mention that in the piece. This is a good illustration of the gap between all of the things you can say and write about music, and the music itself: it's pretty vast. Even the author, a highly qualified musician and jazz educator who knew Elvin personally, doesn't offer a whole lot of fresh verbal information about Jones's thing. That's because there is no verbal explanation to be had; it all happens in the playing and listening. In fact, most of what you can write about any art is either 1) false, 2) true, but obvious, 3) technical. Literally-stated deep insights are extremely rare.

More after the break:

Go watch now

The Max Roach story, at Four on the Floor. Here's part 1/7:

Other people write good things

Of excellence.

I haven't been giving my fellow blogs enough love recently, but they've been producing a veritable tidal wave of excellent stuff:

Trap'd has a long post about playing with large ensembles, with an excellent list of the general principles of big band drumming- a must read.

The Drummer's Way has some words of wisdom from Jim Keltner. "How do I exist in a world of Colaiutas?" Companion piece: interview with Andy Newmark, in which he tells about watching Keltner record with John Lennon.

A "double shot" of Swiss triplets from Four on the Floor and Random Randy. Companion piece: my absurd Swiss triplets exercise.

Dave Aldridge writes about Funkadelic's Tiki Fulwood. Companion piece: my transcription of all of the grooves from Maggot Brain.

The Melodic Drummer writes more about playing brushes at fast tempos.

Rudimental Hands titles a post with some useful advice: never practice struggle.

Other people say good things

It's a slow writing day for me, but there are lots of good things afoot at our brother drummer blogs right now:

@ Trap'd: Inspired by Art Taylor, Ted Warren outlines some easy things you can/should do to give tunes some shape. Here is a savagely-edited teaser- go read the entire piece:

1. Rapid volume changes- One of the things I noticed that Art Taylor did in the tune I saw is that even though he didn't switch cymbals for each soloist, he did change the volume level of his cymbal throughout the piece to cause a texture change. [...]

2. Changing cymbals- This is probably the most common and easiest way of signally changes between soloists and sections, however, it is most effective when you know the form of the tune you're playing! [...]

3. Changing comping textures- Another great thing I noticed in the Art Taylor footage was how when he went from the Tenor to the piano solo, even though he didn't change cymbals he went from quite prominent bass drum/open snare comping to mainly a click on beat 4 and very quiet bass drum. [...]

4. Changing implements- Going from brushes to sticks is a great way to let the listener know the head is over and the soloing has started. [...]

5. A couple of more things about bass solos- Bass is not only usually the quietest thing in the band, it's also the instrument that gets lost most easily due to low frequencies being harder to hear. [...] So it's generally a good idea to thin out the texture of your timekeeping as well as the volume. Don't thin out the strength of the time or the commitment to the form though. [...] 

Also see Warren's recent piece on transcribing and listening, where he says nice things about us.


@ The Melodic Drummer: Andrew Hare offers one burning post after another, this time dealing with the Philly Joe beat- go find out what it is. A nice companion to the Trap'd piece above is Hare's series on transitions, along with a post on endings.

@ Four on the Floor: Jon McCaslin has a ton of great little stuff. Read his Monday Morning Paradiddle for a, ahm, potpourri of good stuff- a number of well-selected clips, MLK on jazz, Elvin with Coltrane, Greg Hutchinson warming up, and more.

Something key

Jon McCaslin presents a very core principle of modern jazz drumming, via a lesson from Alan Dawson. The 3/8-within-4/4 polyrhythm has been present in a variety of forms in jazz since the beginning, and became a core part of the rhythm section concept  with the Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans groups of the early '60's. It comes from African music, and is a very elemental way of conceiving and expressing time and meter.

In Dawson's approach, as presented by McCaslin, it's treated as a melodic idea, in the bebop fashion- the recurring dotted quarter (and rhythms derived from it) is something of a special occasion within distinctly 4/4 bop playing. In post-60's playing, I regard it as more or less ever-present, whether it's stated directly or not- I may be a little bit of an extremist that way. It's often used (and abused) as a tension-producing device- "metric modulation", the currently popular pre-packaged indicator of amazingness, is the most egregious example of this.

