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: Peter Erskine — Clint

Because I like challenging you to hear past things that most people perceive as cheese, here's a little relic of the later fusion era, by the great John Abercrombie trio with Marc Johnson and Peter Erskine. Honestly, this is a case where it sounds cheesy to me, too. The tune is Clint, from the album Current Events.

On the head, the only things happening are the drums, the melody, and a little synth pad, so what Erskine plays is very exposed; he treats main part of the tune as something like a commercial arrangement, and it's a good idea to study how how he interprets the whole thing— it's very deliberately constructed. It's really textbook. The groove for the main part of the tune, then:

From the middle section. There's more activity with the rest of the group, and he plays more interactively. Play the unaccented notes very softly:

The triplet at the end is an embellishment; usually he just plays 16th notes through that.

Audio after the break: