Here's that Billy Cobham transcription— just of a busy portion of Freddie Hubbard's solo on For Someone I Love, on Milt Jackson's record Sunflower. I'm learning a lot about Musescore doing something this damn complicated.
Ignoring form altogether here, the transcription begins at 4:25, a few measures into Hubbard's solo— the first few bars are very light, you can hear where he plays the ruffs/triplets at the beginning of the page— and cutting out after the last big insane lick, out of sheer exhaustion. Tempo is about 74 bpm.
If it looks like a fragmented nightmare, take it up with Mr. Cobham. He packs a lot of stuff into some small spaces. I have some questions about bar 10— the end of yesterday's sixtuplet lick— but I can only let this guy beat me up for so long. It is what it is.
UPDATE: There's a slight fault in the notation in measure 21— each of those drags should be played as a nested triplet. There are supposed to be three dots (...) printed about each of them. Correction coming when I can get to it...
Here's a tune involving a lot of isolated kicks on the & of 2, where we get to hear a lot of different ways Philly Joe Jones sets them up— Blue Roz the Milt Jackson / Wes Montgomery album Bags Meets Wes. I've had a lot of people asking about kicks and set ups lately— here you go:
You can practice those as part of a two-measure phrase like this:
Also move the kick over to the & of 3:
Add two measures to the front of that if you need a longer cycle. Get the timing accurate from the cymbal accent to the following beat where you get back to the time— from the & of 2 to the 4 in the first example, from the & of 3 to the 1 in the second. They're easy spots to rush.
A little drum solo intro played by Philly Joe Jones on Stablesmates, from Milt Jackson's record Bags Meets Wes!. It's 16 bars long, even though there are no 16 bar phrases in the tune— the form is ABA, with the sections 14, 8, and 14 bars long. The tempo is bright, in the high 240s.
I volunteered possible stickings for the triplet passages. It's tempting to put another 6-stroke roll sticking in bar 11, but what I've written sounds like what he's playing. Listening closely, you can hear which notes are taps and which are double strokes.
This is the main loop I've been using with late Three Camps for drumset materials. Most of them— to my taste yesterday's thing is better to practice without a loop. This is sampled from a portion of Milt Jackson's solo from SKJ, a bonus track on the CD release of his album Sunflower. The tune is a 12 bar blues, and the tempo is about 125 bpm.
A melodic drum solo with mallets by Connie Kay, on Cosmic Ray, from the Milt Jackson / Ray Charles album Soul Brothers. Kay is kind of a mysterious player to me, so I'm always on the lookout for anything he does where the drums are featured. The tune is a blues, but the solo is 52 bars long; in effect he plays four choruses, with a four bar tag.
It's extremely clean— everything is exactly in its place. There's very little activity with the feet, except at the beginning as he switches from sticks to mallets, and at the top of the second chorus— bar 13. It's not real exciting, but I don't know if Kay sees exciting drumming as his job. He's more about swinging the band, making the arrangement, and being an ensemble player. You feel like he was asked to play an intro and solo on the tom toms with mallets, and he's giving them that.
The tempo is a bright 234, and he doesn't really swing the 8th notes. There are five tom tom sounds here: snare drum with the snares off, the drum set high and low toms, plus a doumbek, and a large African drum. The doumbek/African drum can easily be played on the regular drum set toms; the pitches are very similar, only the timbre is different.
Let's do some more guided listening. Here's Art Blakey playing a little Quincy Jones groove arrangement with a nine piece ensemble: Plenty, Plenty Soul, from the Milt Jackson album of the same title. The form is 12-bar blues. I'm surprised to see that it's 9 1/2 minutes long; it feels like a little four minute radio number.
Put on the headphones and give this at least three close listens:
It's a clean, understated performance, with none of Blakey's trademark ferocity. At no point do you feel he's playing louder to compete with the five horns. I might say it's a professional performance, meaning he's playing it like a hired studio drummer, rather than like a featured show performer, which is more the vibe of his Jazz Messengers stuff. That's not to suggest that his playing there is “unprofessional.”
He plays a backbeat most of the time; it's deeply grooving but not at all loud. Most of the time he's playing the little shuffle pick up before it. He's playing a strong (not loud!) quarter pulse with the cymbal rhythm, typically with a dotted-8th/16th rhythm. The snare drum rhythm has a similar, very tight timing— it's not a triplet. You can hear at the points where he does play triplets in a fill, it's a very different rhythm from the main groove of the piece. No doubt he's playing quarter notes or half notes on the bass drum through most of this, but you never hear it except where he's making a deliberate accent or punctuation, or on the tutti sections.
There's some air between the bass (played by Percy Heath) and the drums. Generally sounds like the attack of the ride cymbal is a little ahead of the bass, and the snare drum is behind everything— playing the shuffle rhythm the way he does is a way of getting that behind-the-beat feel with it. At some points it sounds to me like the bass is more on the front of the beat. Your ears can fool you. It's worth it to give a very close listen to the timing of the major events on this track— everything is not perfectly squared off. That's not a flaw.
Blakey does a double time groove a few times— after 5:00 for example.
Mostly he does it with a straight 2 and 4 on the snare drum— no extra little shuffle note. He often comes in with that in the last two bars of the chorus. He may double times just those two bars, or continue it through the complete following chorus, or he may goes back to regular time on the turnaround— bar 9 of the form. Where things happen in the form is important information for playing blues. We're not just punctuating randomly.
There is no bebop-type comping activity at all. Instead he makes big statements here and there; usually at the end of a solo, leading into the next solo. He may do his crescendoing press roll, a Blakey trademark, or triplets on the tom toms. At the end of the trombone solo he does a pitch bend thing on a tom tom.
His playing on the arranged passages is simple, with simple one or two note set ups for the horn kicks; he'll keep playing the 2 and 4 until the end, when he hits the big figure in unison with the horns. He does a ruff on the toms/bass drum during the horn fall at the end of the short ensemble interlude passages— he lands on the 1 of the second bar of the new chorus with that.
At first I thought he was using two cymbals— but I think he's using one 20" sizzle cymbal and varying his playing area and touch. Listen closely to it— there is no more classic jazz sound than that, and it's very similar to the Cymbal & Gong cymbals [PLUG PLUG PLUG— tb]. The accent sound at 2:00 is exactly the explosive crash sound we look for in a ride cymbal. People call this a “dark” sound, but it's more accurate to call it complex; there are trebly elements to it.
A new practice loop sampled from Blues at Twilight, from Milt Jackson's album Plenty, Plenty Soul. Horace Silver is on piano here. Tempo is 75 bpm, so this is a good one for getting your triplet coordination together— with my recent pages of triplet patterns, for example, or Gary Chaffee's pain-in-the-neck jazz materials.
Be sure to download my practice loop archive (it doesn't include this) while it's still available.
I think of Connie Kay as the quintessential background player, so I'm always interested to hear him actually do something— like play a solo, or some more assertive comping. Here he trades some 8s and 4s on Three Little Words, an uptempo tune from the John Coltrane/Milt Jackson album Bags & Trane.
Tempo is quarter note = 250— roughly what is called “medium up”, and about as fast as most people ever play. It's notable that he never hits the tom toms— he barely comes off of the ride cymbal for most of it— and uses the hihat only part of the time. He does feather the bass drum much of the time, but I haven't attempted to notate it.
The transcription is of the drum solo breaks only, and begins at 5:50 in the recording:
Swing the 8th notes. I have written a lot of accents, but they are mostly pretty subtle; his actual dynamics are fairly even. Use a mixed sticking on the triplets— a double on the first two notes of each triplet.
