Daily best music in the world: Roy Haynes with Charlie Parker LIVE

This is pretty amazing. Rough sounding live tape of Charlie Parker in 1951, with Roy Haynes on drums... sounding basically like any other subsequent time in his career. Incredibly modern playing for 1951. 

h/t to Mark Stryker of Jazz Times.

Practice loop: Dexterity / Bird's chorus

UPDATE: If you want the loop archive, you should get it fast— my ISP is complaining about the large files stored on my account, and I'll probably have to delete it soon.

I assume everyone is busy rifling through my practice loop archive, which I recently posted online. Most of the samples are quite short, from vamp sections of tunes, and there isn't much regular jazz in 4/4. So lately I've been making more loops from whole solos. I'm starting with Bird— probably every jazz musician in the world between 1945-1960 beat their Charlie Parker 78s to death playing along with them.

This is sampled from Dexterity, written and recorded by Charlie Parker. Nobody ever plays this tune, despite it being massively available to jazz students forever, through the original Real Book. Sample is of Parker's 32 bar solo. Tempo is quarter note = 217.

Rub-a-dub lesson: Au Privave

Something a little more challenging to try rub-a-dub style. Since it's not just a lick, but a way of playing figures and setups, musical context is important— we're trying to make some written kicks, so just doing our usual Syncopation thing won't be the best way to work it out.

Here we'll apply the concept to the Charlie Parker tune Au Privave— not a big band kicks-and-setups situation, but still educational. I've written out the exercise, plus the melody rhythm of the tune under the staff.

If you don't know the tune, play it through a few times just playing the melody rhythm on the drums— either snare drum alone, and/or with both hands in unison on the snare plus a tom tom or cymbal, and/or with the left hand along with the jazz cymbal rhythm. Listen to the recording and copy the horn's accents. Good advice for learning any bop tune, actually...

Then play the exercise as written, on the snare drum and one cymbal, then begin moving both hands around the drums/cymbals as outlined in Chris Smith's video that kicked off this whole series. Try it with the practice loop once you've got it up to speed.

As I said with the Equinox exercise, this will be helpful in learning to play Au Privave, but it's not necessarily how you want to play the tune.

Get the pdf

Billy Higgins trading 4s

This is from the same tune as the recent post Comping The Billy Way— Things Ain't What They Used To Be, with Hank Jones and Ray Drummond, from the album The Essence. Here Higgins is trading 4s with Jones, starting after 3:48 in the recording. I've transcribed just Higgins's solos.

There's also a stealth groove o' the day in here— on the fourth line he plays a hip, easy Afro 6 type of groove that you can lift directly.

Billy's dynamics are extremely subdued here— accents and crescendos are subtle, overall volume is low, and the vibe is relaxed. The quarter notes on the bass drum are played very softly. Single drags (on lines 2 and 3) are played open; long rolls (lines 1 and 3) are played closed. On line 3 there are some ruffs with the main note played as a stick shot— hitting the other stick while the bead is pressed into the head.

Get the pdf

 

Very occasional quote of the day: cymbal selection for bop

Roy Haynes talks about what cymbal used to go with what soloist in the 1940s:


“I just liked the sound of a cymbal with the sax. It was cool with a trumpet, too. Back in the old days we used to play the hi-hat for trumpet players and also for the piano soloist. Now all of the guys want you up there.”


Highly worth reading that entire interview with Christian McBride.

Related: Mel Lewis talks cymbals in his 1985 Modern Drummer interview.

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.

Kenny Clarke at 100

[Oh heck, this is from 2014— oh well. Just saw it on Famoudou Don Moye's Facebook feed today. Whatever.]

Good of NPR's Kevin Whitehead to take notice of Kenny Clarke's (“inventor of modern jazz drumming”) 100th birthday. He doesn't quite accurately describe the nature of Clarke's innovation:

Before him, jazz drummers kept time lightly on the bass drum. Kenny Clarke used bass drum sparingly, often tethered to his snare, for dramatic accents in odd places — what jazz folk call "dropping bombs." He drew on his playing for stage shows, where drummers punctuate the action with split-second timing. Clarke kicked a band along. 

With those twin innovations, Kenny Clarke invented modern jazz drumming. 

