Playing Airegin

The title is Nigeria spelled backwards, usually pronounced AIRa-jin. I took a minute in the shower this morning figuring out how to pronounce it actually like Nigeria backwards: ah-ee-REE-jine. JINE rhyming with JIVE. A little stage banter item in case you ever have to get on the mic.  

Let's keep talking about tunes. That's a good subject. Airegin by Sonny Rollins is well known, but doesn't get played a whole lot. When it does come there can be a little confusion about how to play it— usually   

There are two famous recorded versions, first from Miles Davis's album Bags' Groove, which is pretty straightforward. Most often people will play it like this. Kenny Clarke mostly swings all the way through. Tempo is 240. 

 

And from Miles's album Cookin', which is is faster, more involved, with some hip flourishes to the arrangement. Philly Joe Jones does a lot more filling, and playing arrangement elements. That's the confusion I'm talking about— I'm trying to play it this way, everybody else is playing it like it is on the other record. Tempo is 288— half note = 144. 

Quick note on those tempos: 240 and 288— those are very common fast tempos in my listening experience. A whole lot of famous recordings are real close to them. For whatever reason people gravitate to them. Good numbers to have on your practice room radar.   

The form is an unusual ABAC, with phrases 8-12-8-8 bars long. 

Usually there's a Latin vamp intro— played in a rather disjointed way on Bag's Groove. On Cookin' the bass plays a quasi-Flamenco vamp, and Joe plays a hand to hand 8th note rhythm on the hihat. Also on Cookin' they they play the Latin vamp in place of the second A, so the actual form is A-B-VAMP-C— 8-12-8-8. That happens on the solos as well as the head. 

The 8 measure A sections have a repeating four-bar theme, with two measures of the main theme, two measures of response. This is timed differently on the different versions— the 'response' line happens in the fourth measure on Bags' Groove, and in the third measure on Cookin'. The rhythm is also squarer on Bags' Groove, more syncopated on Cookin'. It's worth mentioning a Stan Getz version where he plays the Bags' Groove rhythm on the A sections, with a break for a drum fill on the third and seventh measures— the measure before the response line. 

Usually the drums punctuate that part of the tune— at least hit the 2 in the second measure of each four bars. Philly Joe plays the line exactly, like a big band figure, and fills on the 4th and 8th measures of the section. On the solos on Cookin' Red Garland and Joe often punctuate the last measure of the A section with several &s in a row. 

The 12 measure B section has a two measure sequence that is extended the last two times it's played: 2-2-4-4. On Cookin' Garland and Joe hit a figure in the 8th bar of the B section— 1&2&— on the head only. Joe usually fills the last two measures of the section, heading into the Latin second A. 

The 8 measure C section is a coda figure with a break in bar 7— break at the end of the head, play through on the solos. At the very end of the tune that figure is extended a couple of beats— see the New Real Book chart for that, or just listen to the record. 

The two major lead sheets people are likely to use are from the original Real Book and from the New Real Book. The Real Book chart is based on the Cookin' version, except it omits the whole Latin thing— they don't write out the intro, and they don't put it in the form of the tune. It also doesn't include the figure at the very end of the tune. That book is known for containing a lot of suspect chords, I haven't checked for that. 

The New Real Book chart is based on Bags' Groove— except on the record the first measure of the vamp is different. I'm not sure what's happening there. 

There's a zipfile of fake book pdfs circulating, which includes some other charts for it— an OK version in Library of Musicians' Jazz, and a real suck version in Jazz Fakebook (written in that crummy, unreadable “World's Greatest Fake Book” style). 

There we go, that's about all I know about the tune— have fun with it.  

Ben Riley on musicality

Extended excerpt from Ben Riley's Modern Drummer interview from 1986, by Jeff Potter, in which he talks about melodic drumming, Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, and his other influences: 

JP: You have been called a "melodic drummer." Do you think of your playing in those terms?

BR: There are theatrical players, and there are melodic players. I think I play the melodic style, because I worked with a lot of trios and singers. Also, in the era I came from, there were more "melody" songs.

In order for a drummer to be really involved, he had to learn the melodies and verses to really be in tune with what everybody else was doing.

JP: Even your soloing shows this melodic structure.

BR: I think listening to Max Roach caused me to start doing that. If you really listen to Max, you'll notice that he plays the melody all the time. Many drummers who have experience with melody play "melodic" even if the tunes are more abstract. For instance, in Elvin's playing with 'Trane, there was a melodic structure set up. Even in Ornette Coleman's music—which a lot of people say is just "out"—it's all melodic if you listen to the rhythmic structure of the horns and rhythm section. I have always been conscious of playing with structure. Some people just go "out there" with no way of getting back. Sonny Rollins used to say, "When you play, it's like driving on a highway you've never been on before, but there are always landmarks. You have to make those marks."

When you first start playing, you idolize certain players. So, at one time, I tried to play like Max Roach, and then I heard Art Blakey and incorporated that into my playing. Then I heard Philly Joe Jones, and that impressed me. But the biggest impression came the night I heard Kenny Clarke. From then on, I tried to be everywhere he was working. I loved the way that he was not over the top of anyone, no matter who he played with. He was always right underneath and would always build.

He uplifted the music without overpowering anyone, and that is what impressed me about him. I decided that was the way that I wanted to play. But most important, I wanted to be a well-rounded player.

In the era I came up in, there was always someone around to inspire you or say something to you that would help you to think about what you were doing. They would make suggestions without making suggestions. The first time I met Kenny Clarke was at Minton's. I was playing, and I looked out in the audience and saw him. I tried to play as best as I could and as much stuff as I could think of. When I got off the bandstand, I went over to meet him and he said, "Yeah! That was wonderful. Let's go downtown and hear so-and-so." I said, "I can't. I have to stay here and work." He said, "Work? You mean to tell me you're going to play something after that?" [laughs] It made me stop and think. He was telling me that I had to take my time and use my space—put it in order. You can overplay without realizing it. You have to learn what not to play.

Kenny Clarke and Max Roach

It's interesting that history doesn't really move in a linear way, even when you have adjacent history-making players living in the same city at the same time, playing with the same people: 

“Kenny's influence was that you should get more involved in harmonic playing. Kenny plays piano and is a total percussionist. It had little to do with the technique of playing. Kenny was in the Army when I came on the scene. I knew nothing about him until after recording with Coleman Hawkins [1943, Roach was 19]. That style of playing was already established around New York.

The first person I heard on radio who played broken rhythms using the bass drum and hi-hat was Jo Jones. Actually, Chick Webb, Jo Jones, O'Neil Spencer and Sidney Catlett had the greatest influence on me.”

- Max Roach, Modern Drummer interview

Transcription: Kenny Clarke - Swing to Bop

Kenny Clarke playing brushes on Swing To Bop, from the album The Immortal Charlie Christian. This was recorded live at Minton's Playhouse in 1941— epicenter of the formation of bebop. We're hearing a strong quarter note groove, with Clarke making some big angular jabs with the snare drum and bass drum.

The track begins during Christian's solo, in the last ten beats of the first A section. I've included double bars every 8 bars after that. I wrote out two pages of it and stopped when it was time to make breakfast. 

The only things audible from the drums are snare drum and bass drum. There is a cymbal present, and hihat, that we hear later in the recording— at times it sounds he may be playing the hihat with the foot, but mics barely register it. For all I know it wasn't even a standard thing to do yet. You can assume that he's feathering the bass drum throughout this— I've written it in any place it's actually audible. Assume the stickings of most running 8th notes follow a RLRR-RLRR pattern— a swing pattern with the left hand in the gap. 

Get the pdf

Listening to Kenny Clarke

Let's do a little guided listening. I caught this on Portland's excellent jazz station, KMHD— If you don't have a good station locally, and you probably don't, you should be streaming KMHD live 24/7. The tune is Bags' Barney Blues, played by French saxophonist Barney Wilen, with Milt Jackson (on piano), Percy Heath, and Kenny Clarke.

