Still hard at work on the new Cymbalistic site, which will be going live any minute now. I'm at the designing-cruise-ship-drummer-themed-merch-while-waiting-for-domain-cot-com-to-let-me-log-in-to-my-account-so-I-can-reset-the-domain-to-take-you-to-shopify phase. That old story.
In the mean time, in honor of Tony Williams's birthday, here's an old favorite record, Believe It, by his fusion group Lifetime. It's one of the first things I bought with him on it, in about the 10th grade. All the older guys knew about the drum solo on this tune, Snake Oil. It's a different kind of drumming from what fusion developed into.
It's a funny tune— it reminds me of the first things I tried to write, that were very chunky— a series of episodes.
Getting back into Gary Chaffee's linear materials a little bit— originally outlined in the Time Functioning volume of his Patterns series of books. Since first working on this system as a student, it has been a little problem fitting the patterns into a regular musical phrase. That's what we do here, write up solutions to things that kind of bugged me 35 years ago.
So here are some fill phrases in 4/4, beginning with a cymbal accent on 1, a double left on the e&, with the linear phrase beginning on the a of the beat. That's a natural entry.
We have a choice with these: on the phrases ending with two bass drum notes— which makes three in a row including the 1 of the repeat— you can play that as a single 8th notes. That will be more playable for more people.
Once you've learned a pattern repetitively, play it as a fill during a regular funk phrase, move your hands around the drums, and have a good time.
Here's Chester Thompson playing on the tune Gibraltar, an extended groove number on the Weather Report album Black Market. The first thing I ever transcribed was Chester Thompson playing with Genesis, and I associate him with the kind of vibe there— very clean, professional, and deliberate. Here he sounds looser.
This starts at 1:19, where the groove comes in— I bailed out just as he gets into a rather difficult to notate hihat groove— he's playing the hats while moving his foot a lot, resulting in a lot of irregular open sounds. Listen to the whole thing, it's pretty smoking by the end— and harder to separate the drums from the percussion to transcribe it.
His backbeats and accents on the snare drum are played very strong, as rim shots. His left foot is pretty consistently playing 8th notes, though they're not always sounding real clearly— I didn't notate them.
Taking a moment to dispel a totally absurd impression of Steve Gadd that has somehow formed in recent years: that he is some kind of conservative “groove” player, which...
...no. He's extremely influential on the way drums are played now, and the epitome of what a modern player should be, actually— a great jazz drummer, and pop, funk, and fusion drummer, with an incredibly deep groove sense, and musical taste and creativity through the full range of expression possible on the drums. An incredible reader in the sense of handling arrangements creatively and excitingly, and sounding like pure foundation while doing that.
I don't like getting into superlatives. Just understand, he's the s***. As big a deal as anyone else you can name. It's our job to listen a lot, and figure out why.
Night Sprite, from Chick Corea's album Leprechaun, is the reason half the drum sets sold today include a 10" tom tom— it inspired a whole generation of fusion players to use them. Or Gadd generally did, and this is the track of his that features it most spectacularly.
It's also an essay on why the RLLR-LRRL paradiddle inversion is awesome.
...I don't mention those mundane things because they're the main things that are great about the record. I mention them because they're the only things you can say. The music itself is the explanation of how great it is, there's nothing you can say about it that isn't banal technical point.
Three Quartets is another huge Chick Corea record— basically a jazz record, but they've brought in some fusion elements, and we've become unused to hearing this deep, fat, fusion-like drum sound in a straight jazz setting. Note that we hear lots of cymbal/bass drum unisons throughout this— all the right hand lead stuff we do leads into this kind of thing. All of that Reed stuff.
There's a lot with both hands in unison as well, on the snare drum and cymbal. And he does some exciting things with the cymbals alone, unsupported by the snare or bass— how he begins the piano solo, for example, after 1:10:
Slamming here, with an extended drum/percussion feature, playing live with saxophonist Tom Scott. It's easy to think of all of modern studio funk/fusion playing— that universal anonymous style— as basically people doing Steve Gadd, but through all of this listening we can hear different things happening, that the generations of influencees did not pick up on. The unisons between the snare drum and bass drum, for example.
Another mundane technical note, this track has been famous with me for a long time for having the pataflafla-ed 6 stroke rolls— pataflaflas with doubles in the middle. At about 6:35.
Silly Putty, the first thing in the video below, is not so well known now, but it's one of those era-defining tracks, like Herbie Hancock's Chameleon, or Palm Grease. There was a thing of inventing creative linear funk grooves on the drums at that time. I don't know if Gadd started it, but he certainly led it— you're aware of his famous 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover groove.
Cool instrumentation there, a quartet (guitar, keyboards) doing the playing, plus nine horns hitting the arranged stuff. Note to self, hire the extra guys. If you listen to that record all the way through, that's Lenny White on the third tune, the rest of it is Gadd.
Those are all pretty showy recordings, he is of course on a thousand other records. Maybe literally. You can look up more stuff from the 70s/early 80s especially. Do.
Someone shared the following video, and was commenting on the technique of JD Beck, a hot new drumming sensation who I kind of like. How can you not? He's cute and charismatic, and has an actual music project that is a band with an image that tours and plays music and shows like real musicians. His duo act, DOMi and JD Beck, has put together a lot of complicated music that they know really well, and he's really good at playing densely. It's cool.
I like that they're not a pure YouTube product— though they have a big social media presence, and the YouTube grift community has latched onto them with a lot of “REACTS” videos, and assorted other bullcrap content.
This is a video put together by Zildjian to feature Beck— pretty sure it's a regular item from their set, that someone else arranged for a larger group.
Wow, a lot of activity there. Let's analyze it a little bit, put the framework in real world terms. If you subscribe to YouTube music you might want to clip the sections involved to have a shot at relating them to what's below. The music starts at 1:47.
1:47-2:01 - Intro vamp based on a quarter note pulse @ ~176 bpm, 18 beats long. Without seeing their chart it's easiest to count as three measures of 6/4. The vamp is played two times. Beck floats some stuff over it.
2:01-3:03 - Band comes in, vamp continues behind melody. Here's where he's putting the backbeats on the snare drum, suggesting that the barlines are placed differently than I've written them.
The bass drum rhythm is busy, seemingly with a consistent pattern that I haven't listened closely enough to discern.
The melody is an R&B thing played over two times through the vamp— it seems unconnected to the vamp until the last couple of accents on the & of 6 / & of 2. Here's the rhythm of it in 6/4:
3:03-3:35 - John Scofield like vamp in 4/4, 8 bars long.
Beck plays half time, getting very busy. Possibly he's triggering with the snare drum, and the sensitivity is set to only catch the biggest hits— you can hear that electronic sound on the backbeats, and the very dry sound on the filler.
Again, the horns float over that, closer to the rhythm of the vamp this time.
3:35-3:42 - Arranged four measure rhythm break— Beck plays it conventionally.
3:42-4:20 - Original vamp, with some different horn activity, ending with a figure that's easy to hear. Clearly the bass drum rhythm is a repeating worked out thing.
4:20-5:39 - Guitar starts a new section in 3/4, same tempo as before, then ensemble blowing by keyboards, bass and drums, very open, nobody's particularly enforcing the 3/4... if that's even the meter they're thinking. Maybe 6/4— 2+2+2. Weather Report-like vibe to me.
5:39-OUT - Vamp for drum solo:
Has the same four beat ending as the section starting at 3:42— I think it happens on the last bar of the vamp written in 4/4. And that ends arrangement.
Density of the drumming aside, I find it to be hard music because it doesn't sit real well in my ear. I need some repetition to make sense of it. I assume the band has a click (at least) going in their headphones— nobody seems to be helping anybody along nailing their parts. Like, if it was just some guys in a room setting up and playing, I would expect a little bit of fluff from the horns on the drum solo, with all of the broken up stuff he's doing.
The drumming: Very broadly, if we're counting the tempo as 176, he's playing a highly embellished half time feel. He plays running 8ths with his right hand for a lot of it, and has a lot of 16th note texture activity happening off of that with the left hand. See Johnny Rabb's book for examples of the sort of thing. Otherwise there are a lot of paradiddle inversions/variations. It doesn't require exceptional technique— statistically it's well within the range of speed many drummers can do.
In fact Beck's technique is interesting, for how normal it is. I'm used to everyone in drumming videos having fascinating technique. His back fingers are very controlled, and he's looser up front. Similar to my grip, actually, but he allows less finger than I do. Partly due to what he's playing— I imagine if he were playing Satin Doll he would open up his grip some. He uses a lot of arm. But you can play stuff like this with a regular controlled grip, without any special Jojo Mayer type techniques.