Before Clarke— I'm not going to call him “Klook”, like I knew him— drummers kept time often quite heavily on the bass drum, and the snare drum, too, with a swing-style march rhythm. They also played the familiar thing on the hihat— that was Papa Jo Jones's thing. You can get a more detailed idea of what he did in his Modern Drummer interview with Ed Thigpen— I've excerpted the relevant passages. This post about Charley Wilcoxon's Drum Method, as well as the Mel Lewis's history of jazz drumming interviews, and, hey, records, can give you an idea of what swing-era drumming was in the early part of Clarke's career, before Bebop.

Transcription: Connie Kay - Billie's Bounce

Here's a basic bebop study, looking at how Connie Kay plays the head of Billie's Bounce— we've got the drums transcribed, along with the melody rhythm so you can see how they intersect. Kay was the drummer for the Modern Jazz Quartet, and was sort of a quiet work horse— I've not come across a lot of records with him giving big performances like drummers like to hear. But my listening habits are kind of narrow and not encyclopedic. The album is Stan Getz & J.J. Johnson At The Opera House, from 1957.

The 8th notes here will swing, of course. The cymbal rhythm is played on an open hihat, with a few punctuations on a small cymbal— maybe this is Kay's famous 17" Medium-Heavy. It doesn't really matter— play the cymbal part wherever you want it.  Nothing is apparently happening with the left foot. It's likely he's feathering quarter notes on the bass drum, when he's not catching the melody rhythm exactly. He generally stays so close to the melody that there may not be a whole lot of that.

He makes many of the accents with unisons between the cymbal, snare drum, and bass drum, which is a little unusual— that gives a very heavy sound, and he underplays the snare drum a bit on those; the accents are predominantly bass drum. I think rather than making those unisons, you could catch those accents with either bass drum and cymbal, or snare drum and cymbal.

Get the pdf

Transcription: Billy Higgins / Tears Inside

Tears Inside, from Pat Metheny's album Rejoicing, is such a favorite track of mine, I'm surprised we haven't done anything with it before. I did transcribe the drum intro for the forthcoming[!!!] Book of Intros. So to tie into that, here's Billy Higgins comping behind the first three choruses of Metheny's guitar solo. His playing on this record is one of the greatest things in recorded drumming, and this tune is like a textbook of medium tempo bop drumming— I hate to reduce it to that, because it's primarily a great work of art, but it's also educational.

Swing the 8th notes. Higgins plays his ride cymbal at a fairly even volume— generally without the accenting characteristic of many drummers' playing; and he tends to not be over-triplety in his swing feel. He flattens it out a bit. There's no hihat audible, but you can add it on 2 and 4 if you want. He does often play time on the bass drum— feathers it, in current parlance— and probably is doing that here. You can practice the page in one, two, or four measure chunks, or learn the whole thing like an etude.

Get the pdf

How to play Jordu

About time I did another one of these: here's Jordu, by Clifford Brown, as played on the definitive recording, Clifford Brown & Max Roach, on EmArcy. It gets played a lot at the high school and college level, and at jam sessions, and it's an easy tune to play wrong.  Per our usual format, I've given here the recorded rhythm of the melody, along with a sketch of the drum part, along with a few notes. Print the pdf, find the lead sheet in your Real Book, listen to the recording, and proceed.

First the roadmap: the tune is 32 bars long, AABA form— an A section played twice, followed by a B section (or bridge), and then a final A section, with each section being 8 bars long. On the pdf, the first A runs from the beginning of the piece to the first ending, the second A runs from the repeat through the second ending, the bridge runs from the double bar to the end of the page, and the last A runs the DS at the top of the page through the first ending.

The major issue people have with this tune is how to handle the figures and stops on the A section. The standard thing done at jam sessions is to play the figure in measure 2, three times. But originally, that figure starts off the beat the first time, on the beat the second time, and off the beat again on the third time; and on the second time they aren't actually playing the figure at all— they just play a measure of time with a stop on the & of 4. People also tend to be unclear on what to do in measures 6 and 7— often they'll try to fit the previous figure in again. Max and the bassist just play time.

On measures 1-2 and 5-6 of the bridge Max plays a little set-up on the floor tom which might be a little hokey in modern playing. Listen closely to what's going on there, and see what you think about it, and how it works as an arrangement element. At the end of the bridge there is a bit of a subito mp as the horns do their pickups in to the last A, so you have to set that up gently.

Max fills with crescendoing 16th notes on the floor tom on the second ending, and on the last measure of the form before the solos.

Get the pdf

Lead sheet and audio after the break:

Kenny Clarke plays an intro

Putting together a bebop podcast (which we'll see here whenever I get it finished), this intro from 1941 by Kenny Clarke jumped out at me— the tune is Hot House, and the playing feels more like the end of the swing era than the beginning of bebop:

I have it on a record called The Immortal Charlie Christian, but it has apparently been released under Dizzy Gillespie's name, too:




There's also a little history lesson here. This is very early in the bebop era, and throughout the tune Clarke plays the time on the hihat— Papa Jo Jones's thing, and immediately before bebop, the hip way of playing. He only uses the cymbal as punctuation, like on the little choke he does in the third measure of that intro; he wasn't actually riding on it yet, as was the standard thing a few years later. Thanks to Clarke himself, to be clear.

Examples after the break:

Transcription: Philly Joe Jones — Locomotion

I've been working through Philly Joe Jones's intro on Lomotion, from the Coltrane album Blue Train; a student was given the fairly nutso assignment of learning this verbatim off of YouTube. We worked through it by rote/aurally, but I thought I'd do my own transcription of it, so she can see what's going on with it that way:

It's not clear what's happening within the rolls in measures 5-8— something with a triplet rhythm, probably; but we simplified the part there by fitting accented doubles to the rhythm Philly Joe is playing there. It doesn't exactly resolve to a normal rhythm, but the tempo is fast, and it's easy to throw it in there and land the accents in the right spot:

Get the pdf

Audio after the break:

DBMITW: Jazz at the Philharmonic

This is from a Jazz at the Philharmonic album from 1949 that I dug out of my father's record collection back in the early 80's, and I've been carrying it around ever since. It's got Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Roy Eldridge, Hank Jones, and Buddy Rich playing some pretty honking jam session style stuff. That trombone player is a guy named Tommy Turk.



That's what they used to call dropping bombs, what Buddy is doing there.

The record is labeled "New Volume 7 (formerly Vols. 12 and 13)"; you probably can't find the LP, but you can get it from Amazon. 

After the break is Lester Leaps In, from the same record, which I have to include because I love Lester Young's solo on it.

1996 Paul Motian interview, part 1: Not-So-Correct

This is another old favorite of mine that's just been floating around the Internet- you kind of have to look for it to find it- a 1996 Paul Motian interview by Chuck Braman. Not a lot of what you call deep reflection- Motian seems to be a pretty direct cat- but that seems to be the lesson itself. I've excerpted my favorite parts, of which there are many. In the first part he talks about his influences and early career, up to the 1960's:

WHY HE LIKED MAX:
Chuck: What was it about Max Roach in particular that attracted you to his playing?

Paul: He was more into the Bebop. I was going to say jazz, but you can't say jazz because you'd have to put Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa in that too, you know? And of course I liked them too, but Max was the one that stood out to me. And also, I was never really a Buddy Rich fan, I must say.

Chuck: Why not?

Paul: Because to me that was more technical. I mean, I admired it and I respected it, he was a great technician and played great. Even today, you listen to some of that stuff he played with Art Tatum and Charlie Parker, some of that shit's great, man. It's really good. But somehow Max stood out more to me. Just from the sound and the rhythmical patterns and what came out from him was somehow more hip than the other shit.

Chuck: Some of your early recordings also remind me of Philly Joe Jones.

Paul: Sure. Philly, and Kenny Clarke, those were my people, but at this point Art Blakey is high up on that list, man. I listened to him too, you know, but my playing, listening to it now, came more from Max.

Kenny Clarke on the invention of the ride cymbal

...and modern drumming in general, excerpted from Ed Thigpen's Kenny Clarke interview in the Feb. 1984 Modern Drummer. I originally posted this last year on the Drummerworld.com forum.

From Thigpen's introduction:

It's understandably difficult for a young drummer to imagine that the various components of the drumset were ever utilized in a manner unlike the way they are today. In actuality, the approach was, at one time, considerably different, and Kenny Clarke had a whole lot to do with changing it all. His drumming led the way towards usage of the bass drum for accentuation as well as timekeeping; the establishment of a jazz-time rhythm for the ride cymbal, and freedom from a strictly metronomic role, forcing the bassist to share in the responsibility of timekeeping. Kenny Clarke can also be credited with freeing the left hand so it could interact with the soloist—the obvious reason why thousands of young student drummers still sweat over Jim Chapin's Advanced Techniques For The Modern Drummer...

To say that Kenny Clarke was "important,"or "influential, "or even "a key musical figure, "does not do his contribution justice. To state, unequivocally, that he was drumming's all-time Great Emancipator, a man to whom every jazz drummer who's ever lived owes a debt of gratitude, is perhaps a much more honest appraisal.