Transcription: Jimmy Cobb solo

This week I may finally be getting a handle on this Jimmy Cobb fellow, after 40 years of listening to him. It turns out his records with Wynton Kelly are the ones to listen to. Obvious, but when you're mostly monofocused on a paltry 300? 500? records, there are going to be gaps. 

This is an extended solo from Out Front, from Kelly's record Undiluted. It's a 32 bar tune, and Cobb solos for three choruses. Tempo is in Roy Haynes territory, 283 bpm. It's rather macho— he's on the spot for three choruses and he burns it out in a big way. We talk about “ideas” and “chops” and “musicality”, but there's also a basic jazz musician thing where you just bring it and that's it.  

Still, his phrases are nicely composed, and they're good basic vocabulary at more moderate tempos. You could practice them two or four measures at a time. 

Dynamics are dramatic— the ghosted notes (indicated with parentheses) are extremely soft. So soft I may be missing some things there. 

He keeps the hihat going on beats 2 and 4 for the first chorus, drops it out in the second chorus, and feathers the bass drum for most of the first two A sections of the third chorus. Like a lot of players of this period, this is played mostly with the hands on the drums, with the bass drum used mainly for accents, or as part of worked out licks. I'm not hearing evidence of a lot of rudiments happening— it's mostly accented singles. There are probably doubles happening where there's one or two beats of triplets. At the beginning of the third chorus there are some Flam Accent #2s, or something like it.  

I felt like many two measure phrases started after the down beat, often on the & of 1. 

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Page o' coordination: Jimmy Cobb Afro

Page o' coordination based on Jimmy Cobb's playing on the tune Not A Tear, played by Wynton Kelly. The main groove Cobb plays on this tune is actually identical to the groove from Andrew Hill's MC, played by Idris Muhammad— which I misattributed to Freddie Waits. It's a good groove to have at your disposal for situations requiring an easy to follow version of this feel. Here we'll look at a variation Cobb frequently plays on that tune.  

That POC at the link above, plus today's POC, plus this warm up page, and perhaps this one, make a pretty fair introduction to this area of playing— for mastering the coordination, at least. Scroll through my Afro 6 labeled posts, you're bound to find others, and many serious challenges as well. 

My suggested method is to learn the whole page, then drill it using some set left hand moves around the drums.  

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Here's the recording— the Afro groove begins at around 2:00:

Transcription: Jimmy Cobb fours

Jimmy Cobb trading fours with Wynton Kelly on Gone With The Wind, from Kelly's self-titled (plus an exclamation point) trio album from 1961. There's a lot of very standard vocabulary here, the type of which I've been working with several students lately. And there are some unusual things, like the five note patterns in 8th notes and triplets in the fifth and last lines. I don't see a lot of that in making these transcriptions.  

The trading begins at 2:37. Tempo is a bright quarter note = 247. I've been real interested in this tempo range lately— around 240 to 280. 

 

Note that on some lines I've included the pickups to his solo breaks— he sets up his solos pretty emphatically, starting with the third one.  The tempo is bright, and the denser spots get a little crushed— any place you see any 16th notes. If I were learning to play this page, I would figure out something to do with those; they're just little fast things that sound kind of funny and aren't really critical content.  

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Very occasional quote of the day: Jimmy Cobb

“Miles could tell me the things he wanted from the drums but I didn’t let him tell me how to play them.”

— Jimmy Cobb, 1979 interview by Rick Mattingly

Ethan Iverson interview with Billy Hart

Here's part of another great interview by the Bad Plus' Ethan Iverson, this time with Billy Hart:


Miles and Tony
Tony, for his age, seemed to me more thorough in the study of the jazz tradition of drumming than anybody I’ve ever come across. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other guys. But the more I learned, the more I realized that he had somehow gotten that history together. And it is not just patterns, it’s the reason why… I guess it would be in any kind of musical tradition, certain chords or accents or whatever present an emotion that been tried and true over a length of time, which I guess “speaks” or is traditionally accurate or correct. Tony had that. It wasn’t just that he played this rhythm or pattern, it was that the pattern belonged there traditionally. A lot of people today might play a Tony Williams pattern, but they play it just because they heard it…they don’t know why or how it works.

There is that video you played me of the Miles Davis quintet with Herbie and Ron playing “Autumn Leaves.” There are some tensions in the piano and bass, and Tony responds by playing a simple shuffle on the snare and cymbal, which is kind of an advanced response to the tension.

Except that it so correct! You can see Miles is immediately influenced and affected emotionally. And then you back to Philly Joe or anybody, hear them do it, and go, “oh right.” It’s like a change of color or a heightened intensity. (As opposed to starting a tune that way---if you start a tune there, you have to stay there.)

One of the interesting things about the Miles band is that there were a lot of details about the tunes that incoming members have to learn, like the cymbal beat and piano tremolos on “All Blues.” Tony and Herbie interpreted those parts in their own way, but still they clearly knew the details.

That’s something else that Tony said. Someone asked him about getting the gig with Miles just before he was 17 years old. There must have been other good drummers, right? Tony said, “Hard to know. I’d like to ask Miles myself. I can’t say that I was better than anybody else. But I was definitely prepared for the gig. There was nothing Miles could play that I didn’t already know.”


Keep reading- important stuff about time after the break:

Transcription: Four - more intros

Once you get going on these, it's hard to stop. And it looks like I'll have to do one more, because in a near-inconceivable oversight, I left off my favorite one, by Tony Williams on Four and More. Anyhow, here are some more intros to the tune Four, by Miles Davis. Two of these are live performances with Jimmy Cobb, from 1960. The other is an earlier performance in the UK with Kenny Clarke, which I mentioned in our previous entry.

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After the break- YouTube audio:

Jimmy Cobb on Trane

This is part of Jazz Onlines's "Tranumentary", discussions about John Coltrane, mostly with people who played with him or knew him (though not all- a surprising inclusion is Anton Fig of the David Letterman band). The entire series is worth a listen, but the talk with Jimmy Cobb caught my attention first. You'll also want to check out what Sonny Rollins and McCoy Tyner have to say.