Groove o' the day: Ogene 6/8

Via African Muzik Magazine and Famoudou Don Moye, music by traditional Ogene musicians, from Nigeria:



I'm transcribing some of the cool instrumental breaks they're playing on the bells, between vocal parts, but until I get those done, here are some of the things happening with the time feel— simplified a little bit, and adapted for the drumset.

The basic groove, played with shaker and jug— a bass sound; since we're drumset musicians, we'll play the parts on the bass drum, and any right hand sound you want— hihat, bell, rim, whatever you have handy. It's felt “in 1”; one beat per measure of 6/8.

Note the staccato, muffled bass drum note in the first measure, and the accented long note in the second measure. The circled note is an optional variation, played occasionally; when you play it, it's a long note, slightly softer than the accented note.

With a tonal middle voice added; in the video it's played on a bell; we'll play it on the high tom, or on the snare drum with the snares off. This occurs briefly after many of the instrumental breaks— the strong, interactive bell parts that happen between vocal phrases. Listen for the double in the second measure; you can hear it pretty clearly at 2:02:

A more complex middle voice, with articulations— this is played by the bell player on the right during many of the vocal parts:

The housetop accent is a stronger note with an open sound; the staccato notes are softer, with a dead stroke; the note in parenthesis is the softest, and also a dead stroke. If you watch the player, you can see there's often more going on than what I've written— more soft notes— when I get some more time with this, I'll post some more...

Groove(s) o' the day: On the streets of Aba, Nigeria

I loved this video so much I wanted to lay on you a transcription of the whole thing, but we're going to have to settle for just getting the basic groove. I hit a wall about a minute in— there's an interlude there that is going to be very difficult to notate. It may sound like he's all over the place, but when you study the thing closely in Audacity, his execution is pretty much impeccable, and he stays oriented in 4 the whole time— he does a couple of slight tempo changes, and adds beats when he does the little fills, but that's about it. Let's listen first:




His set up is a little different, and he's playing the bell part with his left hand, but you can play all of these on a normal drumset, and leading with your right. On all the grooves, the accents refer to the bell pattern— he has a really good left hand, and the accents jump around quite a bit. These are all from the first minute of the performance, and the tempo is around quarter note = 195 bpm.

Here is the main groove from the beginning:

A little further in he plays the traditional “short” bell pattern:

This bell variation happens quite a bit:

At about 0:43 there's a change in the drum-hand part (our left, his right). I transcribed this without looking at the video, so I missed that he is playing the first two notes of each triplet on all four beats. You'll have to pencil in another low tom note on the downbeats of 2 and 4. He implies a cross rhythm by playing the second note of each triplet a little late with the left hand. The only way to execute that is to be extremely fluent with the first polyrhythm on line 5 of the Ladzekpo page from a few days ago. Our drummer today executes this rhythm in the cracks between the triplet notation below, and Ladzekpo's rhythm:

And for fun, here's a little lick he does at about 0:13. It's possible I was one beat off by in the way I wrote this out; the actual downbeat could be on beat 2 of this example, which would give us a normal short bell pattern in the first measure, and alternating triplets starting with the left hand in the second measure:

So, those are some of the notes. Being and playing as real as this kid is the really hard part.

[h/t to Peter Kalu, Arky, Victor Wooten  for making and sharing the video]