Groove o' the day: Grady Tate Afro

Grady Tate playing a heavy Afro-Cuban style groove, or Afro 6, as I've been calling it, on Grant Green's The Final Comedown movie soundtrack. The track is Soul Food African Shop, and the transcription is of the percussion break starting at 0:48. 

Bar 7 is probably the cleanest shot of his baseline groove here. He's hitting the bell of the cymbal, except in bar 6 where he moves his hand between a couple of cymbals. He hits the the drums strongly all the way, with a feeling of building into the next beat 1, a standard thing with this style.

Feet are in unison on the dotted quarters throughout— there is some dynamic variance in them, mainly occasional ghosted notes in the bass drum, which I wouldn't call accidental. I think he's very aware of the dynamic movement from beat to beat, and is sometimes getting the bass drum to help with that, mainly coming down with it in the middle of the measure, or on beat 3 as he builds into the next downbeat.  

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Daily best music in the world / groove o' the day: Sookie Sookie

I heard this on Portland's jazz station KMHD yesterday— on Ben Turner's excellent afternoon show. You probably don't have a decent local jazz station, so you should be streaming KMHD online and becoming a monthly supporter. A much better use of that $10 monthly than that Hulu subscription or whatever.   

This is Sookie Sookie by Grant Green, with Idris Muhammad on drums— because he's everywhere— and it's everything I like in drumming. There's a lot here to be learned about the difference between human musical repetition and machine repetition. 

Here's approximately the groove Muhammad is playing on the solos: 

He may not be stating all of it all the time— some of that bass drum rhythm is being played by the bassist and/or percussionist. That's the overall vibe— with a strong 1 in the first three measures and building intensity in the fourth measure. He does some different things with the cymbal— listen for how he uses the bell later on in the track.   

It's very repetitive, clearly, and it's engaging because you feel that it's being created by a group of very engaged humans. There's a feeling of suspense that's totally absent when someone plays over a loop created on a device. Humans are sensitive to that, and mechanical repetition has totally different implications for them.  

Groove o' the day: Art Blakey afro

This is a triplet Afro feel by Art Blakey, one of the major people playing that feel in a hard bop setting in the late 50s/early 60s. I usually call it a 6/8 feel— some people call it 12/8— here the tune is clearly in 4, so we'll call it 12/8. This groove appears to be something he made up, rather than a “correct” African/Latin feel. The bell pattern is derived from our usual pattern, the so-called “short” bell pattern— with the triplets filled out in the last two beats.

On the solos, Blakey goes into a heavy shuffle— the way only he can play it— and stays with it for the rest of the tune, up to the fade out, when he switches back to this feel.

The bass drum is barely audible on the recording, so he could be playing something different for all I know; this matches what the bass player is doing, anyway. The floor tom hit on 4 is softer than the other left hand notes, hence the parentheses.

Listening to the complete track, can you imagine a jazz drummer in a small group today playing as loud as Blakey does, for as long as he does, on this track? He's playing loud. Modern players have basically retired that effect from their playing— that simple, sustained, deep, powerful, groove.

Groove o' the day: Idris Muhammad — The Windjammer

Here's a funk groove with a couple of unusual touches, and a New Orleans flavor, by Idris Muhammad. The tune is The Windjammer, from Grant Green's 1970 album Green Is Beautiful. On the intro Muhammad plays the ride cymbal— sounds like a little 602 Flat Ride, in fact. The ruff at the end of the second measure will be a little technical challenge:

The main groove, played on the hihat, with a 7-stroke roll at the end of the second measure:

 And, what the heck, the first big fill:

The rolls here are 5-stroke, played quiet and loose. The bass drum hits on beat 4 of the second measure are pretty sloppy, but this seems to be what he was going for.

Groove o' the day: Elvin Jones Latin

We want to get a sense of the texture of this groove, and just writing out one time through of it would be misleading, so here's the whole intro from I Wish You Love, from Grant Green's Street of Dreams album, on Blue Note. Elvin Jones is the drummer.

There was an Afro-Cuban style somewhere in this groove's ancestry, but now it's just Elvin Jones Latin Jazz. He puts a little bit of a swing feel on it, and plays it very loose— not all of the notes written as unisons land exactly together. Listen, and try to cop the feel. Elvin tends to lean on the &s a little bit, or a lot, throughout his playing. Here he plays the bass drum strongly and the floor tom lightly.

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Audio after the break: 

Groove o' the day: Grant Green — Cantaloupe Woman

Here are two different Blue Note/soul/boogaloo-type grooves on the tune Cantaloupe Woman, from albums by Grant Green.

First, from the great session drummer Ben Dixon (who also wrote the tune), as played on the 1965 Blue Note album His Majesty King Funk:

Then on the 1971 album Visions, played by Idris Muhammad (or possibly Harold Caldwell— I think it's IM, though):

In both examples the bass drum notes in parentheses are optional— those notes are played maybe 50% of the time. The snare drum hits are played at roughly an even volume, with the buzzed note in the second example maybe a little lighter. None of them are loud.

Audio after the break: