Transcription: John Guerin — Dirty Harry, Main Title

Here's a whole lot of kickass 70s stuff. The drumming here is by John Guerin, one of the great L.A. studio drummers of the era. He plays a large set here, with five concert toms, and, fairly or not— to everyone else— he kind of owns the giant 70s tom fill in my mind. The piece is Lalo Schifrin's Main Title from the Dirty Harry Soundtrack. Lalo himself is the king of burning 70s TV and movie soundtracks, and this is one of my favorites.

The tempo is pretty cooking, but the 16ths swing a little bit on much of this, which is rather difficult to pull off. There's a good amount of somewhat linear playing, with the right leading, and the left hand filling in, especially on the tom fills. Guerin has a little non-independent method for making those open hihats: he plays both feet in unison on the close notes— almost all of them.

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Audio after the break:

Groove o' the day: Mel Lewis — Jive Samba

Mel Lewis plays a funk groove. The tune is Nat Adderly's Jive Samba, and the album is Thad Jones / Mel Lewis, Central Park North, from 1969. The intro has some fun tom fills, so let's write that out, too:

The tempo is around ~126-128, and the 16ths have just a slight lilt to them. Today the fashion would be to give the fills some shape by accenting part of them— well, I guess even at the time most good jazz drummers would've played them that way, too— but Mel plays every note of them at a pretty even volume, like you might expect a studio drummer of the time to do. Most good players now would be too hip to do them that way, but it sounds great.

Here's the groove he plays after that, when the band is in, with obvious bass drum variations:

Later in the tune, he also moves to an earlier-60's style groove, playing all four beats on the snare drum.

Audio after the break:

The Hawaii 5-O fill

That's the term I use for that universal 8th-grade-style fill down the toms effectively applied, ever since it was coined by Ralph Hardimon regarding a concert tom run of mine when I was in Santa Clara Vanguard's pit in 1986 (for you non-corps people, the pit is the non-marching concert percussion section that sets up along the front sideline). The piece is "The Hut", from Pictures at an Exhibition- it starts at 7:00, and the fill is a few measures after- my most exposed stuff on the show was during this piece- the concert toms are all me on that one:



When he said it I recognized it instantly, but listening back to the actual theme, with John Guerin on drums, nothing like the fill actually happens until late in the tune, at 1:13, so maybe he was just talking about a general vibe:



Other examples after the break- share your personal favorites in the comments: