Transcription: Jack Dejohnette - Boo Ann's Grand

Jack Dejohnette open drum solo from Boo Ann's Grand, on the Jackie McLean 1967 album Demon's Dance. Tempo is about 241— about as fast you can do this kind of stuff. This is burning for jazz stuff using triplets. 

The solo begins at 5:23, and is 48 bars long, less two beats— the band comes in two beats off the 1 of the transcription. 

 

Naturally at this speed you can put a big slur marking over much of the dense activity. A lot of things written as unisons are not lined up precisely. Much of it is Elvin-like activity; he doesn't come off the cymbal much, except on the paradiddle-diddle thing in the fourth line, and at the beginning of the sixth line. He does some interactive snare and hihat stuff at the beginning and end. 

Playing this note for note would be insane. Analyze it for general principles, ways of playing, things played within one phrase. Some things are certainly happening from physical momentum that would be hard to duplicate if you played it literally. Something can be structured to the person playing it, but if they ghost some notes, it can look really fragmented on the page. 

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Transcription: Jack Dejohnette - Tumbleweed - 01

Jack Dejohnette playing on Tumbleweed, from Michael Brecker's album Pilgramage— released a few months after his death. This is the type of playing much of what we do here is in service of. 

For a moment it sounded like the tune is in 7, but that's because the bass hits the root on the & of 4, and again on the 1, which is a little unusual. The transcription starts at the beginning of the track, and goes through the first time through the head— it repeats quite a few times. Tempo is 89 bpm. 

There's some random-ish hihat activity, which I usually don't include, except I think it's a co-equal voice with the ride cymbal, almost, as far as constructing the groove is concerned. In the last two measures there's some unusual bass drum activity, partly in unison with the hands, partially in the gaps. Not all of it is real audible, that interaction between the snare drum/tom tom and bass drum is a little buried, the statement there is about the hands.  

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Daily best music in the world: Moon Germs

I have some commitments out of town right the next couple of weeks, and will be posting very lightly, so here's a record I listen to a lot in college, that I need to get back into rotation: Moon Germs, by Joe Farrell, with Jack Dejohnette on drums. I'm hitting the CTI label catalog hard these days.  

RANDOM NOTE: I should also remind you that I have two AWESOME 22" Extra Special Janavar jazz rides available at Cymbalistic right now. The first ones sold in 48 hours, these two have been inexplicably hanging around several weeks. We're doing meets in Seattle and central Washington in coming weeks, and they will certainly go away then. 

When I will have more in stock is UNKNOWN. 

UPDATE: One of them, “Emilia”, has sold— one remains, “Beatrice.”

Transcription: Jack Dejohnette - Gentle Rain

This tune shows you one way of opening up a Bossa Nova groove, in a modern jazz setting. It's Jack Dejohnette playing on Gentle Rain, from George Benson's album Beyond The Blue Horizon. I'm listening to a lot of CTI records lately. I like the cymbals sounds, and the music. 

This is the first part of George Benson's solo, starting at 1:38. He mostly stays in the original 8th note bossa groove, taking it in a rather funky direction at times. This is largely about cymbal and bass drum. Early on he plays some isolated 16th, later he gets denser— on this part he doesn't fully double time it, on the next part he goes into a more double time post-bop feel. The organ keeps the bass line in the original groove. 

The bass drum here is a rather high and dry sound, so it's nimble enough to do all the stuff he's doing by just touching it. Note that he plays a tresillo-type rhythm on the bass drum sometimes— to my ear that's suggested by what the organ is doing. The written accents are subtle— just a suggestion that the groove has some dynamic shape within itself you might not expect. He's using a narrow range of sounds here— one cymbal, rim clicks on the snare drum (sparsely), and bass drum. If he's playing the hihat, it's mostly inaudible. 

Things get busy in part two, I'll post that whenever I get around to doing it. 

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Best books: The Art of Modern Jazz Drumming - Dejohnette / Perry

“As our mental image becomes more precise, we are better able to select muscle movements which will achieve our goals quickly, efficiently, and accurately.”

