Very occasional quote of the day: Joe gives advice

“When I was playing the Vanguard with Freddie Hubbard, I went back to the kitchen and Philly Joe was there. He said, 'You're playing good. You gotta kick Freddie's ass, make his lips burn.' All the while Freddie was telling me I was playing too loud.”

-Lenny White, Modern Drummer interview by Aran Wald, 1977

Philly Joe set ups

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.  

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Listening to The Musings of Miles

Listening to a Miles Davis record I never really heard before: The Musings of Miles. It's a lower profile item in Miles's catalog. These listening to albums posts are a test for me, because I normally don't feel I have a lot to say about what I hear. 

It was Miles's first LP album, recorded and released in 1955, with Red Garland and Philly Joe Jones, who would soon be members of Miles's regular quintet. Oscar Pettiford rounds out the quartet recorded here. 

Will You Still Be Mine
One of those tunes I've played many times, but nobody calls the titles so I can hear them, so I never learned a lot of them. Half my reason for writing this post is so I can finally memorize the title: WILL YOU STILL BE MINE.

WILL YOU STILL BE MINE. 

Bright little item, and they play it moderately fast, the tempo is about 256. They cruise through it. 

Form is a long AABA, 56 bars; A sections are 16 bars long, bridge is 8. On the head the last A has a four bar tag.  

Miles solos for two choruses, Garland plays a chorus and a half; Miles finishes his second chorus, then plays another chorus, and solos through the head out, finally playing the tune on the last A only. Pettiford pedals on the first 8 bars of the first two As of the head out.

Jones plays brushes behind Garland's solo; switching back to sticks for Miles to come in in the middle of Garland's second chorus, so I guess that was planned, or Miles signaled he was coming back in, and Joe was on it.

There's no mistaking his cymbal beat, is there? It's dominant on the recording, you don't hear the rest of the drums real well, though his left hand is very active— all his slick stuff is there. He seems more polished with that than players before him. 

I See Your Face Before Me
Lovely ballad I wasn't aware of, they really set a mood here. I'll have to dig up the Johnny Hartman recording of it. 

32 bars, form is ABAC, tempo 59 beats a minute. Walking ballad, Pettiford plays in 4 on all of it except the first 8 bars of the piano solo, where he plays in 2. They play two choruses total, all Miles except for the first half of the second chorus. Plus there's a four bar piano intro.

Jones is playing with brushes, obviously, mostly lovely long quarter notes, playing the bell of the cymbal with the metal loop especially during the piano solo. Skip note is present in his brush rhythm in a subtle way, and very late, suggesting double time— I think his skip note lands right before Pettiford's attack, and his downbeat right after. He double times the hihat briefly on the end of the C section.  

I Didn't
Cool Miles Davis tune based on Thelonious Monk's Well, You Needn't. I had to look that up, I figured it was based on a show tune, because Miles took it a whole different direction. But you can clearly hear Monk's changes happening on the solos. The title is a hip play on Monk's title. Form is 32 bars, AABA of course, tempo around 272. 8 bars of drums up front. 

At 1:10 you can hear a familiar cue Miles plays on later recordings. I don't know what the deal is with it, but you should recognize it. Like on Four & More Miles sets up Tony Williams's solo with it, and Tony cues the end of his solo with the rhythm figure. 

After the piano solo Miles and Jones do some irregular trading— Miles plays a chorus, gives Joe the bridge, Miles plays the last A; the next chorus they trade 4s, except Miles plays the tune on the last A. Then he solos for another chorus, and again plays the tune on the last A, and they're done.

Jones and Pettiford are kind of brawling in a nice way here— both playing very muscularly, not exactly together. Things don't have to be perfectly in unison to swing. 
 

A Gal In Calico
Kind of a mundane standard. Miles must have heard Ahmad Jamal play it. Maybe there's some interest in it for the horns, I find it a rather insipid, uninteresting tune. 32 bars, tempo is about 186. 

A Night In Tunisia
The centerpiece of the album, which it has to be. The tune is AABA with an interlude; the A sections are six bars Latin / two bars swing, the bridge swings. There's also a shout chorus that frequently gets played over the A sections the last time through, as it is here— I don't know where that originated. Tempo is about 174.  

There's a free time intro by Pettiford, with Jones playing jingle sticks, for a tambourine effect. On the head they do the normal Latin/swing switching thing, on the solos they swing, but it's pulling all kinds of directions. Pettiford's playing very independently at times.

On the solos they just play the AABA form— no interlude. Then they trade fours kind of roughly with Jones for 1 and a half choruses, sketching in the shout chorus line on the A sections. Actually on the last A of the first chorus, Miles plays the whole 8 bars— Jones doesn't get a break there. Then they play the head out from the bridge. The end gets drawn out, they're clearly winging it.

Green Haze 
12 bar blues, tempo about 78 beats per minute. Miles gets composer credit, but there's no tune that I can discern, it's just a blues. 

Piano plays two choruses, then Miles plays four, then Pettiford. Double time feel in 2 on the second chorus of Miles's solo, back to the slow 4 on Pettiford's solo, back to double time on the head out. Jones plays brushes all the way, except he plays time on the cymbal on Miles's solo. Again, his feel suggests double time even while he's playing the slow 4. 

Pettiford is doing hip stuff at the end of the first chorus of piano, and into the second and then third chorus of Miles's solo, where he forces the double time. He's playing like an arranger, and leader. To me he's the star of this record. 

There you go— you'll notice a lot of it simple description of what happened. It's important information, knowing the parameters of what happens when people play, and knowing what's out of the ordinary. You could ask for deeper insight to what they're really doing, beyond he's doing something hip here, but that's on the record, that's not translatable into words. Or if it were it wouldn't be communicable. 

Transcription: Ahmad's Blues - fours

Hitting the ground running with this 2024 business, here's Philly Joe Jones trading fours with Red Garland on Ahmad's Blues, from the Miles Davis album Workin'. Joe sounds quite beautiful, hand made, and direct after a couple of days of listening to all that Dave Weckl polish. 

Tempo is about 118, and the first break is at 4:09.

Note that several of the breaks start with a partial measure— he gets into them before the 1. A lot of them are in double time; swing the 8ths on the first solo, on the rest of them any 8th notes will likely be straight. 

Some other unusual things: in the second break the triplets are played with the left hand, with the grace notes of the flams played with the right. On the 8th break he muffles the drum with his hand— you'll have to figure out a logical way to do that, that gets the sound. I offered a possible sticking on one of the sixtuplets, you could probably use that, or part of it, on many of them.   

Hey, how come I haven't put out a Philly Joe transcriptions e-book to go with all the others? 

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Transcription: Philly Joe trading

Here is Philly Joe Jones trading eights and fours with Bill Evans on Minority, from one of my favorite records, Everybody Digs Bill Evans. It's a good tune to learn. 

I've written just the drum breaks. Transcription begins at 2:51. The tempo is quarter note = 247. 

No tom toms at all here, just snare drum, bass drum, a cymbal, and hihats. A lot of stick shots. There are a few passages of straight 8th notes— at this tempo the 8ths don't swing a whole lot anyway. Note the rhythm in bars 3 and 5. Bar 5 is the “intended” rhythm, in bar 3 he spreads it out a little bit, so the notes are evenly spaced— I've notated it pretty accurately. 

It's basically non-technical— you could do a rudimental sticking on the triplets— and much of it is linear, between the snare drum and bass drum. The rhythms could have been pulled from the book Syncopation, and give a clue for how to look at the phrases in that book— a subject for another time. 

The melodic idea for each break is pretty clear— listen for that, and how he repeats it and changes it, and listen for what sounds like the ending— the last bar, or two bars. The structure is logical, but the structure didn't come first, it's the natural result of thinking musically when you're improvising, and of doing your job, where you set people up to come back in out of your solo. 

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Know your tempos: Workin' / Steamin' / Cookin' / Relaxin'

You can buy them 
all in one collection now.

Hey, we haven't done one of these in a while. All the tempos from four very famous Miles Davis records, with his very famous quintet from the 50s, with Philly Joe Jones on drums— core literature. 