Can you play 8th notes with one hand @ 176 bpm, and hang a half time funk beat off of that? Can you play some paradiddle variations, or Chaffee-style sticking patterns at that 16th note speed at that tempo? You've got a foot in the door, at least. Learn some of my velocity patterns and prepare your drums with some towels and splash cymbals on the heads, and set them up really close together.
His set up basically has just extremely dry sounds. Various timbres of woodblocks, essentially. The only way to get any breadth is to play very fast. A big part of this genre of playing is the textures created by playing fast on different combinations of dry timbres. A lot of people are doing that now.
This kind of drumming is like drum corps— people from that world hear a lot of dense percussion, all the time. So if a corps is playing Finlandia or something, there's still high speed drumming happening all the way through. That's music to you, and you start to hear that way naturally. Beck is well positioned for that— he's in a situation where he's featured all the time, and will likely be mainly appearing in situations like that for some time.
For everyone else, that's a little dangerous, because most of the music you will play in life will not be centered around featuring dense percussion all the time. Most of the time there's a balance, and people like it when you're really good at creating that. I've played with people on other instruments who had no concept of anything else happening in music but them playing a lot of stuff. It sucked.
I don't know how much scope he has with his playing, because I've only heard him with his one act. Ultimately he may be pretty narrow, but so what? A lot of good people are pretty narrow. I'd be surprised if he wasn't; he's 20 now, and has been mainly doing this project for awhile. He's kind of spewing, and it's fine— though I'm more interested in what he'll do when he's done with that.
I have a lot of writing projects going right now, and seem to be unable to finish any of them, so let's listen. Here's Alphonse Mouzon playing on the first Weather Report album, doing what people now call an ECM feel.
I'm working on a transcription of it, which I may or may not be able to complete:
And the same tune from a concert in Germany— at least it's been given the same title, I'm not hearing any composed material in common between the two versions:
Very minor little item. The RLB pattern is extremely useful in fills, and as part of a linear groove, and it's a good idea to be able to end it on 1, no matter where in the measure you start it— no matter how it ends up being inverted at the end of the measure.
I played around with this yesterday, playing the pattern as a 16th note fill, starting on each 8th note of the measure. I was doing it in double time, along with my Watermelon Man loop. What happened was, I ended it one of three ways:
For the example I put the R hand on the cymbal, but the idea is to move both hands around the drums. You can extend this over 1, 2, or 4 measures. I shifted it by one 8th note, but you could also shift it by 16th notes, starting the fill on the es and as. You'll know when you've taken that far enough.
At some point, hopefully, you will be grounded enough with this pattern that you'll know on the fly how to get out of it, without planning or remembering which beat you started it on.
I'm getting into some finer points of playing the hihat two handed with a younger student, and was tempted to show him a groove I transcribed a long time ago: Predator, played by Omar Hakim on Weather Report's album Domino Theory.
It's a good piece of literature, with a lot happening— accents with either hand on the hihat, either hand moving to the snare, an open roll, an open sound— a lot for a 12 year old to process all at once, though individually within his technical grasp. So I wrote this page breaking down every part of it, working it out precisely. This is like a piano lesson, learning technique through a piece, rather than through technical exercises.
In the lesson we'll play each numbered pattern one time, until the dynamics/articulations are what I want, and then play them repeating. With the 3/4 measures I just want to leave some space after playing the thing; if a student leaves an extra beat of rest, making it 4/4, it doesn't matter.
Normally I might do this same process just looking at the original transcribed beat, and giving the student orders— e.g. “play the last two beats of the second bar”, “play beat 3 of the first bar plus the snare hit on 4.” Not all students are adept at filtering that way, right away, hence this page. In fact, this will be a good way to teach him to filter that way.
We've been doing a lot with the highly useful RLLR-LRRL paradiddle inversion lately. This is a page I wrote for myself as I'm developing some other Reed methods for it— sometimes you need to see these things written out. Here the right hand is on the cymbal the whole time.
I usually put the “control” moniker on something when I intend to combine patterns, I don't suggest bothering with that here. Suggested tempo is between 100-150 bpm.
Quick little transcription that includes one of the great opening drum fills ever— Ndugu Leon Chancler playing Man in the Green Shirt, from Weather Report's album Tale Spinnin'. I've just written out the opening, some of the main drum groove, and an ensemble section at about 1:30, and some of the half time groove he plays after it.
The tempo is fast, about 154 bpm. To me that's about the natural tempo limit for 16th note funk/fusion vocabulary— above that it starts sounding silly. For another fusion burner in a similar tempo range see my transcription of Egberto Gismonti's Baiao Malandro, with Roberto Silva on drums.
Ndugu has a couple of extra drums here— a concert tom and a second floor tom. Or a middle tom tuned very low. He's also using a China cymbal, and plays the bell of the ride quite a bit. That opening fill moves from drum to drum in a funny way, assuming the drums are arranged normally, and he's leading with his right hand. I'm not going to worry about how he did it, just note that with that kind of movement it doesn't sound quite like a normal bonehead Hawaii 5-0 fill.
I was expecting him to vary the cymbal rhythm to accommodate the 16th notes he's playing on the snare and bass, but he plays straight 8th notes. Listen beyond the transcription, to how he uses the bell of the cymbal, he'll use it for accents, or go to it for a few bars to build intensity, or play it sort of randomly.
Alphonse Mouzon's groove from McCoy Tyner's Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit— as he plays it in the live video below, from 1973. The tune was originally recorded on Tyner's album Enlightenment— a 24 minute spiritual journey.
As it says, he's playing with the snares off, stick in the right hand, mallet in the left hand. He's playing the bell of the cymbal, with the tip of the stick— it's not that piercing shoulder of the stick sound. The bass drum part varies to fit around what the hands are doing; it's there to provide a pulse, it's not really a featured part of the groove.
Here are some variations in the left hand part he plays near the beginning of the video below:
Some more from that self-titled Stanley Clarke album. I must have gotten the record in high school. Nobody ever told me to get it, I was just rooting through the stacks at the used record store and I saw that it had Tony Williams on it. These things are just around waiting for you to buy them and you luck onto them because you're looking. This is the drum solo from the tune Life Suite, Part 2.
The solo is 60 bars long, over a 4 bar vamp played 15 times. He takes his time getting off the hihat, and comes back to it during the more soloistic parts, and then takes it out with four bars of hihat at the end. Tempo is a pretty burning 148. Getting up into the natural speed limit for 16th notes in a fusion setting, before they start sounding like massive hyperactivity. Egberto Gismonti's Baiao Malandro, which I transcribed early in the blog, is similar. The transcription begins at 0:40 in the track, or at 2:29 in the YouTube clip below.
Snares off for the entire solo. There's some open hihat activity I didn't bother writing out— at the beginning especially. He's bouncing his left foot for a good portion of it, which creates some half-open sounds on the es and as. I also didn't write out a good amount of left foot activity throughout that doesn't really relate to the rest of what he's playing.
Tony Williams isn't really a textural drummer, is he? Everything he plays here is very direct, with a lot of hihat and bass drum at the beginning, and a lot of cymbal with bass drum generally, along with some stuff with the hands on the snare and tom toms. Mainly alternating sticking. Briefly in measures 53-54 there's some modern textural stuff happening with the cymbal, snare, and bass drum. Tony-like(!) licks are happening in measures 30, 37-38 (same handed flam accents, there), and 55-56. Those crescendo-ing singles in m. 16 and 18 are also very Tony.
I was working on this post about Billy Cobham some weeks ago, and felt I couldn't finish it— it's not that easy to write a complete portrait of the playing of a great drummer. Try it sometime. But this should be interesting to read in light of my recent thing on Rufus Jones. Take it as a starting place for thinking about what you're hearing when listening to him.
Billy Cobham is one of the most recorded and talked about drummers of the first part of the fusion era— from roughly 1970 to 1980. He was on a lot of records, and made a huge splash playing a large drum set in a really exciting way. He took drumming chops to a new level— maybe not exceeding Buddy Rich, but using more modern drumming language than Buddy. He was involved with a number of technical innovations expanding the concept of the drum set as an instrument. He was the first major player to play the drums “open handed”, that I know of.
He's probably the most effective player of a large drum set ever. Neil Peart, a totally different type of player, would be another example of that. With so many tom toms, he can do some pianistic lines not really possible on normal sets, that I haven't really heard from other large-set players. The modern, fusion era usage of the Chinese cymbal, with the cymbal mounted upside down, is his thing. The way he used it was extremely effective, and was widely copied for a long time. Not so much any more, except among Metal drummers.
There is a specific overall vibe on his records that you don't really hear any more— fusion music shifted to a different kind of product, and the type of music on Cobham's records has never really been revived among younger players— unlike Miles Davis's 70s thing, for example. In terms of drumming, by the 80s Steve Gadd's concept and sound became the prevalent thing in the fusion and studio drumming. When I was a student in that period, Cobham wasn't one of the first people talked about. Drummers today largely talk about him in terms of chops and technique, and he's often mentioned by open-handed drumming enthusiasts. If his playing is talked about at all, it's generally in terms of spectacular drumming feats.
