Groove o' the day: Omar Hakim / Gil

The early 80s were kind of a heyday for hip hihat work. Stewart Copeland and Omar Hakim, really got my attention for that, anyway. Can two great players make a heyday? You decide. Here's Hakim's groove on Gil, from John Scofield's album Still Warm. This is the intro and the first couple of measures of the head:

You could play all this with your right hand on the hihat, but it works so much better to do it with both hands, natural sticking, playing the snare drum with your right, a la my Cissy Strut-style method— so any note on the beat or on an & is played with your right, and your left plays any es or as. If you've ever played alternating 16th notes on the hihat, your hands already know how to place these rhythms relative to the bass drum. There's nothing wrong with learning to do more things, so go ahead and retrain your right hand if you want, but to get anywhere on this instrument sometimes you have to take the easy, natural solution when it's presented to you.

Hey, you'll probably want a fresh link to my other Reed-based funk methods if you're going to get into that Cissy Strut thing.

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Daily best music in the world: Spirit of '86

Funny how dramatically the zeitgeist can change in a few years. Did you know that fusion was actually a serious thing, for many years? Until Wynton Marsalis hit us with his thing in the mid 80s, fusion was the only thing; jazz played with acoustic instruments and a swing beat was still around, but all the energy and money was in fusion.

Individual albums had a lot more influence. Chick Corea's Elektric Band album was the huge-deal release for musicians in 1986, with everybody envying Dave Weckl's effects rack, 8 and 10 inch mounted toms, and poofy mullet. And, hey, his playing— he was sort of a super-Steve Gadd. Hyper Gadd. Now it looks like the sort of twilight of LA as the center of the musical universe.




John Scofield's Blue Matter is technically an '86 release, but we didn't hear it until around spring of '87. It's fusion, but it's more New York. The weird out-of-time snare drum thing at 0:10 and the sixtuplets on the bass drum after 0:25 announced Dennis Chambers, and what seemed to be a whole thing in drumming.





More after the break:

Very occasional quote(s) of the day: over and over again

This is the one I had...

“When we were young, we had our seven jazz albums next to our bed and played them over and over again.”
— John Scofield

“When I was young, I'd listen to one record over and over again, like The Best of Sonny Rollins. It's not like now, when I have every Sonny Rollins record ever made. But back the I could only afford one record I found in a cut-out bin. The first Wes Montgomery record I had was his first on Riverside that I got for 89 cents. I listened to it so many times that I took it in in a different way. I was getting an emotional connection that you can't get if you listen to something once and go on to the next one. Now when I hear anything from that record, it still hits me in my gut. I think young people's brains, with the whole computer thing, can take in more than I ever could. There's a real advantage to that, but there's also an advantage to listening to one thing over and over.”
— Bill Frisell

Quotes from Six String Theories by Geoffrey Himes, Jazz Times, August 2015

Transcription: Jack Dejohnette - Since You Asked

UPDATE 2019: Since I just linked to this in my Jack Dejohnette / Tennessee waltz transcription. New preview image coming soon. Now kind of amazed at how little I used to write about these things.

Here's an example of Jack Dejohnette “playing fast at a slow tempo”, to use Peter Erskine's phrase. This is another original transcription by me, from John Scofield's great Time On My Hands album.

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