EZ Zigaboo method

Should have included this when I first made this up way back when, but... here's an EZ entry into my quite challenging and extensive Zigaboo Modeliste/Cissy Strut-style practice method. It's a way of playing funk grooves with a mixed rhythm on the hihat, played with both hands, which is how Modeliste played the very famous groove on Cissy Strut. Credit to Stanton Moore for writing about this in his book Groove Alchemy.

It uses the syncopation section (pp.32-44) of Ted Reed's Progressive Steps to Syncopation, but you can also use pp. 29-31— the 8th note rest portion— or pp. 10-11, with 8th notes and quarter notes. The crux of the method is that you play the book rhythms in natural sticking on the hihat and snare drum, and add bass drum. The method is in cut time, so, to make a funk groove, the snare drum is played on beat 3, or if there's a rest on 3, the closest note to it. In the original method the bass drum played an array of stock patterns; with today's EZ method, we're just going to play it in unison with the hihats— exactly the same as the book rhythm, except you don't play the bass drum when you're playing the snare.

Natural sticking, you'll recall, means that you play all the notes on strong beats (in this case, the 1, 2, 3, and 4) with the right hand, and the weak beats (all the &s) with the left hand. It's a very good system for playing mixed 16th note rhythms accurately— or their functional equivalent in cut time, mixed, syncopated quarter note and 8th note rhythms, as we're playing here.

Tempo for this method is roughly half note = 60-100. I suggest doing this two different ways— first by playing the snare drum on 3 all the time, no matter what's written in the book. So with this familiar line of music from Reed:

You'll play this— notice that on measures 2 and 6 there's a rest on 3, and the end of a tied note on 3, and we're playing the snare drum there anyway:

Then do it playing the book rhythms exactly. When there's a rest on 3, play the closest note to 3 on the snare drum, with whichever hand it falls on— usually the left. Usually you'll want to play the note before the 3 if possible— & of 2 is generally preferred to & of 3. So for the same passage above, you would play this:

Here's another line of music from the bottom of the same page:

Here's what you would play the always-play-the-3 way:

And here's what you would play the exact-rhythm way:

I neglected to put in the stickings on those examples, but remember: 1-2-3-4 = RH, &s = LH.

Pretty straightforward once you have natural sticking figured out, and can read the rhythms. We don't call these EZ methods for nothing. When do this with all of the first eight full-page syncopation exercises (pp. 37-44), you can take a crack at the more challenging original method, playing the hands as in this method, along with this page of bass drum ostinatos.

Groove o' the day: Omar Hakim / Gil

The early 80s were kind of a heyday for hip hihat work. Stewart Copeland and Omar Hakim, really got my attention for that, anyway. Can two great players make a heyday? You decide. Here's Hakim's groove on Gil, from John Scofield's album Still Warm. This is the intro and the first couple of measures of the head:

You could play all this with your right hand on the hihat, but it works so much better to do it with both hands, natural sticking, playing the snare drum with your right, a la my Cissy Strut-style method— so any note on the beat or on an & is played with your right, and your left plays any es or as. If you've ever played alternating 16th notes on the hihat, your hands already know how to place these rhythms relative to the bass drum. There's nothing wrong with learning to do more things, so go ahead and retrain your right hand if you want, but to get anywhere on this instrument sometimes you have to take the easy, natural solution when it's presented to you.

Hey, you'll probably want a fresh link to my other Reed-based funk methods if you're going to get into that Cissy Strut thing.

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Practice loop: The Meters / Cabbage Alley

Take care of your mental wellbeing and forget this political nightmare for awhile, with this cheery practice loop, sampled from Cabbage Alley by The Meters. Excellent for use with this late plethora of funk materials. Also take a look at my transcription of the breakdown from this tune.

Practice loop: The Meters / Doodle-Oop

Oh, and you might want a slightly slower loop to hang with the sixtuplets on the new page of funk stuff, so here's some more Meters. The tempo is about 90 BPM, and the NOLA-style swing feel si happening, but it'll work well with those pages. The drummer, our beloved and revered Zigaboo Modeliste, is playing a combination of street beat and funk groove, so this will also be great for working on those recent street beat methods I posted.

Practice loop: The Meters / The Same Old Thing

A new funk practice loop, sampled from The Same Old Thing, by The Meters. Use this with these two recent pages, or any of my funk stuff. The tempo is about 106 bpm. The 16th notes are swung slightly, in that New Orleans kind of way; don't worry about copying it, just listen and play and you'll start to acquire it.

Transcription: James Black - Hook And Sling, pt. 2

This is something very special— it's probably classical music to anyone well versed in New Orleans music, and anyone in the sampling world, but I only heard it for the first time recently: James Black playing Hook And Sling, by Eddie Bo. It's an extended funk jam taking up both sides of a 45 rpm single, and the drumming on it is something else— very much in the Zigaboo Modeliste zone, and roughly contemporaneous with the early Meters stuff we know and love, though Black was a little older.