I'm surprised I haven't written much about this book already— The Art of Modern Jazz Drumming, by Jack Dejohnette and Charlie Perry. It's my favorite jazz drumming book, after Syncopation. Together with Bob Moses's Drum Wisdom, it makes up a pretty expansive 60s-70s era doctrine of creative jazz drumming, that I very much agree with.  

It includes a lot of practice materials, but also a lot of informational text, which may be the most important parts of it. There are sections on listening, the general elements of contemporary jazz drumming, a historical overview of modern drumming, improvisation, drums-band interaction and improvisation, the cymbal line, cymbal interpretation, interaction of parts of the drum set, meter-within-meter playing, song form, the rhythm section, clave rhythm, phrasing, muscular tension, and body motion. Each thing is well illustrated, with recorded examples cited. Now that all music is instantly available on the internet, I need to reread it and actually listen to the recordings I was never able to find as a student.  

It is purely a book about creative playing, for the drum set as a four limbed instrument. There's nothing in here purely about the hands. Not much about the job of playing structurally, except broadly. 

Book I deals with meter-within-meter playing— mostly, playing 3/4 ideas in a 4/4 setting. Some of the patterns are similar Mel Lewis's rubadub idea. There are a lot of practice patterns written in a very loose format. It's a very valuable chapter that nevertheless could have used some editing/polishing— that doesn't matter, you figure out what to do with it. 

Book II deals with triplet patterns with the hands and feet, played as solo patterns, and played along with a cymbal rhythm. 

Book III deals with modern feet and left hand independence with a cymbal rhythm, in triplet partials. I certainly practiced this a lot; today I feel like there may be better ways of developing the same thing. Then again, we're not supposed to be living in book exercises, you're supposed to use them as a starting place. The entire book requires you to take a creative approach— you practice the pattern a little bit, then improvise with the broad idea of it. 

My complaints/caveats are: 

Too focused on triplets. Triplets are a fairly narrow range of what happens in jazz drumming. I think it's better to have 8th notes— swung or not— and quarter notes as your primary orientation. 

The book may even over-emphasize the creative, improvisatory, interactive aspects of playing. As a feral young jazz student, it took me awhile to figure out that my job was also to provide a foundation. My education was imperfect, that's not the book's fault. 

The meter-within-meter section could have been more developed, and polished. Many of the patterns seem redundant as written. It takes some creativity to get full value from it.  

The notation style is somewhat archaic, though that doesn't wreck the book, as it does many others. 

That's all fine— I don't think it's good to be looking for complete answers from any book. 

There's a big contrast in attitude between it and the most popular jazz drumming book ever— Art of Bop Drumming. AOBD is largely a style guide— a creative framework within a pretty particular set of boundaries. AOMJD is more of an open ended map of the creative terrain. They do serve different purposes. In retrospect I could have use some of the boundaries AOBD provides; I think many more people are missing the perspective AOMJD provides.  

120 pages. 

Groove o' the day: Jack Dejohnette - Polar AC

Jack Dejohnette playing a straight 8th groove on Freddie Hubbard's Polar AC. This gets called an ECM feel today, but maybe we should start calling it a CTI feel. Change it up, direct people to some other records. 

I've transcribed the intro of the tune, right up until the trumpet comes in: 

The groove suggests a 2/2 or half time feel— a free texture somewhere between a samba and funk feel. The main point of interest is the mostly-linear snare drum and bass drum activity, with some overlapping. The accents are subtle— he plays the snare drum at a pretty even volume.  

Groove o' the day: Jack Dejohnette - Soft Blue

Another item from Jack Dejohnette, playing on Jackie McLean's album Jackknife— Dejohnette's first major recording, made when he was 24 years old. We've seen a couple of other things from this album, a groove o' the day and a longer transcription. His playing on it is very interesting— like the previous GOTD, he's playing an Elvin-like groove, very repetitively. At this point when everyone is letting it all hang out, he virtually never deviates from the exact pattern below. A curious decision on a jazz record— I guess they wanted to make an instrumental single out of it, a la Lee Morgan:

He does add another tom hit on the & of 3 of the first measure, occasionally. And there are some very small variations in the cymbal occasionally. He plays the little ensemble figure on the head exactly, on the snare and cymbal, with no embellishment. If there are any fills at all I missed them. He handles dynamics very sensitively. 

Groove o' the day: Jack Dejohnette - Fiesta

A bright samba groove played by Jack Dejohnette on Fiesta, from Stan Getz' My Foolish Heart album— a live record from the mid-70s. Tempo is about half note = 130. 

Here's the very beginning of the tune:
 

He plays basically this for most of the body of the tune, with minor variations in the cymbal rhythm, plus fills and left hand activity:

Listen to the whole thing: 

Dejohnette patterns

UPDATE: Oops, there's a duplicate pattern in there— I think pattern 9 happens three times. And I got sloppy with my beaming standard. Oh well, it happens when you're rushing to post stuff.   

Some patterns extracted from these recent two Jack Dejohnette transcriptions. You could do essentially this with every transcription on the site— get your pencil, draw a bracket over any part of a transcription that looks interesting, practice that, develop it into something you can do in a musical texture. Sharpie a big rectangle around it. 

These are not particularly unique patterns— you can make something similar to them using a variety of sources, especially Stick Control and Syncopation. We'll take advantage of them all being written on one page (two pages) to practice combining them. Many of them are four note patterns played twice. At the end of page 2 there are some patterns that are essentially grooves. Patterns 7 and 19 are polyrhythmic/polymetric patterns that can be played over two or more bars of 4/4 or 2/2. 

Practicing these, I essentially play around with them as musical ideas, moving them around the drums and cymbals, varying the accents, playing obvious variations on them, and finding ways to end them other than by stopping on beat 1. I might practice them the same way as my “Funk/Figure/Cliché Control” pages, combining measures without stopping, one time each: 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, etc, 2-3, 2-4, 2-5, etc, 3-4, 3-5, etc, and so on.  

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Transcription: Jack Dejohnette - Directions

Here's that Jack Dejohnette transcription I mentioned yesterday— on the intro of Directions, from Miles Davis Live at the Fillmore East - It's About Time.

The 8th note quintuplets I mentioned happen right up front, when he's playing half-free, not quite settled on the main groove. It's possible he worked out the 5s, or maybe he's thinking something else and is just pushing the rhythm around, a la yesterday's post.

The transcription begins at 0:38 in the recording.

All of the squirrelly stuff happens in the first four bars; after that he's in the main groove for the tune. It's mostly straightforward “non-independent” drumming, not unlike what we saw on another recent Dejohnette transcription. The simplest formula for doing that kind of thing is to play a Stone-type sticking pattern, with the RH on the cymbal (with bass drum in unison), LH on the snare. Here the snare drum is a little more active, and sometimes overlaps with the RH/cymbal part. And he doesn't play the cymbal on all of the bass drum hits. It would be easy to make some kind of formula to do that— and I probably will— or you can just do the Stick Control type thing a lot and play around with it, which is probably what Dejohnette did. 

I just made a label non-independent drumming, which is so far only attached to this post. If you dig around in the posts under the ECM label, you'll find most of what will eventually get that new label.  

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Transcription: Jack Dejohnette - Climax - drum solo

Another drum solo from a Jackie McLean record. Jack Dejohnette early in his career, soloing on a fast tune from McLean's album Jackknife. The tune is Climax, tempo is about half note = 160. We looked at another tune from this record awhile back.

If you ever worried about not being able to solo at fast tempos, check this out. It's fast but very simple, using a few basic “non-independent” patterns, with hands in unison opposite the bass drum. He's not panicking about not throwing in enough stuff, or changing ideas fast enough. 

The solo begins at 6:55 in the track. 

Listening closely, Dejohnette's execution is quite loose— the unisons between hands are pretty wide flams. 

That measure of 9/8 near the end is nothing, ignore it. Just an extra 8th note seemed to work its way in there. 

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Daily best music in the world: So What

I'm going to transcribe some part of this— you can give it a listen while I figure that out. It seems worthy of a pretty full treatment, and breaks down cleanly into funk, medium swing, and fast swing sections, so maybe it will be a multi-part project. 

It's Jack Dejohnette playing So What on George Benson's album Beyond The Blue Horizon. This is really the kind of drumming everything on this blog is in aid of: 

Transcription: Jack Dejohnette - Mr. Clean

Took a break from the really long and hard Elvin Jones transcription and did something else really hard. From the Freddie Hubbard album Straight Life, this is Jack Dejohnette playing behind Joe Henderson's solo on Mr. Clean. It's quite dense. The transcription begins at 3:58. 
 

It gets so dense I was presented with some formatting problems— like if anyone's going to do anything with it, I have to do one measure per line on a lot of it:  

I've put brackets over a few things that are easy to work out as patterns. There's probably more, but I didn't take a lot of time to analyze it. You could actually write a whole book breaking down what he plays here. 

He plays 8th notes on the ride cymbal almost the entire time, when he's not doing textural/soloistic stuff. You can hear that the accents on the cymbal vary dramatically— he's not just playing it at an even volume. 

All of the slashes indicate 32nd note open doubles. I've also written out the actual 32nd notes. If you want to work some of this out, be looking for ways to use doubles or mixed paradiddle type stickings. I think relatively little of the fast stuff will be played as singles. 

Regarding the 32nd note quintuplets— do what you will. What I've written is accurate, but than can be deceptive as to what's really going on. It's really fast, do what you want with it. With much of the fast stuff you can hit main accents and fill it up whatever way is most comfortable to you. Without knowing the actual stickings he used, it's pointless to try to play something weird exactly accurately to the transcription.  

The hihat is irregular, and is not integral to the rest of what he's doing. I notice he tends to play it in the middle of the measure. I include it for information purposes; you can play it on the &s, or play it on all the 8th notes, or not at all. 

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Transcription: Jack Dejohnette - Peasant Dance

Hey, the longest transcription we've done in awhile, here, a three pager. It's Jack Dejohnette playing on a very interesting record I had not really heard before: Peacemeal, by Lee Konitz, recorded in 1969. It's a quintet, with Konitz on alto and tenor, and some electronic device, and Marshall Brown on valve trombone and baritone horn. This is a jazz arrangement of Peasant Dance, from Bela Bartók's Mikrokosmos. This is the blowing over a vamp starting at 1:20. 

It was difficult at times for me to isolate the bass drum from Eddie Gomez's bass playing, so I probably left some out, or put some things in that were actually the acoustic bass. Dejohnette swings his 16th notes for much of this; relating that back to this recent post, that's equivalent a normal jazz tune played at quarter note = 230— getting towards the upper limit for swinging the rhythm.

After the recent Max Roach series, I like the idea of making study guides based on transcriptions— maybe I'll get to that later in the week.

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Transcription: Jack Dejohnette - Tennessee Waltz

Jack Dejohnette plays Tennessee Waltz! One of the most cursed tunes in the standard repertoire. I don't know what's going through his head here— maybe he's having a wonderful time. I know a couple of guys who will confidently tell you what Jack Dejohnette or anybody else is feeling based on what he's playing. I find that annoying, so let's leave it at this: for me it would be a bit of a struggle making a jazz performance out of this tune. There are a lot of funny tunes on Sonny Rollins's records. This is from Falling In Love With Jazz— made in 1989, which certainly has to be the low ebb for that tune as far as jazz musicians are concerned.

Here he's playing behind Jerome Harris's guitar solo, starting at 2:03.

There's a good amount of variation in the dynamics on the ride cymbal— quite a few accents with the shoulder of the stick. To me, that's a modern, post-Tony thing— I feel like I don't hear as much of that with drummers in the 50s. I notice at the end of phrases he'll accent before the 1, but still play the 1 with the bass drum. Not a lot of independence happening here; usually he's playing one foot or the other. There are a couple of standard Dejohnette licks near the end— similar to what he plays in this very old John Scofield transcription.

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Practice loop: Sivad

This is a fun one, and just about my favorite ~45 seconds of music in the world: the opening of Sivad, from the Miles Davis album Live Evil. Tempo is 86 bpm. Rock out.