Workin'
It Never Entered My Mind - 58
Four - 207
In Your Own Sweet Way - 114
The Theme (take 1) - 137
Trane's Blues - 164
Ahmad's Blues - 114
Half Nelson - 257
The Theme (take 2) - 132

Cookin' 
My Funny Valentine - 67
Blues By Five - 177
Airegin - 292
Tune Up - 315
When Lights Are Low - 123

Steamin' 
Surrey With The Fringe On Top - 128
Salt Peanuts - 350
Something I Dreamed Last Night - 56
Diane - 143
Well, You Needn't - 230
When I Fall In Love - 67

Relaxin'
If I Were A Bell - 184
You're My Everything - 57
I Could Write A Book - 227
Oleo - 258
It Could Happen To You - 188
Woody'n You - 256

All of them, again, in ascending order:
Something I Dreamed Last Night - 56
You're My Everything - 57
It Never Entered My Mind - 58
My Funny Valentine - 67
When I Fall In Love - 67
Ahmad's Blues - 114
In Your Own Sweet Way - 114
When Lights Are Low - 123
Surrey With The Fringe On Top - 128
The Theme (take 2) - 132
The Theme (take 1) - 137
Diane - 143
Trane's Blues - 164
Blues By Five - 177
If I Were A Bell - 184
It Could Happen To You - 188
Four - 207
I Could Write A Book - 227
Well, You Needn't - 230
Woody'n You - 256
Half Nelson - 257
Oleo - 258
Airegin - 292
Tune Up - 315
Salt Peanuts - 350

It's good to attach a number to these things, and know that Miles ballads, in this period at least, gravitated around 57 and 67 bpm. Those showy numbers like Half Nelson and Woody'n You are around 257. Those slow medium items @ 114, and two different types of bright swingers around ~185 and ~230. 

And here— for my own peculiar interest— are all of them doubled or halved to put them in the familiar ~100-200 range— the medium to top end of standard metronome range. Useful and helpful as a practical thing dealing with time. There's got to be some kind of useful information in Miles putting a lot of tunes in tempos that equalize to the low to mid teens, or high 120s to mid 130s.

Four - 103
Something I Dreamed Last Night - 112
You're My Everything - 114
Ahmad's Blues - 114
In Your Own Sweet Way - 114
I Could Write A Book - 114
Well, You Needn't - 115
It Never Entered My Mind - 116
When Lights Are Low - 123
Surrey With The Fringe On Top - 128
Woody'n You - 128
Half Nelson - 129
Oleo - 129
The Theme (take 2) - 132
My Funny Valentine - 134
When I Fall In Love - 134
The Theme (take 1) - 137
Diane - 143
Airegin - 146
Tune Up - 157
Trane's Blues - 164
Salt Peanuts - 175
Blues By Five - 177
If I Were A Bell - 184
It Could Happen To You - 188

Playing Airegin

The title is Nigeria spelled backwards, usually pronounced AIRa-jin. I took a minute in the shower this morning figuring out how to pronounce it actually like Nigeria backwards: ah-ee-REE-jine. JINE rhyming with JIVE. A little stage banter item in case you ever have to get on the mic.  

Let's keep talking about tunes. That's a good subject. Airegin by Sonny Rollins is well known, but doesn't get played a whole lot. When it does come there can be a little confusion about how to play it— usually   

There are two famous recorded versions, first from Miles Davis's album Bags' Groove, which is pretty straightforward. Most often people will play it like this. Kenny Clarke mostly swings all the way through. Tempo is 240. 

 

And from Miles's album Cookin', which is is faster, more involved, with some hip flourishes to the arrangement. Philly Joe Jones does a lot more filling, and playing arrangement elements. That's the confusion I'm talking about— I'm trying to play it this way, everybody else is playing it like it is on the other record. Tempo is 288— half note = 144. 

Quick note on those tempos: 240 and 288— those are very common fast tempos in my listening experience. A whole lot of famous recordings are real close to them. For whatever reason people gravitate to them. Good numbers to have on your practice room radar.   

The form is an unusual ABAC, with phrases 8-12-8-8 bars long. 