This recording should tell you some things about playing the ride cymbal. Like, the interpretation you use does not have to be consistent all the way through the tune. Clarke plays with a strong quarter note pulse throughout— not with the accent on 2 and 4 many associate with bebop. You can also hear that he varies how he plays the “skip” note— sometimes he plays it with a triplet feel, with all the notes at a roughly even volume, sometimes he plays a dotted-8th/16th feel, with a very soft skip note. His comping is mostly played with a triplet feel, and the cymbal rhythm agrees with that— he's not playing triplets with his left hand with the dotted-8th/16th rhythm with his right.

Whatever he was doing leading up to it, at phrase endings Clarke often plays the triplet feel very emphatically, while dragging a bit, clearly conducting the time. Listen to his beat 4s. He's really bringing up the rear timewise here— he's way on the back of the beat, while Wilen plays very much on the front of the beat. Wherever Clarke is trying to take it, he succeeds, and the tune ends a little slower than it started. In his smooth way, he's playing assertively, acting as conductor of this tune.

With his comping, you can hear a lot of what I once called “the Kenny note”, which is actually a regular punctuation in swing drumming: a snare drum punctuation on the & of 3 in the second or fourth measure. As pure independence, it's an easy place to start when you're inventing a vocabulary for comping on the snare drum. We also heard a lot of that from Max Roach recently. In general, most of his comping happens at the end of the measure, and end of the phrase.

Transcription: Kenny Clarke fours - 02

Put this in your binder with Kenny Clarke's fours from Love Me Or Leave Me that I posted a few years ago. Here he's trading fours on Two Not One from the album Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh. For some reason he has me thinking about Philly Joe Jones— I never thought about Joe being especially a Kenny guy, but I'm feeling a strong semblance here. The tempo is bright, fours begin at 3:55.

As usual, Clarke doesn't play the tom toms at all. The triplet lick in the first two lines, that happens several more times, I suspect is played with a paradiddle sticking starting with the left hand— either LRLLR or LRRLR (I prefer the latter). At the beginning of line 3 play five-stroke rolls ending with stick shots. On the last two measures of line 5, you can start with our previous paradiddle lick, then two double paradiddles, then singles. Or do the whole things as singles. Pencil in whatever sticking you want to use. Use a RRL sticking on the triplets in line 6. The four-stroke ruffs in line 7 are some little personal flash lick of Clarke's; what I wrote appears to be what is played— you can really play them however you want.

Get the pdf

Very occasional quote of the day: soloing

“My idea of a drum solo is that you play like you sing. It comes from different things you listen to. And the beauty is always in the simple things.”

— Kenny Clarke, from 1984 Modern Drummer interview by Ed Thigpen

Very occasional quote of the day: it's an instrument

“You don't beat the drums— you play them.”
- Kenny Clarke

Thanks to Scott K. Fish for the quote— be sure to follow his excellent blog Life Behind The Cymbals.

Kenny Clarke at 100

[Oh heck, this is from 2014— oh well. Just saw it on Famoudou Don Moye's Facebook feed today. Whatever.]

Good of NPR's Kevin Whitehead to take notice of Kenny Clarke's (“inventor of modern jazz drumming”) 100th birthday. He doesn't quite accurately describe the nature of Clarke's innovation:

Before him, jazz drummers kept time lightly on the bass drum. Kenny Clarke used bass drum sparingly, often tethered to his snare, for dramatic accents in odd places — what jazz folk call "dropping bombs." He drew on his playing for stage shows, where drummers punctuate the action with split-second timing. Clarke kicked a band along. 

With those twin innovations, Kenny Clarke invented modern jazz drumming. 

Before Clarke— I'm not going to call him “Klook”, like I knew him— drummers kept time often quite heavily on the bass drum, and the snare drum, too, with a swing-style march rhythm. They also played the familiar thing on the hihat— that was Papa Jo Jones's thing. You can get a more detailed idea of what he did in his Modern Drummer interview with Ed Thigpen— I've excerpted the relevant passages. This post about Charley Wilcoxon's Drum Method, as well as the Mel Lewis's history of jazz drumming interviews, and, hey, records, can give you an idea of what swing-era drumming was in the early part of Clarke's career, before Bebop.