You do have to talk about excitement when you talk about Billy Cobham. He plays with a lot of bravado, and is often wildly dramatic. He can be very flashy and very dense, and it's easy to see how people just take him as pure drumming confection. In a way he's the prototype for the current high-performance drumming thing.
And some of his recordings are like that: parts of them are there to blow away an audience. This is to me a festival-style performance, designed to blow a festival audience's mind:
On most of his records there are extended open drum features, which you can take a number of ways. You could just hear them as early versions of the modern drum chops display events, opportunities to marvel at his technical awesomeness. Or you can take them as examples of 70s bloat and “pretentiousness”— a meme from the 70s rock press— like on Crosswinds there's a solo with a lot of flanger on the tom toms, which sounds corny to us now. I listen to them as music, as creative percussion features:
So it can be difficult to distinguish legit musical energy from just excitement over a spectacular performance, but it's something you have to figure out. Cobham is a great musician and people should understand his playing as normal drumming, doing all the things normal drumming is supposed to accomplish. It may be easier to do that listening to him on records where he's not a leader.
His general approach to playing the drum set could be taken as “snare drummy”— hands-oriented, but modern, not particularly rudimentally based. On fills and solos he seems to play a lot of singles, and a lot of open rolls with accented singles. The bass drum tends to be used in normal funk ways, and for accents, and ostinatos, often tied to the cymbals. We don't often hear a fully integrated linear thing, a la Steve Gadd, or Elvin Jones. In that way maybe he's more similar to Tony Williams than either of those drummers. I think he actually uses his bass drums pretty economically, when he's not doing his showy double bass stuff. In interviews he mentions using his left foot to play time, but I don't feel that I often hear that with him. These are all just my impressions from listening— it's not meant to be the complete last word on his playing.
We don't hear drum sounds like his much any more— it doesn't seem to have been widely copied. It's an energy sound, not a deep “power” sound, which is where things were moving in the 80s. Particularly the tom toms, which are live and tonal, with a sound that is throaty rather than deep/punchy— maybe a combination of Black Dot heads, and moderate tension on the bottom head— as opposed to the loose top/tight bottom for the Gadd-like sound. His snare drum has a very tight, dry sound; it's tuned rather high, with the snares highly tensioned. Clearly his bass drums are large, and somewhat live, but it's a controlled sound, not a huge sound.
This is all set up for listening to him a lot, so please do that. If you're into vinyl, many of these you can find cheaply in used record stores:
As leader:
A Funky Side Of Things
Crosswinds
Alivemutherforya
Total Eclipse
Spectrum
Mahavishnu Orchestra:
Inner Mounting Flame
Birds of Fire
Miroslav Vitous - Purple
George Benson - White Rabbit
Milt Jackson - Sunflower
Miles Davis - Jack Johnson
Stanley Turrentine - Cherry
Deodato - Prelude
Listening to Ndugu Leon Chancler is always a great lesson in how to play funk, and how to use a set with a lot of tom toms. How to use the tom toms period. I really, really love his playing. This is the opening groove from Yana Aminah, from George Duke's album Feel. This is the intro right after his little lead in; the double bar is where the vocals come in. It's a sort of 70s fusion Latin groove— obviously it's not a traditional clave-based thing.
There are three toms used on this portion of the tune, but you can easily do this with two. I would practice this by making a repeating groove out of each two bars. At the double bar he he catches a crash on 4, and comes back in on 2 in the first measure of the verse. We developed a similar thing in a Mozambique feel on this page, which will be in the new Book of the Blog, as soon as I wrap that up.
The rough rhythmic outline of what he plays for much of the tune:
Ivan Conti and Azymuth playing A Caça, a lightweight little 70s fusion arrangement, with some fun things happening. It's from Azymuth's album Águia Não Come Mosca. It's such a clean and tight performance and arrangement this would be a good candidate for someone to actually learn to play.
What caught my attention with it was the rather outrageous long tom fill in the middle. The fills generally are interesting, and different from what an American fusion drummer would play.
Swing the 16th notes, moderately. There are four tom toms present. And a couple of unusual cymbals, which I haven't bothered to differentiate.