This isn't exactly a how-to piece, but you can begin to introduce this into your playing by following the instructions at 4OTF, by getting very familiar with the way 3/8 and 3/4 lay against various 4/4 phrases, by getting your snare drum stuff together in 3/8 and 3/4 (here's a clue for how to begin applying that to the drums), by studying the difference between/similarity of 3/4 and 6/8, and especially by doing a lot of listening to the great drummers since the 1960's, including Elvin Jones, Roy Haynes, Jack Dejohnette, Bob Moses, Billy Hart, Jon Christiansen, Barry Altschul, et al, and to African, Afro-Cuban, and Brazilian drumming. I didn't say it was easy...

A growing community

Following up this post by Mark Feldman, I thought it would be good to direct your attention to my drumming blogroll, in case you somehow are not a regular follower of them already. There are other blogs than the ones I've mentioned, mainly dealing with gear, amazingness, or heavy metal, or just telling what the blogger is up to, but I'm interested in ones that deal with actually learning to play the drums and being a musician. I also haven't mentioned a few good ones that are either defunct, or extremely occasional posters.

If you write or know of a drumming blog not mentioned here, please let us know about it in the comments.

Four on the Floor - Along with Trap'd, Jon McCaslin of Calgary has the most active and prominent drumming blog. Excellent text and YouTube clips, occasional technical pieces. Most recent post: The Calgary Scene - Michelle Grégoire

Trap'd - By Ted Warren in Ontario. As I've already mentioned, I love his online teaching style. Most recent post: A little jam

Tim's Parlour - The one that inspired me to make this an actual drumming blog. Very sporadic posting, and not easy to navigate (get thee on Blogger/Wordpress!), but great content. Most recent post: Idea #11 ("This is a simple idea for working on hand co-ordination and involves playing different figures in each hand over a basic foot pattern.")

Bang! the Drum School - Mark Feldman in Brooklyn, NY has a great blog on his teaching studio site. Lots of downloadable content, just like here, for every level of player. Most recent post (after the one that inspired this one): Samba Independence Part 2

The Melodic Drummer - Andrew Hare in DC just started this blog a few weeks ago, and already has a ton of outstanding content. Most recent post: The Caravan Warmup: Moving moeller strokes between drums

Rudimental Hands - A really good blog for keeping track of what's current in the marching percussion world. Most recent post: Wednesday: Basic Strokes

David Aldridge's Drumming Blog - Primarily text, and a sporadic poster, a little esoteric, always interesting. Most recent post: Bio Robotic Drumming... Really

Jazz Schmazz - This is an honorable mention- it's primarily a jazz recordings blog, but he does have at least a couple of excellent Max Roach and Pete LarRoca transcriptions posted.

Jon Christiansen @ 4OTF

Go read this post about Jon Christiansen at Four on the Floor- I haven't even had a chance to read it yet, but it doesn't matter. One of the great facilitators in drumming, I think of Christiansen as kind the Billy Higgins of the 70's, for his supportive, relatively egoless playing, and beautiful light sound. He also epitomizes the ECM style and sound.

Here's one of my transcriptions of his playing, Long As You Know You're Living Yours, from Keith Jarrett's Belonging.

They have a bunch of clips of him, but here he is playing with Michael Brecker in the '80's:

Go now

Yikes, another patch of light posting, as I've been busy with other projects. Until I can get something posted later in the day, get your rear over to Jon McCaslin's blog to watch and more importantly listen to a rare Kenny Clarke video. In case you're not familiar with him, Clarke is the guy who basically invented the modern usage of the cymbal, and modern drumming generally. Learn more about him from the Mel Lewis history of jazz drumming interviews (another h/t to Jon for linking to that originally), then get yourself copies of Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington and Miles Davis' Walkin', for starters.

Billy Cobham with Horace Silver

Here's a fun clip of Billy Cobham playing Nutville with Horace Silver in 1968. And there's Bennie Maupin on tenor. It's awfully strange seeing Cobham playing a four piece.



Tip-o-the-stick to Drum to Life for finding that. I also see Jon McCaslin has beaten me to it.

The only two videos available.

Another great post at Jon McCaslin's Four on the Floor- the complete Elvin Jones documentary Different Drummer- reminds me of how scarce information used to be. Up through at least the beginning of my college years- 1985-88 or so- the only serious drumming videos I was aware of were DD, and Steve Gadd Up Close. That was it. I didn't get to see Dejohnette on video until the mid-90's, shortly before I got to see him live. I never got to see Paul Motian, Philly Joe, 90% of other important people until YouTube came along. It seems absurd now.