Transcription: Kenny Clarke fours

Here are Kenny Clarke's fours, played with brushes, on Love Me Or Leave Me, from the album Walkin', by Miles Davis. I've given the drum solo breaks only:

The ties are due to some kind of left hand swishing activity— do whatever you see fit there. The lick with the quintuplets likely has a double in it, either on the first two notes, or on the 3rd-4th notes; it was probably conceived as two 8th notes and a triplet, slurred together, due to the tempo. Many of the triplets may have doubles in them, and are not super-cleanly executed generally.

Get the pdf

You own this record, but here's the audio anyway:

Kenny Clarke plays an intro

Putting together a bebop podcast (which we'll see here whenever I get it finished), this intro from 1941 by Kenny Clarke jumped out at me— the tune is Hot House, and the playing feels more like the end of the swing era than the beginning of bebop:

I have it on a record called The Immortal Charlie Christian, but it has apparently been released under Dizzy Gillespie's name, too:




There's also a little history lesson here. This is very early in the bebop era, and throughout the tune Clarke plays the time on the hihat— Papa Jo Jones's thing, and immediately before bebop, the hip way of playing. He only uses the cymbal as punctuation, like on the little choke he does in the third measure of that intro; he wasn't actually riding on it yet, as was the standard thing a few years later. Thanks to Clarke himself, to be clear.

Examples after the break:

Expanding on The Kenny Note

What we have here are some very basic comping ideas based on the so-called (by me only, I'm sure) "Kenny" note-- a snare drum punctuation on the & of 1 or the & of 3. A student is having some difficulties bringing his comping practice into his actual playing, and we had some success starting with this approach of starting with one note, and adding things to it:

You could also call this "jazz comping survival chops"; a bare minimum of stuff that will sound like a lot more than the sum of its parts, if applied musically. Memorize the patterns as you practice them, then throw the page away and improvise with them while playing along with a recording or singing a tune. In general you don't want to play them repetitively in actual music; mix them up, and put in more space (where you just play time) between ideas. Listen to recordings of Kenny Clarke or Connie Kay to get an idea of the level of density to shoot for at first.

Get the pdf

The Kenny Note

As I was listening to the Kenny Clarke record Detroit Jazzmen it jumped out at me that Clarke really favors comping with the snare drum on the & of 1 and/or 3:

Get the pdf

Now, this is such a universal thing that giving "credit" to one drummer for it seems completely ridiculous; the & of 1/& of 3 punctuation certainly pre-dates Kenny Clarke. It would be just as easy to make a case for calling it the Papa Jo note or the Big Sid note. Then again, there was really no such thing as modern left hand independence before Clarke. From his 1984 Modern Drummer interview with Ed Thigpen:

...Joe Garland, a tenor player with Edgar Hayes, would write things for me. He'd write out a trumpet part, and he'd leave it up to me to play whatever I felt would be most effective. I'd play the figures over the regular beat. That's how I first got the idea to play that way. Then I developed the idea further with Roy [Eldridge]. Most of the guys who'd played with Roy didn't do anything with their left hands. Almost everybody was just copying Jo with that hi-hat thing. 

For that matter, it would not be at all out of line to call the standard jazz ride cymbal pattern The Kenny Beat or whatever, since he did in fact invent it. So maybe if we think of this comping thing narrowly in a bebop context played along with the ride cymbal it won't be quite so absurd as it initially seems. 

YouTube audio of the tune 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.

Get the pdf.

After the break- YouTube audio:

Go now

Yikes, another patch of light posting, as I've been busy with other projects. Until I can get something posted later in the day, get your rear over to Jon McCaslin's blog to watch and more importantly listen to a rare Kenny Clarke video. In case you're not familiar with him, Clarke is the guy who basically invented the modern usage of the cymbal, and modern drumming generally. Learn more about him from the Mel Lewis history of jazz drumming interviews (another h/t to Jon for linking to that originally), then get yourself copies of Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington and Miles Davis' Walkin', for starters.