Here's something he played on with Paul Bley, Jaco Pastorius, and Pat Metheny:
He's also on some Gil Evans records, including the Jimi Hendrix album, and this bananas version of the Brazilian tune Nana, from Where Flamingos Fly. He shares drumming credits with Lenny White on that album.
Gary Chaffee's linear system— found in book 3 of his Patterns series— is a major entry in the literature of drumming, but it has always felt unfinished to me. There are some extra steps required to put it into a musical context, and I was never able to improvise a way of practicing it that I felt was very effective.
Here I've organized the patterns to end easily with a cymbal and bass drum on beat 1; you'll notice none of the measures end with the 4, 6, or 8 note patterns, which end with two notes on the bass drum— meaning you have to play three in a row to make the crash on the downbeat, which I don't like. I've also included some fills that end with just the hands: RLRL.
They also flow easily from a cymbal and bass drum note on beat 1. When you're playing time, it's easier to do that than it is to start the fill right on 1. We're aiming to exploit the path of least resistance here.
Use the stickings at the top of the page, and vary the accents/dynamics. Play each pattern many times, then play them as a fill in a two or four measure phrase, improvising a groove in the other measures. Move your hands around the toms, or keep your right hand on the hihat or ride. I don't think there's anything to be gained by first learning the patterns in a “neutral” way: at an even volume on the snare drum. Except maybe the very first time you play them; after that, move them around, play dynamics, and make them sound like music.
UPDATE:Correction from the comments, it is Fattoruso on drums! I'll put the correct credit in the 2018 Book of the Blog. Until then, you'll have to pencil it in onto your printout.
Here is a SUPER-ENHANCED groove o' the day— it includes not only the groove for this tune, but the intro, and a couple of brief shout choruses with a lot of fills happening. It's from the album Fingers by Airto, and it's an early fusion samba played either by Airto, or by the Uruguayan drummer Osvaldo Fattoruso, who passed away a few years ago. They both have drum credits on the album, and since I don't have the LP, I don't know if there is a personnel listing for each track. It sounds like Airto; it could be Fatturuso.
...no excuse for not having the LP, by the way; Airto's stuff is massively available used. I've heard this record my whole life, but just never owned it. CTI must have really papered the radio stations with promo copies...
The ensemble figure from the intro happens a few times throughout the tune, and the drummer always plays the same set part behind it, with very minor variations. He cuts loose more on the drum breaks on the shout choruses at the bottom of the page. The main groove for the tune is in the fourth line. You can see that the right hand is very busy with the running 16th notes, in typical Brazilian style. There's also a fast left hand move required— a small tom hit right before a rim click. I can do that move pretty fast, but I haven't tried it with this groove at this tempo. It may be that there's something else happening there— just get the sounds right. The small tom is the main left hand voice through out this tune.
Something has happened with music in the last 30 years— people have gotten really fascinated with subdivisions. You shouldn't sound like you're fascinated by subdivisions. If you listen to a lot of music from the early to mid 70s, there's an overwhelming energy and enthusiasm. I think people should try to sound like that.
Let's do one of these for the rhythm in the Nexus practice loop. You'll recall, with this Funk Control / Figure Control series what I do is take a single performance rhythm and put a lot of common Reed style interpretations on it, all on one page, so you can practice playing them together easily and completely.
You could do that without me writing it out, but as you're first becoming familiar with this kind of thing, it's good to see it all together. You'll probably end up doing some combinations of things you wouldn't get to if you were just working from memory.
The top portion of the page just gives you the basic rhythm and foundational interpretations of it— there's no special need to practice them, but take a moment to study them and figure out how they relate to the base rhythm. Learn each of the practice patterns individually, then play all possible combinations of them:
A-B, A-C, A-D, through A-O
B-C, B-D, B-E, through B-O
C-D, C-E, etc
For each combination, play each measure once or twice:
ABAB
AABBAABB
Practice each sequence above many times, of course. Take care with the transitions between patterns— get them right in the practice room and you'll have better control when improvising on stage. Don't be too hihat-centric in your practicing— use all the cymbals. Pattern C and the hand unisons in patterns L and N can be played on cym/snare or toms/snare. Move patterns K and O around the drums.
Hip Ensemble is Roy Haynes's fusion band that was around for a couple of years around 1970. Or is it just the title of the one record under Roy's name? I don't know, man. Anyone born before the 1990s is accustomed to a measure of uncertainty in life. Whatever: here are a few new bootleg tracks (courtesy of Fabio Baglioni) by this great band, plus part of the albums Hip Ensemble and Senyah, which had (mostly) the same personnel:
