Daily best music in the world: Tootie with McCoy

Here's a nice performance on brushes by Tootie Heath, on Five Spot After Dark, from McCoy Tyner's album Today And Tomorrow. I don't know how it passed under my radar that he died just last month.

I've had the record for years, but never gave it the close listen it deserves— I always reach for the high energy records from McCoy. I should know more about Tootie Heath than I do, too— he was close to some people at USC when I was there. He did a clinic— from which I honestly did not draw a lot— and my combo leader played with him regularly. Their regular gig was someplace too classy for me to go to. For whatever reason, I haven't listened closely to much he played on, and I have him filed as another second generation hard bop guy— which is not fair or good, you have to actually listen to people. 

He plays real clean here, hanging all his comping/fill ideas off the straight time feel. It's not a “texture” performance, everything he does is a statement. It's a nice catalog of things you can do that way. He's playing the context, but you could cop what he's doing as generic vocabulary. 

Pay attention to his sound and touch as well— nice definition, he lays into his accents, the cymbals sound strong. He's real alert, supports the tune and form well, and interacts with McCoy nicely. Very chipper. 

Speaking of Mickey Mousing, we hear a little bit of that after his first solo chorus, after 3:25. McCoy grabs a rhythm from the end of Tootie's solo, and then Tootie jumps back on it hard while McCoy is playing it. Normally that's not now thought to be good comping practice. Then again, you can't always avoid it in the moment. Stuff happens, and before you know it, you did it. 

Oh, and his main 20" cymbal reminds me of my own main 20— a rather stiff, dry Holy Grail. 

Two handed brush variations for fast tempos

UPDATE: I added some video of me practicing this.  

I've been practicing my fast tempos lately, both with sticks and brushes. I'm talking about jazz, tempos above ~290 bpm. I haven't had to do a lot of it my playing career, so I have to do it in the practice room and in sessions— I haven't had the chance to develop it naturally, on the gig. 

I can't/won't approach this as a pure technical thing, by working on my chops for playing the cymbal rhythm fast, and then learning coordination patterns to go with it— the way people initially learn to play jazz, learning a swing beat and adding some comping rhythms from Chapin. 

Basically my approach is to play complete phrases, change it up, have a lot of tactics available. This is one tactic for playing brushes: a varying and evolving two handed time pattern. 

Play these with brushes on the snare drum, playing each pattern one, several, or many times, before moving directly into any other pattern that connects easily with it. [UPDATE: Or whatever. You can see in the video below, I'm not really doing that at all.] We're in 4/4 the whole time, with the hihat on beats 2 and 4. The 3/4 patterns are generally meant to be connecting the 2/4 measures, you can also repeat them for a meter-within-meter effect. 

The left hand is sweeping sideways, so one hit will land in the middle of the drum, and the next one will be closer to the edge. Personally, I play matched grip, and my left hand tends to sweep left to right rather than in a circular motion. Finding your own left hand motion through the changing patterns is part of the deal here. We do need to hear the attack of the LH note as part of the rhythm, even as it's sweeping the drum after you hit it. 

I do this at 300 bpm, with a metronome set to 75 bpm— whole notes— while thinking Cherokee or whatever tune. 

Get the pdf

UPDATE: In the comments, our man in Berlin, Michael Griener, who plays a lot of fast music, asked for some VIDEO of this stuff. So here we go: 

This is basically how I practice this— I'm not systematic. I'm looking at the page and trying to work those patterns into a regular time feel, and connect them to each other. I think I'm doing patterns 1 and 3 together a lot, which is the crux of the idea— I'm building a time feel out of mixed RRLs and LRRs. You can hear that when I'm doing that, it basically sounds like the complete spangalang rhythm— the lefts are speaking as part of that rhythm. Though I am playing the complete rhythm with my right hand some times. 

The tempo is just under 300, I think. I'm not using a metronome here. 

Yeah. This page is kind of a failure. The basic idea works ok, for me, but the way I wrote that page isn't great for working on it, for me. Take it as a sketch pad. 

16th note exercise for brushes - solo

Continuing this thing— playing the the 16th note pages from Reed with brushes, with accents and bass drum additions hastily scribbled in while practicing. Here's the 20 bar solo on p. 23.  

> = accent / circled note = add bass drum

16th note exercise for brushes

Another cut and paste item. I don't practice brushes nearly enough, so yesterday I was hitting that a little bit. Poking around for things I needed to work on, I settled on these pages from Syncopation, with a few markings scribbled in: 

Like is says, the accent means hit an accent, the circled notes mean add bass drum. Half the time I was probably substituting bass drum for the brush hit— it doesn't matter. Nothing matters, we're just trying to play some singles with the brushes, with a little extra something to make a realistic thing out of it. You could try hitting a cymbal on those BD-added notes part of the time. Find your own way to play it. 

Do it at a bright medium tempo— I was playing it along with this McCoy Tyner loop. 

Transcription: Kenny Clarke - Swing to Bop

Kenny Clarke playing brushes on Swing To Bop, from the album The Immortal Charlie Christian. This was recorded live at Minton's Playhouse in 1941— epicenter of the formation of bebop. We're hearing a strong quarter note groove, with Clarke making some big angular jabs with the snare drum and bass drum.

The track begins during Christian's solo, in the last ten beats of the first A section. I've included double bars every 8 bars after that. I wrote out two pages of it and stopped when it was time to make breakfast. 

The only things audible from the drums are snare drum and bass drum. There is a cymbal present, and hihat, that we hear later in the recording— at times it sounds he may be playing the hihat with the foot, but mics barely register it. For all I know it wasn't even a standard thing to do yet. You can assume that he's feathering the bass drum throughout this— I've written it in any place it's actually audible. Assume the stickings of most running 8th notes follow a RLRR-RLRR pattern— a swing pattern with the left hand in the gap. 

Get the pdf

EZ solo method: six stroke rolls with brushes

I was doing this easy Reed method with a student— it's a rare one for using the triplets-and-8th-notes pages of Progressive Steps to Syncopation,  pp. 16-17. This is good for brushes, OK for soloing with sticks. Let's bang it out: 

On measures with one beat of triplets play RRL and RLL stickings on the triplet, alternate the rest:

Swing the 8th notes, try some different accent possibilities: 

On measures with two beats of triplets, play a six stroke roll sticking: 

Or a reversed* six stroke roll sticking:
 

* - We need a name for this rudiment. Inverted SSR, Half Reversed SSR, something... 

Typically we'll accent the single strokes in those patterns: RLLRRL or RRLRLL.

On measures with three beats of triplets, extend either sticking by adding a RRL at the end:

Note that the result of that is a six stroke roll with an added RRL at the beginning or end. 

On the full measure of triplets, do either sticking, RLLRRL or RRLRLL

Play exercises 1-15 and the 16-bar exercise as written, then practice one measure of time, one measure of solo pattern: 

On exercises where the triplets run across the barline, you could play them as written— line 4, for example:

Or start the solo part where the across the barline triplets start: 

Note that the sticking is different depending on how you do that. It's up to you how you handle any remaining 8th notes in the measure— they're really not the critical part of this exercise. 

Add hihat on beats 2 and 4, add quarter notes on the bass drum if you choose. As with all jazz solo materials, it's important to finesse the dynamics so you don't play it too ricky-ticky. I retain much of my normal timekeeping motion with this type of thing, so this integrates smoothly with the ongoing texture, I'm not stopping my motion to execute some triplets. Since I play matched grip, it's easier for my left hand to do a lateral motion than a circular motion, and that naturally has an alternating 8th note motion to it. Much of brush playing is just doing it, so your personal natural motion emerges. 

Tootie Heath brush lesson

True old school guys approach things a whole different way from the modern technocratic thing. Here's Tootie Heath giving a brush lesson:



h/t to Larry Appelbaum

Daily best music in the world: Elvin plays brushes

You would think with all of this extra quarantine time I would just be writing up a storm, but I'm actually kind of blocked this week. So here's Tommy Flanagan's Overseas—a nice record with Elvin Jones playing only brushes. Recorded in 1957 in Sweden, while touring with JJ Johnson.

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.

Get the pdf

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.

