Transcription: Mickey Roker - Essence

Here's Mickey Roker playing behind Donald Byrd on Essence, from Byrd's record Electric Byrd. It's vibey modal thing, in a slower 4/4 swing feel. It looks busy on the page, but this is mostly about groove, which is exceedingly deep. Tempo is about 88 bpm. 

I've gone a little nuts with the ghost note notation, but it's accurate— a lot of the comping activity is very soft. We can assume he's feathering the bass drum most of the time; I've only notated it where it's audible. Often with Roker that bass drum and snare drum are layered— he plays more unisons between the two drums than some of us do. 

In the comments someone mentioned an interview with Roker by Ethan Iverson, where he mentions the bass drum: 

EI:  When you are playing this fast, are you feathering the bass drum?

MR:  I almost always pat the bass drum because that’s the bottom of the drums.  I’m from the old school.  We used to play with no bass player and you had to pat the bass drum.  I am so used to that.  Sometimes I get too rambunctious with it but I don’t want to sound like Papa Joe Jones.  That’s why I like cats like Vernel Fournier. Nobody played that bass drum like that guy, you can hear it all the time. Some drummers tune their bass drum at too high a pitch and you can hear it but it gets on your nerves.  But if it is down and damp, it don’t get in the way of the bass player.

EI:  Do you think you are feathering here?

MR:  (listens to track [Three Little Words from Sonny Rollins On Impulse!]) No, I am not playing it here. Well, it’s hard to do that on something fast. You can’t do that on something that is extremely fast, unless you are playing without a bass player. (Listening to Sonny solo) Bad dude. Sonny Rollins!

His sound has a lot of bottom, with a large, muffled bass drum with a soft beater. The snare drum is tuned high and crispy. He's using a smaller, medium weight ride cymbal. Toms are medium size, with the top head tighter than the bottom... if you were wondering what that sounds like. 

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Groove o' the day: Mickey Roker funk

Here's a lot of ink for you, for eight measures. Mickey Roker playing a funk groove with a lot of detail to it, on Goin' Down South, a Joe Sample tune from Bobby Hutcherson's record San Francisco. The transcription starts at the beginning of the track: 
   

The hihat, snare drum and bass drum are pretty layered here, there's no master plan of simplified coordination underlying it, of the type I'm always pushing. Like he doesn't avoid unisons between the SD and BD. I don't know how much he worked out his funk stuff. I've been listening to Roker playing some absurdly fast tempos with Dizzy Gillespie— to me this sounds like independence inherited from his jazz drumming. Everything about him sounds like it evolved through constant playing, on the gig.  

Point of notation: as I often do, I'm using a tenuto mark to indicate a half-open, sizzling hihat. I like it, it makes sense, and I think we should use standard articulations as much as possible.

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Very occasional quote of the day: Mickey Roker on practicing

More from Mickey Roker's Modern Drummer interview by Jeff Potter, October, 1985, on the subject of practicing the drums: 

It has always been hard for me to practice, because I get bored if I don't hear music—if I'm just hearing the drums.

I go from one thing to the next to keep me from being bored.


I learn all the rhythms basically. Then you learn how to create— how to improvise. If you can think, then all you've got to do is think. I learned the rhythms in their basic form— the calypso, bolero, reggae— but then you need music. You learn how to do things when you're on that bandstand or rehearsing with other musicians.

When I practice, I don't say, “I'm going to get this or that lick together.” 

I don't discourage my students from formal practice or using books. There are great things in drum method books—as long as you can make it sound natural. You want to sound natural, not mechanical. 

Very occasional quote of the day: play sessions

“We used to have sessions right here in this house where I was raised. Lee Morgan, Reggie Workman, McCoy Tyner—all those guys used to come right here and my grandmother would be back there cooking. We would be in here all day.

Each guy would have a jam session on a different day at his house; Sunday was my day. So we played every day when we were young— Kenny Barron, Arthur Hopper, C Sharpe, Jimmy Vance—a bunch of Philadelphia musicians.”

— Mickey Roker, Modern Drummer interview by Jeff Potter, October, 1985

Transcription: Mickey Roker comping

Mickey Roker's accompaniment of Dizzy Gillespie's solo— the first three choruses anyway— on Birk's Works, from Gillespie's album Big 4. Roker has a deep groove I associate with musicians who have played a lot of R&B. It's a very substantive sound, without necessarily being loud.

He plays the bass drum through most of this— “feathering” it, if you want to call it that. This is someone who learned to play the bass drum in music where it was meant to be heard. That's a different thing than the modern jazz ed thing of learning it as a vestigial technique in the first place.

The hihat is consistent, but he doesn't play it strongly. I associate him with a strong quarter note pulse, but he also plays a lot of anticipations— see the accents with cymbal tied through the following downbeat.

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Mickey Roker on the bass drum

Mickey Roker is kind of an under-appreciated player— by me, too. We often focus on the ultra-modern star-type players, but he was a very hardworking musician in his day, and there's a lot to learn from him about what works in a jazz setting. You can hear on yesterday's recording (you bought the record, right?) that he plays the bass drum rather strongly through the swing sections of the tune. He talks about that a little bit with Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson, in an interview Iverson has posted online. I like that Roker doesn't say feathering the best drum— a term which just annoys me, and I use only begrudgingly:

EI: When you are playing this fast, are you feathering the bass drum? 

MR: I almost always pat the bass drum because that’s the bottom of the drums. I’m from the old school. We used to play with no bass player and you had to pat the bass drum. I am so used to that. Sometimes I get too rambunctious with it but I don’t want to sound like Papa Joe Jones. That’s why I like cats like Vernel Fournier. Nobody played that bass drum like that guy, you can hear it all the time. Some drummers tune their bass drum at too high a pitch and you can hear it but it gets on your nerves. But if it is down and damp, it don’t get in the way of the bass player. 

EI: Do you think you are feathering here? 

MR: (listens to track) No, I am not playing it here. Well, it’s hard to do that on something fast. You can’t do that on something that is extremely fast, unless you are playing without a bass player.

The track they're talking about is Three Little Words, from the album Sonny Rollins on Impulse; the tempo is around 300 bpm.

Groove o' the day: Mickey Roker Latin

Fantastic, I hadn't planned it this way, but here's yet another thing you have to buy— a Latin groove by Mickey Roker, on the tune Woody'n You, on McCoy Tyner's album Live At Newport:

Roker plays a Brazilian-style bass drum pattern (very softly) under his quasi-Afro-Cuban bell and tom part— a very common thing for many years, but which doesn't really fly these days. I really think we should lose that part of the American drumming literature. You could play the bass drum lightly just on 1 and 3, or try this more contemporary-sounding pattern:

That seems a little closer to an authentic salsa pattern. If the band were actually playing off of clave, this bell pattern suggests a 2-3 orientation, in which case we'd be wanting to punch the bass drum on the & of 2 of the second measure instead of (or in addition to) the written b.d. part here. It doesn't matter; we're not playing salsa, we're just trying to make a reasonably hip Latin groove for a jazz context.