Light patch

Here are some good things to look at while I have a couple of busy days. I haven't had a lot of time for much serious book learnin' or ritin' recently, but I'll have some substantive things coming up. There's a Tony Allen transcription that will take about five minutes to finish, when I have the time. Meanwhile:

Interview with Montreal drummer Andre White @ Four on the Floor.

Dueling rudiments-of-the-moment at Trap'd and FOTF.

Via Larry Appelbaum, here's a piece where several jazz writers are asked "Do jazz critics need to know how to play jazz?"

Destination Out gives us Lost Tones, The Unheard Sun Ra parts one and two, complete with free sample mp3s.

All About Jazz interview: Alvin Fielder

Here are some extended excerpts of an Allaboutjazz.com interview by Clifford Allen with drummer Alvin Fielder. Fielder was a student of Ed Blackwell's, and a founding member of AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a 60's Chicago free jazz collective). He played with Muhal Richard Abrams, Sun Ra, Roscoe Mitchell, and likely everyone else associated with AACM at one point or another. He talks about influences, the history of the drums in jazz, his interactions with some great drummers, and his time in Chicago.

LINEAGES:
...Blackwell practiced all day... all the Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Max Roach tunes, all day.

[...]He used to sit down and play Max licks... and... it was strictly that. They weren't experimenting then as they would later on, and I never thought of Blackwell as a New Orleans drummer. I always thought he played very differently from the other drummers. He was a bebop drummer. [...] you didn't hear much of Blakey, Roy Haynes, or Kenny Clarke. Everything was Max Roach let me tell you...

AAJ: And all those other guys—Max, Roy, Klook—were playing melodically, which is different from what I think of with Blakey's style.

AF: Well... Blakey's a melodic drummer too. Blakey plays a lot of form, and Roy Haynes does too. My contention is—and sometimes I get a lot of arguments from it—modern drumming, and by modern drumming I mean bebop only, we aren't talking about swing drummers, or one foot in swing and one foot in bebop. We aren't talking about Big Sid Catlett or Shadow Wilson, even though they are modern drummers. I'm talking about from 1945 on up, every drummer, every modern drummer, and it's still true: Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Art Blakey and Roy Haynes—every modern drummer is a combination of those four drummers. Whether they know it or not, drummers today really owe a big debt to Roy Haynes and he owed a big debt to Kenny Clarke and Papa Jo Jones.