Get the pdf

From the zone: brush things

A little item from Ted Warren, author of the excellent Trap'd blog, who is clearly not suffering from any kind of OCD, having written this upside down on some kind of assignment sheet. I post so much stuff on this site that it's easy to forget that most of what you actually play centers around relatively few basic ideas (actually, what I write also centers around relatively few basic ideas, in different contexts)... so when you get one or two things from a source like this, you should actually spend proportionally more time playing them, and experimenting with them. They're going to be very useful and/or fertile.

Ted gives some explanation of this here.

Definitely also see his series of brush videos— those, plus a lot of playing with people are all you need to learn to play the brushes.

Please send me (see the sidebar) any practice room artifacts you would like to be featured in a FROM THE ZONE post. Don't worry about it looking good, making sense, or being finished.

Transcription: Kenny Clarke fours

Here are Kenny Clarke's fours, played with brushes, on Love Me Or Leave Me, from the album Walkin', by Miles Davis. I've given the drum solo breaks only:

The ties are due to some kind of left hand swishing activity— do whatever you see fit there. The lick with the quintuplets likely has a double in it, either on the first two notes, or on the 3rd-4th notes; it was probably conceived as two 8th notes and a triplet, slurred together, due to the tempo. Many of the triplets may have doubles in them, and are not super-cleanly executed generally.

Get the pdf

You own this record, but here's the audio anyway:

Daily best music in the world: brushes

Researching videos for another post, I came across this, by drummer Sebastian Whittaker, who is as good a brush player as anyone, ever:

How to play the brushes, part two

I had never seen this before: Steve Gadd playing on a 2" tape box. Along with Ted Warren's videos, the only instruction you need for brushes:



(h/t to Who Is Tony?)

Groove o' the day: Dry Cleaner from Des Moines

Extremely light posting again this week, obviously-- there's just a whole lot going on right now; so until Monday at least you'll have to amuse yourself by making another pass through our copious archives, or you can work up Peter Erskine's groove from Dry Cleaner From Des Moines, on Joni Mitchell's Mingus:

It's played with brushes on the snare drum. The toms are not played strongly-- it takes a close listen to even hear that he's playing them. The 16ths are lightly swinging.

YouTube audio after the break:

How to play the brushes

Now we're talking- here's something substantial for you: I was able to shame Ted @ Trap'd into finally labelling his posts, and now I can link to his entire great series on playing the brushes. I plan on working through it this evening:



I've lost all patience with 95% of all "lesson" videos, but I love these things.

A little more after the break:

Brushes... fast... hoo...

As I finish up the thing I'm working on, do yourself a favor and visit The Melodic Drummer for an excellent post on playing brushes at really, really fast tempos. You can also brush up (gah!) on your Kenny Washington with his profile at the Jazz Profiles blog- I'll be with you in a moment.

The way drum instructional videos should be

30 seconds long, no explanation, no BS, no nothing except everything you need to know about the subject:



More of Ted Warren's excellent series of brush videos after the break:

Transcription: Elvin Jones - Soul Eyes

Another transcription from the archives- Elvin Jones playing brushes on Soul Eyes, from the album Coltrane, by John Coltrane. The transcription is of the piano and tenor solos; it's written in the four of the double-time feel, so two transcription measures = one measure of slow four on the head of the tune. Swing the eighth notes.

Buy my e-book 5 Elvin Jones Transcriptions to get the complete transcription

Papa Jo and Big Sid

Jammin' The Blues, a short film featuring Jo Jones and Sid Catlett. Watch for the trade off after 5:40:



"Big Sid was like my brother. I never go anyplace without a picture of Big Sid
Catlett. I've got a little picture of him that I carry with me. That's why I am never afraid. I know I've got Sid with me. See, I was very privileged to play with a Count Basie, to be around so many creative peoples. I remember one time Sidney sat in and he said, 'Man, I ought to knock you down— now I got to go back to the coal mines.'

Did you see Jamming The Blues? Remember when Sid threw that one stick at me? We used to do a thing every Thursday night at the Apollo when we closed. The theater's packed, but there are two seats set aside for Sid Catlett and his wife. I used to throw the stick to Sidney, and a man would put the light on him and BOOM—he'd catch it. Then, BOOM, he'd throw the stick back to me and we'd go into 'One O'Clock Jump.' Don't ask me. Ask the people that were there. They done saw it. They saw show business. Yeah, we did some strange things out there."

- Jo Jones, Modern Drummer, January 1984