Groove o' the day: Jack Dejohnette - On the Nile

Here's Jack Dejohnette early in his career, soon after his move from Chicago to New York. He's playing in a very Elvin Jones-like mode with Jackie McLean, who is himself writing in a Coltrane Quartet-like mode. The tune is On The Nile, from the record Jack Knife.

This is the groove from the head of the tune. Swing the 8th notes. 

He plays this on the solo vamp:

He plays these grooves pretty repetitively throughout, which is interesting. For some reason it reminds me of Robert Rauschenberg's Factum I and Factum II, where the famously freewheeling painter made two identical pictures. On the solo vamp Dejohnette sometimes plays 16th notes a la Elvin in the second measure—just double the middle note of the triplet and spread it all out to make legato 16th notes.

Transcription: Jack Dejohnette - Timeless

Biggest longest transcription we've done here in some time. This is Jack Dejohnette playing on Timeless, another essential recording by John Abercrombie. Jan Hammer also appears. I got my copy of this album at Rasputin's Records in Berkeley, California in 1988. Where did you get yours? Our relationships with recordings are supposed to be significant enough that we remember stuff like that.

This is the title track, which is somewhat overshadowed by the presence of the hypervelocitous madhouse Lungs on the same recording. This tune is very “ECM”, in the same bag as Vashkar and Dansere: slow, with a long spacy intro, a beautiful tune, and spacy soloing over a vamp, or short form. The transcription starts at 4:40 in the recording:

The entire tune is played over a three bar vamp, with two measures of 4/4 plus one measure of 6/4. Later in the tune there are some odd bars— Hammer shorts a few of the 6/4 measures, and adds a beat to one of them. It happens.

Dejohnette plays very softly for much of this, barely ever getting into anything I would call a mezzo forte; the written accents are mostly very subtle. You'll notice his hands don't move around a lot, partly because of that— swinging your arm around naturally creates too much volume when you're mostly playing a couple of inches off the drum. Dynamic situations like this are extremely common in modern playing, and complex, rebound-y, Moeller-y type technique is totally useless in them.

The main cymbal here sounds like an 18" or 20" Paiste 602 Flat Ride, for whatever that's worth to you.

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Transcription: Jack Dejohnette - Backwoods Song

In honor of the passing of the guitarist John Abercrombie— along with Pat Metheny, John Scofield, and Bill Frisell, one of the most important guitarists of the last ~45 years— here's Jack Dejohnette's playing on the opening of Backwoods Song, from the first Gateway album. Gateway was Abercrombie's trio with Dejohnette and Dave Holland. Every serious drummer needs to own all four of their records: Gateway, Gateway II, Homecoming, In The Moment.

I've transcribed the intro and head of the tune, up to the beginning of the guitar solo— probably I'll write out more of the track for a future Dejohnette transcription e-book.

There's a lot of stuff on the page, but this is pretty straightforward and playable. Play rolls, ruffs, and drags open— as 32nd note doubles. Where I've notated 32nd notes, play an alternating sticking. There are also a number of closed buzz-strokes, indicated with the z articulation. It's interesting where he plays the hihat with his foot— often when it's played sporadically like this, it seems to be happening by accident; the player is moving his foot the whole time, and occasionally some notes sound. Here Dejohnette mostly plays it during fills, not so much during the regular time feel— it's interesting to me because it suggests deliberation. I don't know if that observation will mean anything to anyone else.

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Groove o' the day: Go Ahead John

Getting loose definitionally with our groove o' the day here— this one is all variations, really, and no foundational groove. This is Jack Dejohnette playing the beginning of Go Ahead, John, from Miles Davis's album Big Fun. He's playing a two-measure groove with a stop in the first measure, and a busy second measure. I've just transcribed the first 15 bars of the track:

He's playing around with it, but you can see there are a few basic ingredients he's using. They got cute panning the drums in the mixing— if you want to give the track a close listen, you may want to go to your digital file of the track and load it in Transcribe or Audacity, and play it in mono.

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