Usually there's a Latin vamp intro— played in a rather disjointed way on Bag's Groove. On Cookin' the bass plays a quasi-Flamenco vamp, and Joe plays a hand to hand 8th note rhythm on the hihat. Also on Cookin' they they play the Latin vamp in place of the second A, so the actual form is A-B-VAMP-C— 8-12-8-8. That happens on the solos as well as the head. 

The 8 measure A sections have a repeating four-bar theme, with two measures of the main theme, two measures of response. This is timed differently on the different versions— the 'response' line happens in the fourth measure on Bags' Groove, and in the third measure on Cookin'. The rhythm is also squarer on Bags' Groove, more syncopated on Cookin'. It's worth mentioning a Stan Getz version where he plays the Bags' Groove rhythm on the A sections, with a break for a drum fill on the third and seventh measures— the measure before the response line. 

Usually the drums punctuate that part of the tune— at least hit the 2 in the second measure of each four bars. Philly Joe plays the line exactly, like a big band figure, and fills on the 4th and 8th measures of the section. On the solos on Cookin' Red Garland and Joe often punctuate the last measure of the A section with several &s in a row. 

The 12 measure B section has a two measure sequence that is extended the last two times it's played: 2-2-4-4. On Cookin' Garland and Joe hit a figure in the 8th bar of the B section— 1&2&— on the head only. Joe usually fills the last two measures of the section, heading into the Latin second A. 

The 8 measure C section is a coda figure with a break in bar 7— break at the end of the head, play through on the solos. At the very end of the tune that figure is extended a couple of beats— see the New Real Book chart for that, or just listen to the record. 

The two major lead sheets people are likely to use are from the original Real Book and from the New Real Book. The Real Book chart is based on the Cookin' version, except it omits the whole Latin thing— they don't write out the intro, and they don't put it in the form of the tune. It also doesn't include the figure at the very end of the tune. That book is known for containing a lot of suspect chords, I haven't checked for that. 

The New Real Book chart is based on Bags' Groove— except on the record the first measure of the vamp is different. I'm not sure what's happening there. 

There's a zipfile of fake book pdfs circulating, which includes some other charts for it— an OK version in Library of Musicians' Jazz, and a real suck version in Jazz Fakebook (written in that crummy, unreadable “World's Greatest Fake Book” style). 

There we go, that's about all I know about the tune— have fun with it.  

Philly Joe's early career

“When I got to New York I joined a rhythm-and-blues band right away, with Joe Morris, Johnny Griffin, Elmo Hope, and Percy Heath. It was an 8-piece group. We barnstormed all over the country, from Key West, to Maine, to California. I stayed with them for 3 or 4 years, I guess. Joe Morris had a lot of hits at that time. Today, you speak about a band having a number-one hit on the charts. In those days, Joe Morris had 3 or 4 hits going at once. He was making good money because he worked all the time.

After I left his band, I was in the Highlanders with Tiny Grimes. We had kilts and all that. I was not in that band too long. Then I went to Bull Moose Jackson's band, which was another rhythm-and-blues band. Most of the bands in those days played rhythm-and-blues and I did a lot of playing with groups like that. I was on the road with Jackson's band for a good while, and then I was in Arnett Cobb's band for a little while after that.”

- Philly Joe Jones, 1982 MD interview with Rick Mattingly

Very occasional quote of the day: learning

“I learn something every time I play.”

- Philly Joe Jones, 1982 Modern Drummer interview with Rick Mattingly

Transcription: Philly Joe Jones - Stablemates - intro

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. 

Read more about playing this odd tune— on which someone will try to test you, at some point. 

Read more about Philly Joe in a “key players” post I wrote early this year, which already seems like a lifetime ago.

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The three bloggers listen to Milestones

Yer Three Bloggers— myself, Ted Warren @ Trap'd, and Jon McCaslin @ Four On The Floor— decided to listen to Milestones by Miles Davis, and make whatever comments occur to us. It's one of his most famous albums, and was considered by Tony Williams to be the definitive jazz album of the universe. I listened to it a lot in college— I think I really didn't get it then— up through the 90s. It's been awhile since I've listened to it all the way through. 