The record is one continuous recorded track split in two, and they chose a very strange spot to split it— take a look at the first measure. There's quite a bit of wiggle room in the hihat and cymbal parts; someone's playing some tambourine, and it obscures it to some extent. There's also a good amount of half-open hihat, and the cymbals in general are pretty rough sounding and not always easy to pick out or notate accurately. Do take some care where there's something linear happening with the hihats, but in general, the cymbals can be a suggestion— focus on the drum parts. The accents, too, are not critically important: all of the parts of the instrument are played pretty strongly all the time. You'd be more true to the original if you played everything the same volume than if you exaggerated the accents. The rolls and ruffs are played very closed; he really digs into the drum for them. Play the 32nd notes as singles.

As always with the transcriptions, if nothing else, give the track many listens through while following along on the page.

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Transcription: Zigaboo Modeliste — The Mob

Here's the rest of that thing we were looking at the other day: Zigaboo Modeliste's playing on The Mob, from the Meters album Look-ka Py Py. On the first and last A sections, he improvises a non-repetitive groove, with the hihat sparsely played in an interesting way. See that previous Groove o' The Day from this album, and you can play the whole tune, except for a couple of fills.

The hihat is played pretty softly, except where it's accented, and by itself— on the accented snare drum/hihat unisons, play it light. Listen to the recording.

The 1 is a little hidden at the beginning of the track, so seeing the basic rhythm of the guitar riff written out will help you get oriented:

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Grooves o' the day: all the grooves from Look-ka Py Py

Let's do a whole record for the groove of the day— and a very famous one at that: Look-Ka Py Py, by The Meters. The drummer is Zigaboo Modeliste, the New Orleans funk legend. We've covered him pretty heavily here, but if you don't know who he is, get thee to the archives, and go buy a bunch of Meters albums— don't think, just do it.

Mr. Modeliste is still actively performing, and you can follow him on Twitter to find out what he's up to, and to go see him play.

I see a couple of typos as I'm going to post this. Worst of all, I've left out the tune Rigor Mortis altogether [UPDATE: wtf, also Dry Spell!]— oops! I'll fix those for the book, I guess. Most of these examples give a pretty accurate picture of what's played on the actual tune; most grooves are not heavily varied, and fills are generally pretty sparse. On The Mob the A sections are completely improvised and non-repetitive, in the broken-up style of the example I transcribed— I'll write out the whole drum part soon. One notation you might wonder about are the tenuto marks on Yeah, You're Right. Those are slightly open hihat notes— just a little sizzle without being a full-fledged open. Accented snare drum notes are solid rim shots.

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Audio is after the break:

Groove o' the day: Zigaboo Modeliste — Keep On Marching

Here's a funky Second Line groove from Zigaboo Modeliste, on the song Keep On Marching, from the Meters album Good Old Funky Music.

Play the open hihat strongly— it helps if you have some pretty light hihats, as Modeliste does. On the downbeat of beat 3, he plays the hihat both with his hand and with his foot, or sometimes just with his foot— the sound is a little different, and accents that note a little bit.

Here's what he plays in the first measure of the recording, which you can use as a fill. The tenuto mark on the & of beat 3 indicates a half-open hihat.

The track:

Groove o' the day: Jungle Man

Another Zigaboo Modeliste groove today, from Jungle Man on The Meters album Rejuvenation:

Half-swing the 16th notes-- listen to the track to hear the correct interpretation.

YouTube audio after the break:

Groove o' the day: Zigaboo Modeliste - People Say

Today's groove o' the day is Zigaboo Modeliste's part from People Say, by The Meters:

The 16ths are half-swung in the New Orleans style ("in between the cracks", as Stanton Moore calls it). Listen to the recording for variations in the bass drum part- often he'll add it on the "&-a" of 1 of the first measure. The variations in the hihat part are basically optional- it would sound just as good with 8th notes all the way through.

YouTube audio after the break:

Transcription: Zigaboo Modeliste - Good Old Funky Music

This is a permanent favorite of mine- Good Old Funky Music by the Meters, with Zigaboo Modeliste on drums. Not a single day goes by without me hearing this internally at some point. There is another version of this floating around; this is the shorter of the two- here they've edited out half of the intro, and I like it a lot better- it puts the Hawaii 5-0 fill right up front.

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YouTube clip and a few notes on the transription after the break:

Transcription: Zigaboo Modeliste - Stay Away

Another older transcription, Zigaboo Modeliste on Stay Away by the Meters. This one has a lot of fills.

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Drum! Magazine piece - Inside "Cissy Strut"

This is an educational piece of mine, entitled Inside "Cissy Strut" And Beyond, which ran in the Nov. 2010 issue of Drum! magazine. After reviewing New Orleans drummer Stanton Moore's book Groove Alchemy for Oregon Music News, I devised a method for developing something Moore revealed about Meters drummer Zigaboo Modeliste's way of playing the famous tune Cissy Strut. The groove featured a two-handed, broken-up approach to the hi-hat which anticipated the linear fusion thing more fully explored later in the 70's and 80's.

The method is fully explained in the piece. You'll need your copy of Syncopation to cover it thoroughly- it's recommended that you apply it to the quarters and 8ths pages ("lesson 4" in the new edition), the 8th note rest pages, and the syncopation sets, before eventually moving on to the long syncopation exercises.