All About Jazz interview: Alvin Fielder

Here are some extended excerpts of an Allaboutjazz.com interview by Clifford Allen with drummer Alvin Fielder. Fielder was a student of Ed Blackwell's, and a founding member of AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a 60's Chicago free jazz collective). He played with Muhal Richard Abrams, Sun Ra, Roscoe Mitchell, and likely everyone else associated with AACM at one point or another. He talks about influences, the history of the drums in jazz, his interactions with some great drummers, and his time in Chicago.

LINEAGES:
...Blackwell practiced all day... all the Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Max Roach tunes, all day.

[...]He used to sit down and play Max licks... and... it was strictly that. They weren't experimenting then as they would later on, and I never thought of Blackwell as a New Orleans drummer. I always thought he played very differently from the other drummers. He was a bebop drummer. [...] you didn't hear much of Blakey, Roy Haynes, or Kenny Clarke. Everything was Max Roach let me tell you...

AAJ: And all those other guys—Max, Roy, Klook—were playing melodically, which is different from what I think of with Blakey's style.

AF: Well... Blakey's a melodic drummer too. Blakey plays a lot of form, and Roy Haynes does too. My contention is—and sometimes I get a lot of arguments from it—modern drumming, and by modern drumming I mean bebop only, we aren't talking about swing drummers, or one foot in swing and one foot in bebop. We aren't talking about Big Sid Catlett or Shadow Wilson, even though they are modern drummers. I'm talking about from 1945 on up, every drummer, every modern drummer, and it's still true: Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Art Blakey and Roy Haynes—every modern drummer is a combination of those four drummers. Whether they know it or not, drummers today really owe a big debt to Roy Haynes and he owed a big debt to Kenny Clarke and Papa Jo Jones.

1996 Paul Motian interview, part 1: Not-So-Correct

This is another old favorite of mine that's just been floating around the Internet- you kind of have to look for it to find it- a 1996 Paul Motian interview by Chuck Braman. Not a lot of what you call deep reflection- Motian seems to be a pretty direct cat- but that seems to be the lesson itself. I've excerpted my favorite parts, of which there are many. In the first part he talks about his influences and early career, up to the 1960's:

WHY HE LIKED MAX:
Chuck: What was it about Max Roach in particular that attracted you to his playing?

Paul: He was more into the Bebop. I was going to say jazz, but you can't say jazz because you'd have to put Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa in that too, you know? And of course I liked them too, but Max was the one that stood out to me. And also, I was never really a Buddy Rich fan, I must say.

Chuck: Why not?

Paul: Because to me that was more technical. I mean, I admired it and I respected it, he was a great technician and played great. Even today, you listen to some of that stuff he played with Art Tatum and Charlie Parker, some of that shit's great, man. It's really good. But somehow Max stood out more to me. Just from the sound and the rhythmical patterns and what came out from him was somehow more hip than the other shit.

Chuck: Some of your early recordings also remind me of Philly Joe Jones.

Paul: Sure. Philly, and Kenny Clarke, those were my people, but at this point Art Blakey is high up on that list, man. I listened to him too, you know, but my playing, listening to it now, came more from Max.

Kenny Clarke on the invention of the ride cymbal

...and modern drumming in general, excerpted from Ed Thigpen's Kenny Clarke interview in the Feb. 1984 Modern Drummer. I originally posted this last year on the Drummerworld.com forum.

From Thigpen's introduction:

It's understandably difficult for a young drummer to imagine that the various components of the drumset were ever utilized in a manner unlike the way they are today. In actuality, the approach was, at one time, considerably different, and Kenny Clarke had a whole lot to do with changing it all. His drumming led the way towards usage of the bass drum for accentuation as well as timekeeping; the establishment of a jazz-time rhythm for the ride cymbal, and freedom from a strictly metronomic role, forcing the bassist to share in the responsibility of timekeeping. Kenny Clarke can also be credited with freeing the left hand so it could interact with the soloist—the obvious reason why thousands of young student drummers still sweat over Jim Chapin's Advanced Techniques For The Modern Drummer...

To say that Kenny Clarke was "important,"or "influential, "or even "a key musical figure, "does not do his contribution justice. To state, unequivocally, that he was drumming's all-time Great Emancipator, a man to whom every jazz drummer who's ever lived owes a debt of gratitude, is perhaps a much more honest appraisal.