An Elvin-inspired lick

A page inspired by something that came up on Elvin Jones's solo on the tune Crisis, which I partially transcribed last week. It's not even a lick, it's something funny that happened with his timing, that's worth exploring.   

Pattern 1 is the key part— the triplet portion is really just a distortion of the alternating 16th notes. The sticking for both parts is RLRL, we've just pushed the rhythm around and put in an odd accent. Apart from this thing as a solo idea, it would be worth playing pattern 1 for awhile as a stick control pattern— teaching your hands a triplet expression of that ordinary RLRL sticking. 

The rest of the page are some possibilities for moving it to the drum set. Play around with it, move it around the drums, have some fun. 

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Todd's five-note pattern

Here's a five note pattern that I play all the time, without ever knowing what I'm doing with it. I've written about a couple of these accidental items before— an 11 note pattern and my grocery store hemiola  thing.

When other people play this— a very common modern thing: 

...I do the following thing. Sort of a Tony-like lick. It's actually a Gary Chaffee pattern exactly, but I re-made it up in this voicing specifically. It's always a little bit sketchy, because not everyone is comfortable hearing that, and I don't know how to get out of it— I have to wing it, with varying degrees of grace and success. So here it is written out in a couple of repeating forms, and as a two-to-eight beat long fill, ending on 1: 

 

Practice the repeating forms, then practice the fills as part of a longer phrase in a modern jazz feel. 

I recommend practicing it this way, too, accenting on the beat every beat: 

All of the fill examples end on 1; I'll also be figuring out how to end those with an accent on the last note of beat 4. 

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