Mind you, I feel like a jerk writing about this record. I don't want to give my opinions on it, I want to hear what other people have to say about it. If I was talking to one of those people, all of the comments below would be phrased in the form of questions. 

So: Milestones by Miles Davis, a sextet album released on Columbia Records in 1958, featuring: John Coltrane - Cannonball Adderly - Red Garland - Paul Chambers - Philly Joe Jones

Dr. Jackle (née Jekyll)
Barn burning show number, tempo ~ half note = 168. Lots of trading happening. Working on a Carnival boat gig in 1990 I remember my friend (not a big jazz musician) laughing over the rapid fire trading between Coltrane and Cannonball. It is good for jazz musicians, or anyone playing very active music, to know how their music sounds to ordinary people. A little foreshadowing of the burning tempos on Four & More, and Miles plays the drum solo cue we hear a lot of on the live records with Tony Williams. Red Garland acts as tour guide. Great high energy solo and breaks from Philly Joe.

Miles's solo here is like classical music, almost as much as the So What solo. 

Sid's Ahead
Strange energy here, like a bomb's about to go off, maybe, but we don't know when, or who set it. Tune is an odd little paraphrasis of Walkin'. Massive forward energy to this medium slow blues (~110bpm)— playing wise, groove wise, history of jazz wise. Coltrane sounds like he beamed in from another world. Note Philly Joe double timing the hihat sometimes, and playing a dotted-8th/16th rhythm on the cymbal, but he's not playing particularly 16th note-y on the snare drum. Rhythm section cruising, especially during Miles's solo where there's no piano, little comping. Joe is relentless. I imagine myself playing this and getting really antsy to make it “go somewhere.” 

Groove with this band is always a little mysterious to me— there's big air between Joe and Chambers. It's like a groove cloud at times. The rhythm section are all playing groove, but they're not all attacking the beat in the same place. Compare the feel to something else we heard recently, where everyone is chonk chonk chonk right on it.  

Great solos. So much intelligence on this record. We're used to hearing intelligence now, but this is something else. Makes a lot of other stuff just sound glib. 

Two Bass Hit
Another show arrangement, featuring the drums on the head. Joe generates massive energy through the head just with one hand on the snare drum. This record seems to be retiring the whole bebop era. It's a feeling. Somehow reminds of Mingus's band for pure cohesion— Red Garland and Joe together are tight as hell. After listening to a lot of him for my recent Philly Joe post... his playing on this record is a whole different level above— massive intensity, pure focus and confidence. 

Do you get the feeling that people need to arrange more? With the idea of hooking the audience's attention. It's easy to just play in jam session mode, but people want to hear things that are particular and hip. I'm not even sure how important the blowing is when the arrangement is this killing. 

Normally I don't want to hear a lot of snare drum, but Joe takes this out in a great way with it. The whole record is like that.  

Milestones
Modal jazz was created with this tune of course. More classical music from Cannonball on his solo— could the solos ever not lead off that way? The rhythm section just grooves on this— I'd be interested to find out if and how that choice was related to the new kind of harmonic structure. Certainly the 60s group took a lot more freedom from that.       

Billy Boy 
Ahmad Jamal style trio show number. Extremely hip, and absolutely the literal holy text of the brushes, even though he just plays them on the head in and out. Very polished change from brushes to sticks going into Red's solo, and back to brushes on the head out. Joe plays both feet in unison(***) while changing from sticks back to brushes in the third and fourth measures of the head out. It's funny, you can still hear this in the music of much later, very different people like Michel Camilo in this. 

More great trading with Joe on this. What do you say about that? It's over there, on the record.  

Straight, No Chaser
I listened to this track a lot in college, and I don't think I ever realized how futuristic this record is. This was just bebop to me, and I missed some important fundamentals for that reason. The lessons here are not obvious to a kid. I probably should have listened to more ordinary records, and given them more credit for being good, too.  

Cannonball's hip harmony part on the head is what I'm saying about arranging. If jazz has hooks the way pop music does, it's in things like that— in not doing things— composing, playing and arranging— generically. There's a modern mentality that's very fixated on the concept of genre, but nothing good is generic. There's no other tune “like” Straight, No Chaser; if you search Netflix you'll find there's no other movie “like” Mean Streets, no matter what their search engine claims. Try to find another song like Happy Together. Great things are particular.  

And with that, I can now go learn a lot of things reading what Jon and Ted wrote. Stay tuned for the next Three Bloggers post, whatever that will be. If you have any requested topics about which you'd like to hear from all three of us, by all means leave them in the comments, or email us. 

Philly Joe kicks and set ups

Companion to the Philly Joe Jones appreciation from the other day— I've transcribed some kicks and setups from the tune Soft Winds, from Chet Baker In New York. Jones plays figures all through the head; the time feel just to fill out some partial measures. In December I also wrote out the drum solo from this tune. It's an all around excellent track for jazz beginners to listen to, play along with, and learn. Dig up a chart, or write it out, play it with your friends. 

We're just looking at the broad outlines— I haven't written every detail of what he plays. Listen, and use the transcription as a guide. There are a few markings for straight 8ths, stick shots, and cymbal chokes. The straight 8th lick is very hip; I use variations of it all the time. Notice that he plays it a little different every time, sometimes very legato. On the head out he's using a brush, or a brush and a stick, or one brush played backwards. It doesn't matter, play it with sticks or brushes. Notice in the first measure of the head out Joe plays the kicks in the wrong spot— the trumpet is correct there. He also plays around it a little bit near the end. 

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Key players: Philly Joe Jones

This series is difficult for me, because it means writing a lot of words about somebody's playing, at which I am not good. I never felt a need to put it into words. It also takes some nerve to say let me tell you all about Philly Joe Jones, when I know at least a dozen people in town with more meaningful things to say about him. 

I never had a passionate Philly Joe phase. With many players, you get so into them that, for a time, the way they play seems like the only way to play. I wasn't aware of that, but I think I was trying  to play like him anyway, because he's inescapable. He's like oxygen, he's everywhere on the records you listen to, and his stuff is just what you play. 

Listening to him now I hear a complete architecture, like somebody dropped the Chrysler building in the middle of the recording. I don't know when my perception caught up with reality, which is: 

Philly Joe Jones is a pure classic entity, the hard core of the practice of jazz drumming for all time. In my mind the strongest, clearest voice playing modern bop in the 50s. He's on many of the biggest records of the period, and is often well-featured, and well-recorded. Most often he's a sideman, so you hear him doing the true drummer's job, playing assertively in a supportive role. He seems to have wrapped up and finished a lot things created by Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, and Art Blakey.   

Generally a clean way of playing— in the sense that everything is lined up, and he's not fluffing the more technical stuff. Compare with Max Roach and Art Blakey, both of whose execution can be rougher at times. He's also clean in the sense that his “style” may not seem real overt to naive ears— at least compared to some of the other very greatest players— the “Magnificent Seven”. In no small part because so much of his playing = normal jazz vocabulary now. The stuff is so familiar that he becomes invisible. It's easier to sense the character of his playing by comparing him with other top 50s drummers— with, for example, the very clean, bright, and chipper Joe Morello or Stan Levey. Next to them Philly Joe is edgier, with a very substantive, deep R&B sound. That sound is what we're after. That's the whole thing we're after. 

He is snare drum oriented, and rudiment oriented, with a rather crusty sound on the snare drum— I can only contrast it with Buddy Rich's hyper-aggressive brassy sound. Joe is much funkier. You can get some of his vocabulary through Charley Wilcoxon's books. He's one of the first players I associate with a really polished brush technique— I see some vestiges of the showy, classy, vaudeville thing I associate with Papa Jo Jones. Maybe those observations just reflect the narrowness of my education. 

His cymbal beat is fairly straight, with a solid quarter note pulse— with an emphasis on the skip note when playing in 2. I don't hear a particular accent on 2/4, and I don't have the impression of hearing a lot of variations in the overall rhythm, except at the beginnings of choruses, or at other times when he's dropping a lot of big accents. He does have a variety of very distinct inflections with the cymbal, for example suggesting a 2 feel, or a double time two feel. Everyone does that, but there's a particular authority with Jones, like it's a real part of his presentation. 

He generally uses larger drums— a 22" bass drum, and 13 and 16" tom toms. Not necessarily real big cymbals— often a 20" ride, with a moderately bright, complex 50s A. sound. I'm sure he's using Ks part of the time. Strong hihat on 2 and 4, a la Blakey, with frequent open hihat/bass drum accents on 4 at the top of a chorus or section. He's moderately active with the bass drum; he doesn't do a fully-integrated thing like Elvin Jones, but he does use it interactively in his soloing. As I've noted before, he will sometimes alternate measures/phrases of snare drum ideas with measures of bass drum interactive ideas. Generally it's a deliberate, sparse, bomb-like attitude with the big drum. I can't recall having the impression of him feathering audibly, although he's certainly doing it. 

He has a lot of interesting, hip ways of setting up kicks. Listen for that. 

Finally, there is an aspect of his drumming that gets missed— this is not just jam session drumming. There is a show aspect here; much of what he does is about presenting the band, setting a stage environment for the performance of that tune. You definitely hear that with Max Roach and Art Blakey, too, and others. 

This is all just an invitation to do your own listening; you'll probably find many counter-examples to my observations. Just listen and start making your own wrong observations. There are many videos of people telling you all about his playing, and maybe they don't all suck. Listen to 99 minutes of his playing for every one minute of that.  

Ten + records: 

Miles Davis - The New Quintet, Round About Midnight, Milestones, every other Miles record
John Coltrane - Blue Train

Bill Evans - Everybody Digs...

Sonny Clark - Cool Struttin'

Milt Jackson - Bags Meets Wes

Clark Terry - In Orbit

Sonny Rollins - Newk's Time

Hank Mobley - Poppin' 

Some tracks: 

Billy Boy - Miles Davis

Two Bass Hit - Miles Davis
Dear Old Stockholm - Miles Davis
The Theme - Miles Davis
Oleo - Miles Davis

Night And Day - Bill Evans

Pot Luck - Wynton Kelly
Soft Winds - Chet Baker

Please leave your own tune / album recommendations in the comments— to me these examples just = jazz. I'm not always looking for dynamite drumming performances. 

See my other Philly Joe Jones posts. 

Transcription: Philly Joe Jones - Gone

From the Miles Davis album Porgy & Bess, here is Philly Joe Jones playing Gil Evans's arrangement of Gone. It's mostly just drums and horns, with a lot of drum breaks, plus a bridge where the rhythm section plays, and a trumpet solo. I've written out the whole track, except for the solo— give that a close listen or transcribe it yourself if you want to know what else to do while playing that Philly Joe beat, with the rim click on 4.

On the breaks he has a complete, simple little language happening, along the lines of what we did with that Philly Joe solo lesson from January. There's a lot of forward motion here— the tune starts at around quarter note = 205, and speeds up to around 240 by the beginning of the trumpet solo, where it stays, more or less, for the rest of the tune.

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Philly Joe solo lesson

In that last Philly Joe Jones transcription— his solo on Sub City, with Bud Powell— I noted a pattern of using his 8th note bass drum phrases to break up the mainly-snare drum passages. It's actually an easy way to modernize an old fashioned rudimental snare drum oriented approach to soloing. I'm more whole-instrument oriented, so I'm coming at it from the opposite direction, trying to learn to use my snare drum chops on the drum set without feeling like a pure caveman.

So let's devise a practice method from this. In all the examples I'm giving a rough hands part and bass drum part only. You should be moving your hands around the drums, varying accents and stickings to make something exciting and musical out of it.

Here are some of Philly Joe's 8th note lines which included the bass drum:

It would be easy to devise some practice phrases, alternating these patterns with improvised soloing. For example:

It's probably wise to practice that way, with everything very clear cut, always changing ideas on the 1. It's easy for people to follow. But I suggest being looser with it, using those types of phrases as a starting point, remembering that you are under no obligation to match them exactly.

For example, this is not a real exciting idea:

These are more dynamic ways of playing the same basic phrase:

So we're looking for ways to introduce some space, and to not always play to the 1. I think it's best to work that out in the course of actually playing the drums, but some people may need to write out some possibilities first. Beyond the scope of this little practice formula, it will help to think about having more than one way to phrase and accent— and start and finish— any basic solo idea. 

Solo transcription: Philly Joe Jones - Sub City

Here's a drum solo played at a bright tempo with brushes by Philly Joe Jones. The tune is Sub City, by Bud Powell. The form is 32 bars long, and he's basically playing two choruses, but there are a couple of wonky things on the second chorus. The tempo is about quarter note = 245. And the solo starts at about 2:45 in the track.

I've included some sample stickings in the earlier part. A lot of them will be rudimental stickings, but in the fifth line you may want to alternate. 

Note that he never hits a cymbal during the solo. It's mostly played with the hands, with a HBHB (hand/bass) lick frequently used as a connective— as in measures 11, 13,16, for example. He does a few other things with the bass drum:

The other major activity includes the syncopated meter-within-meter lick in the second line and last line of the first page, and also the quarter note triplet lick on the second page.

The second chorus gets shorted four bars, and there's a rough patch three lines before the end— at the 6/4 bar. I think I resolved the discrepancy correctly as Philly Joe was perceiving it, because of the strong down beat on the measure after the 6/4 bar. And you can see that in the following measure, measure 53, he plays a lick that he also plays in measures 10 and 31. The most logical place to account for the missing four bars is on the first A of the second chorus— 33-36.

It also ends a little roughly, with Powell jumping in aggressively, without Jones setting it up— it sounds like Jones wasn't expecting it. For a moment he plays the cymbal accents backwards, on 1 and 3, when it should be on 2 and 4. He corrects it after a couple of measures. He never loses momentum during any of that.

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Transcription: Philly Joe brush feature

I heard this on the radio yesterday— Soft Winds, from Chet Baker's album In New York. Philly Joe Jones also had a cool drum solo on it, played with brushes. Drumming right now is in a rococco-like ornamentation-obsessed phase, and Joe's solo here is refreshingly clean, deliberate, unadorned. It's sort of a bebop miniature. The way he plays the figures on the head is also really cool.

The tune is a blues, and the solo is 24 bars long— two choruses. The transcription starts after 4:30 in the recording.

In bar 5 he plays a tremolo with one hand and makes the accents with the other. In bars 17-19 he lays the brush on the drum head and rolls it in rhythm with the palm of his hand. He probably does these moves on video somewhere, and if so inclined you could track them down and see exactly what technique he's using.

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Transcription: Philly Joe Jones - Let's Cool One

Here's Philly Joe Jones's drum solo on Let's Cool One, from the Clark Terry album In Orbit. Just the rhythm section plays the tune here: Thelonious Monk, Sam Jones, and Philly Joe. It's a rather old fashioned way of soloing, with a lot of rudimental activity played on the snare drum, while the feet keep time, with the bass drum used mostly at phrase endings, and sparing use of the tom toms, and no cymbals at all.

So, it's mostly about the hands, and is pretty technically dense at times. Jones mostly plays the hihat on 2 and 4 and feathers quarter notes on the bass drum throughout— except where I've written something else for the bass drum. I usually don't indicate stickings in my transcriptions, but I've given some here, where it's clear what he's doing. A couple of items are sort of showy, featured drum solo type of things: the fp rolls starting at bar 9, and the running triplets with the left hand while the right hand plays the tom toms, in bars 19-20. Bar 13-14 will require some special attention if you want to learn how to play it.

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Groove o' the day: Philly Joe Afro 6

From the Sonny Rollins album Newk's Time, another individualistic version of an Afro 6/8 groove, played by Philly Joe Jones on Asiatic Raes, a Kenny Dorham tune.

On the snare line, the x is a rim click. It sounds like he's playing with just a snare and floor tom, no small tom. They continue the 6/8 feel for part of Sonny's solo, and it feels a little labored; you get the feeling that in 1957 it was still a pretty exotic style. 

Daily best music in the world: Sonny plays Surrey

Sonny Rollins and Philly Joe Jones play Surrey With The Fringe On Top, duo, on Sonny's record Newk's Time. This has got to be the purest essay on bop drumming ever.