Reed interpretations: special voicing - 01

This came out of the groove part of my recent Country Rock thing. It's a kind of subtractive method for voicing the snare drum and bass drum. Not unlike my John Riley-inspired “that with interruptions” pages, not unlike the natural sticking concept, where you stick mixed 8th/16th rhythms according to which hand would have been playing that note if you were just doing alternating 16ths.With the Riley thing we started with a simple snare/bass pattern— SSBB— and eliminated some notes, keeping the remaining structure. 

We'll take that a couple of steps farther, using a more complicated foundation pattern, BSSB-SBBS, and learning to use that voicing while reading rhythms from Syncopation. Relax, it's doable, and I think it's worth the effort. 

Here's how you would voice some basic rhythms, following that pattern: 

Warm up with the above patterns along with the cymbal rhythm of your choice, then practice the system using Reed pp. 4-5, 10-11, 30-32, 34-45, revoicing the top line part from the book accordingly. If doing the complete pattern is too difficult at first, try doing just BSSB-BSSB, or SBBS-SBBS. Warm up with beats 1-2 or 3-4 in the examples above, repeating. 

I started doing this as a 2/2 funk/rock system, but there are a lot of other possibilities. It would work fine as a jazz thing. The bass drum part sketches an embellished tresillo rhythm, which makes it useful for some broken New Orleans funk type rhythms, or Baiao, or especially Songo— or whatever other Cuban-type styles/settings where creative funk-like playing is appropriate. The snare drum part makes a cut time funk rhythm, but also suggests the 2 side of a clave rhythm. There is the tantalizing possibility that if you made a two measure system out of it, reversing the pattern in the second measure, SBBS-BSSB, you'd have a complete clave rhythm. BSSB-SBBS-SBBS-BSSB. Play that, check it out.

Just within a regular funk setting, some of the more fragmentary rhythms in Reed create some interesting displaced groove patterns. Many of the rhythms lack that cut time back beat on 3— those patterns are useful for working on open hihat punches with the bass drum. Practice patterns that have a note sounding on beat 3 will sound most like a funk groove.

I'll be interested to try this with the other paradiddle inversions: BSBB-SBSS, BBSB-SSBS, BSBS-SBSB. At some point I imagine we'd get diminishing returns with this kind of thing, or possibly it just gets much easier and we can choose one way or another based on what it's good for stylistically. 

Groove o' the day: two by Idris Muhammad with Melvin Sparks

Two similar grooves played by Idris Muhammad with the guitarist Melvin Sparks. The tunes are also very similar, following the same basic template. Both grooves have this as the main snare drum rhythm:

It's a normal hip funk rhythm, with the backbeat on 2 and the & of 4, with the more unusual extra snare hit on 3. Or maybe it's a New Orleans thing, and more common than I'm aware of.

This is from Spark Plug, from the album of the same title. Muhammad stretches out in a cool way during the solos— maybe we'll see a transcription of that... as soon as I have time to work on transcriptions:

Here is the main groove on The Stinker, from the album Sparks!. The tempo is slower, and the interaction with the cymbal and bass drum is a little more complex:

The recordings are after the break:

Groove o' the day: Billy Higgins - Una Muy Bonita

Some variations on a groove Billy Higgins plays on the Ornette Coleman tune Una Muy Bonita, on Bobby Hutcherson's album Stick-Up!. It's a New Orleans type thing, reminiscent of parts of Poinciana, as played by Vernel Fournier. Higgins plays hip stuff all the way through this tune, some of it related to some other things we're working on— I'll have to transcribe a longer portion of it soon.

Play with the snares off. You can play the bass drum lightly on beats 1 and 3 throughout. Check out Higgins's legato feel on the cymbal— he plays it a little straighter than most people. Much of the time he doesn't play repetitively, but these patterns happen at least a couple of times in a row at different points in the track.

This happens on the intro:

This variation occurs frequently:

During the solos he sometimes plays this variation, with a bass drum accent at the end:

Groove o' the day: Street beat in 7

Here's a New Orleans street beat-style groove in 7/4, played by Bill Stewart. The tune is 7th Floor, from John Scofield's album Hand Jive. This is the basic groove from the intro of the tune; he mixes it up for most of the track.

Swing the 8th notes slightly. Play the 16th notes as an open drag with the left hand, and crush the buzz on beat 7 with both hands. Hihat splashes with the foot every two beats all the way through. Some call that playing the “big” 7— playing two measures of 7/4 as one measure of 7/2... with the hihat on the offbeats, in this case.

Transcription: Joey Baron - Resistor

Here is Joey Baron playing on Don Byron's solo on Resistor, from the Bill Frisell album This Land— Baron's playing on this record is one of the major blowing performances of the 90s. The tune is a mutant blues, and has become canon after a fashion— I'm not aware of a good published lead sheet, but I know a lot of us have been making our own charts for it over the last 30 years. Also check out the earlier version with Paul Motian on drums if you're going to learn the tune. The melody and the tuba riff on the original are the main things on which to hang your playing on it.

Here Baron is playing it with a sort of hybrid New Orleans/Songo groove— obviously those are not the style of the tune, but that's where his drumming vocabulary is coming from. Studying something like this strictly from a drumming perspective, I'm checking out the scope of the vocabulary he's using, how repetitive he is, how he outlines phrases, how much he moves his hands around— right hand moving from the cymbals, left hand moving from the snare drum. Also the nature and level of independence he's using, and how he uses his left foot.

The transcription begins at 1:17 in the track.

The 8th notes are lightly swinging. The dynamic markings can get a little dense here— most of them apply to the snare drum, or the crash cymbal; some apply to the bass drum. Usually parentheses indicate ghost notes, except in the cowbell part they indicate notes played on the shoulder of the bell. Dynamics are extreme— house top accents are very strong rim shots, and notes in parentheses are very soft.

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Practice loop: The Meters / Cabbage Alley

Take care of your mental wellbeing and forget this political nightmare for awhile, with this cheery practice loop, sampled from Cabbage Alley by The Meters. Excellent for use with this late plethora of funk materials. Also take a look at my transcription of the breakdown from this tune.

Transcription: James Black - Hook And Sling, pt. 2

This is something very special— it's probably classical music to anyone well versed in New Orleans music, and anyone in the sampling world, but I only heard it for the first time recently: James Black playing Hook And Sling, by Eddie Bo. It's an extended funk jam taking up both sides of a 45 rpm single, and the drumming on it is something else— very much in the Zigaboo Modeliste zone, and roughly contemporaneous with the early Meters stuff we know and love, though Black was a little older.

The record is one continuous recorded track split in two, and they chose a very strange spot to split it— take a look at the first measure. There's quite a bit of wiggle room in the hihat and cymbal parts; someone's playing some tambourine, and it obscures it to some extent. There's also a good amount of half-open hihat, and the cymbals in general are pretty rough sounding and not always easy to pick out or notate accurately. Do take some care where there's something linear happening with the hihats, but in general, the cymbals can be a suggestion— focus on the drum parts. The accents, too, are not critically important: all of the parts of the instrument are played pretty strongly all the time. You'd be more true to the original if you played everything the same volume than if you exaggerated the accents. The rolls and ruffs are played very closed; he really digs into the drum for them. Play the 32nd notes as singles.

As always with the transcriptions, if nothing else, give the track many listens through while following along on the page.

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New Orleans street beat - Reed method

As promised, another method for developing a NOLA street beat, this one perhaps more musical than the last. Definitely. Here we'll be using Progressive Steps to Syncopation, by Ted Reed, pp. 33-44— the “Syncopation” section of the book.

Similar to the Stone method from last week, we'll be playing alternating 8th notes on the snare drum throughout. Following the music in the book (stems-up part only, ignore the written stems-down part), you'll add a snare drum accent on any written short notes (untied 8th notes), and add a bass drum note on all the long notes (everything else— quarter notes, tied notes, dotted notes).

Once you can do that fluidly, you can begin making two-measure phrases that approximate a real groove. On the last long note every two measures, accent with the hands (whichever hand the note falls on), and roll— just continue playing the running 8th notes, but play multiple-bounce strokes for the duration of that long note. Here, it's all on the page:

Instructions from before still apply, mainly: 1) Swing the 8th notes slightly. 2) Listen to recordings to get the feel, and to get an idea of the amount of variety professional drummers use with this type of groove. Actual bands from New Orleans may not do a lot of variations on the basic groove; jazz drummers playing it as a style may play a lot of variations.

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New Orleans street beat - Stone method

This is the first of two pretty-easy methods for developing a New Orleans-style street beat— or rather, for expanding on it, and playing it in a “modern” way. They'll also be good for getting a type of coordination into your playing which is normally not systemically developed— I haven't seen another system for it, anyway.

With this type of groove there will be lots of snare drum accents in unison with the bass drum. Here's a classic, straightforward way of playing it, as done by Zigaboo Modeliste on Hey Pocky A-Way, performed by The Meters:

It's extremely effective, and more people should play the groove that way, but where it gets a little more interesting, with more musical possibilities, is when you separate the bass drum notes and snare drum accents, so you get a two-tone melody going between the drums:

To begin developing this, we'll make a technical study using the book Stick Control. Based on the patterns from the book, we'll add accents and bass drum notes to a basic, alternating-sticking snare drum rhythm. We'll add a bass drum note where there's an R indicated, and add a snare drum accent where an L is indicated. Don't change the sticking for your hands— you maintain a constant RLRL sticking for the entire method.

Swing the 8th notes slightly— listen to that Meters track above about a thousand times to get a feel for it. As noted on the pdf, Stone exercises starting with RLRR, RLLR, and RRLR, and also exercises 65 and 67 will be most useful as actual performance vocabulary. Pay attention to how the parts interact. Go for accurate unisons between the bass drum and unaccented snare drum, and get a solid lock between the accented snare drum and the bass drum— they should fit together to make a solid, swinging steady 8th note rhythm.

Burn through this warm-up fast— coming next week is a Reed-based method which is much more musical and realistic for actual playing.

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Grooves o' the day: three street beats by Fred Staehle

Kicking off a little series on playing New Orleans-style street beats, here are some grooves by Fred Staehle. These are from Dr. John's Gumbo, a very famous album of classic New Orleans tunes, recorded by, hey, the pianist Dr. John, whom Staehle played with for many years. We've got the main grooves and a break from “Big Chief”— here a percussionist is playing the traditional tambourine part— and the complete transcribed drum intro from “Junko Partner”, and the main groove from “Iko Iko.”

The rolls here are all multiple-bounce. I would probably stick the triplet and break on Big Chief RRLR. You could practice every two measures of Junko Partner as individual grooves— except the last two measures which are kind of a tag. And note the optional accent in Iko Iko— sometimes he plays it, sometimes he doesn't. No big deal.

These all swing in a special way, so don't neglect listening to the tracks— actually buy the record, and play it a lot. Variations and fills are fairly few, so they should be easy to hear if you listen as much as you should.

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Audio after the break:

Transcription: Zigaboo Modeliste — The Mob

Here's the rest of that thing we were looking at the other day: Zigaboo Modeliste's playing on The Mob, from the Meters album Look-ka Py Py. On the first and last A sections, he improvises a non-repetitive groove, with the hihat sparsely played in an interesting way. See that previous Groove o' The Day from this album, and you can play the whole tune, except for a couple of fills.

The hihat is played pretty softly, except where it's accented, and by itself— on the accented snare drum/hihat unisons, play it light. Listen to the recording.

The 1 is a little hidden at the beginning of the track, so seeing the basic rhythm of the guitar riff written out will help you get oriented:

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Grooves o' the day: all the grooves from Look-ka Py Py

Let's do a whole record for the groove of the day— and a very famous one at that: Look-Ka Py Py, by The Meters. The drummer is Zigaboo Modeliste, the New Orleans funk legend. We've covered him pretty heavily here, but if you don't know who he is, get thee to the archives, and go buy a bunch of Meters albums— don't think, just do it.

Mr. Modeliste is still actively performing, and you can follow him on Twitter to find out what he's up to, and to go see him play.

I see a couple of typos as I'm going to post this. Worst of all, I've left out the tune Rigor Mortis altogether [UPDATE: wtf, also Dry Spell!]— oops! I'll fix those for the book, I guess. Most of these examples give a pretty accurate picture of what's played on the actual tune; most grooves are not heavily varied, and fills are generally pretty sparse. On The Mob the A sections are completely improvised and non-repetitive, in the broken-up style of the example I transcribed— I'll write out the whole drum part soon. One notation you might wonder about are the tenuto marks on Yeah, You're Right. Those are slightly open hihat notes— just a little sizzle without being a full-fledged open. Accented snare drum notes are solid rim shots.

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Audio is after the break:

Groove o' the day: Zigaboo Modeliste — Keep On Marching

Here's a funky Second Line groove from Zigaboo Modeliste, on the song Keep On Marching, from the Meters album Good Old Funky Music.

Play the open hihat strongly— it helps if you have some pretty light hihats, as Modeliste does. On the downbeat of beat 3, he plays the hihat both with his hand and with his foot, or sometimes just with his foot— the sound is a little different, and accents that note a little bit.

Here's what he plays in the first measure of the recording, which you can use as a fill. The tenuto mark on the & of beat 3 indicates a half-open hihat.

The track:

Groove o' the day: Jungle Man

Another Zigaboo Modeliste groove today, from Jungle Man on The Meters album Rejuvenation:

Half-swing the 16th notes-- listen to the track to hear the correct interpretation.

YouTube audio after the break:

Transcription: Zigaboo Modeliste - Good Old Funky Music

This is a permanent favorite of mine- Good Old Funky Music by the Meters, with Zigaboo Modeliste on drums. Not a single day goes by without me hearing this internally at some point. There is another version of this floating around; this is the shorter of the two- here they've edited out half of the intro, and I like it a lot better- it puts the Hawaii 5-0 fill right up front.

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YouTube clip and a few notes on the transription after the break:

Drum! Magazine piece - Inside "Cissy Strut"

This is an educational piece of mine, entitled Inside "Cissy Strut" And Beyond, which ran in the Nov. 2010 issue of Drum! magazine. After reviewing New Orleans drummer Stanton Moore's book Groove Alchemy for Oregon Music News, I devised a method for developing something Moore revealed about Meters drummer Zigaboo Modeliste's way of playing the famous tune Cissy Strut. The groove featured a two-handed, broken-up approach to the hi-hat which anticipated the linear fusion thing more fully explored later in the 70's and 80's.

The method is fully explained in the piece. You'll need your copy of Syncopation to cover it thoroughly- it's recommended that you apply it to the quarters and 8ths pages ("lesson 4" in the new edition), the 8th note rest pages, and the syncopation sets, before eventually moving on to the long syncopation exercises.