Survival tips for cruise ship drummers

My man Willie Blair, the only person
I know who could get away with
flouting most of the non-musical rules. 

I guess I had to actually write about drumming on cruise ships at some point, hey? Here are some tips for not getting fired, for not hating your life, and for generally acting like a pro when working that kind of gig.

Keep a positive attitude. Many if not most of the people around you are going to be really negative about the job, especially if they've been doing it awhile. It's important to not let their misery effect you, otherwise your contract can start to seem like a prison sentence. Keeping a positive, professional attitude will make you more attractive to people you are working with who may want to hire you or refer you for non-cruise ship jobs. And remember that you are getting paid to play the drums, which I thought was supposed to be your life's dream, or something.

Be easy to live with. Be reasonably quiet, clean, tidy, non-smelly, and non-funky, but don't be over-fastidious, either. Be aware of your habits and how they effect the person or persons you will be sharing a cabin with.

Learn to keep a low profile. Stay out of people's way- passengers, crew, staff, ship officers, security. If you're a loud talker and/or dresser prone to a lot of public clowning, change that. The crew should not notice you sunbathing eight hours a day.

Adapt to the situation, but not too much. Check yourself if the tacky/skeevy gold chains and silk shirts for sale in the ports of call start looking attractive to you. Usually this starts happening after a year or more  on  the job. Question the wisdom of the whole band buying custom golf clubs or bowling balls because there is an opportunity to use them a couple of hours a week. This  over-adapting to overseas postings is what Marines used to call "going asiatic"- adopting native behavior/dress, becoming over-reliant on houseboys to do things like polish your boots, becoming addicted to opium, etc.

Much more after the break:

Transcription: Frankie Dunlop - Bolivar Blues

There is just a ton of good stuff on Jon McCaslin's Four on the Floor blog- like this little 2010 piece on the great, under-appreciated drummer Frankie Dunlop, who was with Thelonious Monk for part of the 1960's. I've studied him quite a bit myself, and always recommend him as one of the first people for novice jazz drummers to listen to. He plays busy but simply- you get to hear him make a lot of comping decisions, and it's easy to pick out what he's doing. And he also happens to be on a bunch of great records with tunes you want to learn!

Monk's Dream is really a classic beginner's record, though I don't know how many people use it that way. With the title track, Bye-Ya and Five Spot Blues it's got three hip, semi-common Monk compositions. Bolivar Blues doesn't get played much, but is a very classic, singable blues with a little 3/4 figure in the turnaround- right up there with Freddie Freeloader and Blue Monk for first blues, in my opinion. Based on Sweet Georgia Brown, Bright Mississippi is the friendliest possible introduction to the contrafact concept. Monk and Charlie Rouse make it easy on beginners, too- Rouse's solos are straightforward, melodic and swinging, and Monk tends to play the tune behind the solo.

Here's an easy transcription of the head and piano solo on Bolivar Blues, from Monk's Dream (only $6.99 on Amazon!):

[ image here]

As usual, Blogger is balking at taking my uploaded images- I'll post that as soon as it deems to accept it. In the meantime:

Download the pdf

Learning to comp with 16th notes is a necessary misery.

Here I'm elaborating on what some comments in a Drummerworld.com discussion on these pages/recorded example from Jim Chapin's Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer:

I could just be trying to drag everyone else into my particular personal hell, but I think everybody hates the 16th note section in Chapin. I have three different 1986 assignment dates marked in my copy because I basically flat refused to work them up. OK, it's a minor hell.

My operative theory/makeshift dogma at the time went something like: 1) I'm an Elvin man! I don't want to be messing with my nice triplety ride interpretation by introducing that nasty dotted-8th/16th thing, 2) the patterns don't swing, 3) double time is wack. 16th notes suggest double time, and double time is wack!

I don't know what I was about with that last part. I was a little dogmatic at one point about double time being nothing but a CS means of evading moderately uncomfortable tempos. I did eventually learn that 1) Elvin plays a lot of 16th notes, and I did not in fact have a nice triplety ride interpretation to mess up 2) ideas are not swinging or non-swinging, it's how and where you play them, and 3) double time is and is not wack, but it also simply is.

Joey Baron master class, last part: Make Music With Whatever You've Got

Joey Baron master class at the New School, 1994:  last part

ELVIN JONES:
I worked a gig at the Vanguard with Red Rodney and Ira Sullivan, it was like a bebop thing, and Elvin Jones was in the house, and I didn't know it- and I thought I was having a horrible night, and at the end of the night, I'm walking over and he's talking to Red Rodney, he and Red were old friends, and I saw him I was just really like [scared] and I just wanted to hide in the sewer; and he came over to me and he said "it's you and me tonight" [...] and I didn't know what he was talking about but I just went with it and we ended up hanging out all night, just kind of went across the street to the coffee shop, ate and just walked around Chelsea until, I don't know, until about five in the morning. And this whole time I was bambambambam- what about this, what about-- you know, and um, you know...