Daily best music in the world: Freddie Hubbard - Jodo

Absolutely killing tune here— Jodo by Freddie Hubbard, from his album Blue Spirits. Pete La Roca is on drums. Soloists are Hubbard, Hank Mobley, McCoy Tyner, and La Roca. I sometimes forget La Roca is my third favorite 50s-into-the-60s guy after Elvin Jones and Roy Haynes— he's on relatively fewer records. Fantastic energy here. Tempo is right in the same mid-240s ballpark with Chasin' The Trane and Passion Dance. The tempo for crushing 60s s*t, apparently. It ends faster than it started. 

I started transcribing, and it just became futile. I'm a little disillusioned about analyzing things in this moment, but you can hear it's a very modern, energetic texture he's making on the drums. There's a lot of interaction between the snare drum and bass drum, and the cymbal rhythm is often broken up, a la rhythms you might find in Ted Reed's Syncopation. Not a lot of defined activity on the hihat— it's largely a three limb performance, with the right hand on the cymbal, left hand on the snare drum the whole time. The native posture for a jazz drummer. It would be easy to devise a simple method for practicing this kind of thing, and tame it and perfect it, thus draining it of its emotional power. 

Daily best music in the world: Pete La Roca with Coltrane

Busy this week finishing an e-book outlining my “harmonic coordination improved” method. I think I'm going to call it Drumset Control. There are at least two other books with that title, by Mitchell Peters and Dahlgren & Fine. My thing is the only one that is like the book Stick Control— or Accents & Rebounds really. It's essentially A&R orchestrated for four limbs, and massively expanded, and made accessible to players of all levels. I'll go into it more when I'm ready to release it.

So while I do that, here's a bootleg recording of Pete La Roca playing with John Coltrane in 1960, with McCoy Tyner and Steve Davis. Coltrane formed his quartet with Tyner, Davis, and Elvin Jones through this engagement at the Jazz Gallery in New York. 

Thanks to Marco Zondervan in the Netherlands for sharing this.

Pete LaRoca 1938-2012

Another very great drummer has died, Pete LaRoca Sims. I heard that he had entered a hospice a few days ago; his condition must have deteriorated very quickly. He was of roughly the same generation as some very crisp players like Art Taylor and Louis Hayes, but LaRoca had a looser way of playing. If there were such thing as an Elvin Jones “camp” during that period, maybe LaRoca would've been in it. I got to see him play when he was touring in the '90's, after a hiatus of many years, and he was taking a very loose, very Elvin-like approach. I think his chops may have been down a bit, but it didn't matter. Very sorry that he is gone.

This is from, I think, his greatest recording as a player— and one of the great drumming performances in jazz, period— with Sonny Rollins, Live in Stockholm:



A few more selections after the break:

Two nice finds

Two nice things from Jazz Schmazz, a blog I'll be checking in with real often from here on out. First is a transcription of Pete LaRoca's fours on Homestretch, from Joe Henderson's Page One... and, whoops, yes I'll definitely be visiting him again....

Next is something amazing which I've never seen, a clip of Billy Higgins playing duo with Charles Lloyd, a few months before Higgins' death:



I was just thinking about what I'm going to be listening to in advance of recording my new CD next month- I think I found it- I'll be watching this again and again. This would be a good time to visit my other recent Billy Higgins posts, in case you missed them the first time.

After the break is Joe Henderson's Homestretch on YouTube.

VOQOTD: Pete La Roca on backbeats

What an insult for Fusion to impose the repetitive BackBeat on Jazz drummers! How ironic, since the BackBeat is merely the handclap used by American slaves when they were forbidden to have drums! How bizarre to haul a set of drums just to do what people did without drums!

- Pete LaRoca

Tune of the moment: Eiderdown

Eiderdown is a great tune  by Steve Swallow that deserves to be played a lot more, and has been coming up a bunch  lately in sessions and in my listening. The lead sheet is available free, along with a lot of other great stuff, from Swallow's publishing site, shared with with Carla Bley, wattxtrawatt.com. So there's no excuse for not having it in your book!

John Stowell likes to play this one a lot, but he hasn't recorded it yet, that I know of. The version I've been listening to is from Jack Dejohnette's 1975 record Cosmic Chicken. It's been out of print for years, and was never reissued on CD, so good luck finding it. It is available through some of the LP ripping blogs, if you google around for it.



One version that is legally available is from Pete LaRoca's Basra:



Get Basra | get Eiderdown

Transciption: Pete LaRoca - Oleo

I must apologize for the light posting- I've been occupied with work and with my still-upcoming, really-going-to-happen this time recording session for my new record. Allow me to make it up to you by offering this transcription of Pete LaRoca's playing on a very bright rendition of Sonny Rollins' Oleo, from the "A Jazz Hour With..." series of recordings.

I got to see LaRoca play in Portland on the tour he did around 2001 or so. His chops were a little down, but he still had a great, loose, Elvin-like feel. These old trio recordings with Sonny Rollins are some of the greatest things ever. Here he sketches out the melody just on the ride cymbal, and swings on the bridge, as is normal. I've transcribed the drums only on the fours- there's four measures of Sonny blowing in between each line of drums. The choruses of fours start at 1:10, and LaRoca's first break is at 1:14.

Get the pdf

YouTube clip of the track after the break.