So, here are some excerpts (someone was kind enough to remove all the pesky "verbal information" for us) from the other drum video available through most of my early drummerhood, Steve Gadd Up Close:



More after the break:

Some of them just can't count.

There's a great extended piece over at Four on the Floor on the subject of form in soloing, and how to hip the other musicians to the fact you are adhering to it:

Of course Max Roach isn't the only Jazz drummer to have approached soloing [over the form of the tune, rather than free-form] and I think every great Jazz drummer has the ability to do this as well. It's really an important skill to have and the recorded history of Jazz drumming proves this. This isn't a knock on playing free form drum solos liberated from structure or a steady pulse, but I think you've got to be able to do it both ways. All the greats could as far as I'm concerned...so should we.

Where my problem lies is in the often inability for other musician's to follow you while you are doing this.

Steve Swallow interview @ Trap'd

I haven't been getting around to the other blogs as much as I should, but here's something to shake me out of my anti-social torpor: Ted Warren at Trap'd interviewing bassist Steve Swallow. Here's a selection:

You have worked with most of the great drummers out there. (Roy Haynes, Pete LaRoca, Jack DeJohnette, Adam Nussbaum, to name a few). Do you have any favorites to work with and/or people you think you have an especially deep musical connection with?

I'm reluctant to name names, for fear of leaving someone out. Clearly, the drummer I'm next to on the bandstand is the guy I'm most focused on; it's a very intimate and intense relationship. If things don't go well with the drummer I'm left with an incredibly sore lower back by the end of the gig, the product I suppose of trying to force the music into a smooth, relaxed flow. Of course, this can't be done. Either you find a groove with a drummer or you don't, and sometimes I'm surprised that it's not there with a highly regarded drummer, or that it's magically there with a drummer of less renown. I like that you refer to a "deep musical connection." Really connecting with a drummer involves so much more than the placement of beats; touch, dynamics, the drums' tuning, the drummer's response to what's going on elsewhere on the bandstand and many other factors are equally crucial.

Go read the whole thing. H/t to Jon McCaslin at Four on the Floor for linking to this. He also gives a link to Swallow's site, which has his and Carla Bley's lead sheets available to download free of charge.

Massive Mel Lewis interview

More great stuff from Jon McCaslin at Four on the Floor: extended radio interview of Mel Lewis by Loren Schoenberg, discussing the history of the drums in jazz from Baby Dodds to Elvin Jones. An essential document for all jazz drummers, and anyone serious about the drums, period.

2020 UPDATE: You can now get the interviews on the University of North Texas site. Thanks to Manuel, our man in Augsburg for the notice!

Transcription: Frankie Dunlop - Bolivar Blues

There is just a ton of good stuff on Jon McCaslin's Four on the Floor blog- like this little 2010 piece on the great, under-appreciated drummer Frankie Dunlop, who was with Thelonious Monk for part of the 1960's. I've studied him quite a bit myself, and always recommend him as one of the first people for novice jazz drummers to listen to. He plays busy but simply- you get to hear him make a lot of comping decisions, and it's easy to pick out what he's doing. And he also happens to be on a bunch of great records with tunes you want to learn!

Monk's Dream is really a classic beginner's record, though I don't know how many people use it that way. With the title track, Bye-Ya and Five Spot Blues it's got three hip, semi-common Monk compositions. Bolivar Blues doesn't get played much, but is a very classic, singable blues with a little 3/4 figure in the turnaround- right up there with Freddie Freeloader and Blue Monk for first blues, in my opinion. Based on Sweet Georgia Brown, Bright Mississippi is the friendliest possible introduction to the contrafact concept. Monk and Charlie Rouse make it easy on beginners, too- Rouse's solos are straightforward, melodic and swinging, and Monk tends to play the tune behind the solo.

Here's an easy transcription of the head and piano solo on Bolivar Blues, from Monk's Dream (only $6.99 on Amazon!):

[ image here]

As usual, Blogger is balking at taking my uploaded images- I'll post that as soon as it deems to accept it. In the meantime:

Download the pdf