Jazz fundamentals: more stick control for jazz

Another jazz fundamentals item, that pairs nicely with Monday's thing. These are some stick control patterns designed to be played on the drumset, for a specific jazz vocabulary lesson. That's a lot of what we do here. I wrote something like this back in March, with a slightly different purpose— a nice thing about having software like Finale is that it's easy to focus our materials.

This page is meant to help with adding the left hand to some basic cymbal rhythms, and also to help get the timing of some common figures— “additive rhythm” style. We'll be seeing that term again in coming days.

Swing the 8th notes. Play the right hand on the cymbal, left hand on the snare drum. Add bass drum to some or all of the RH notes. Add hihat on beats 2 and 4.

Some of the patterns have the option of playing the left hand on beat 1— those are to get the timing of a cymbal accent on the & of 4. 

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Jazz fundamentals: playing basic rhythms on a cymbal

Usually people start with jazz coordination by playing snare drum independence patterns along with a static cymbal rhythm— see Jim Chapin's Advanced Techniques, for example. It's a thing to do, and it should be done. But it's not the only thing to do, and I don't think it's the directest way to becoming a functional jazz drummer. Jazz does not necessarily require a rigidly unvarying cymbal rhythm, and  complicated left hand activity. 

What it does require is a cymbal rhythm played with a strong quarter note pulse. If you can do that, and play some simple things with a little creativity, you're in OK shape as a novice jazz drummer— at least as far as pure timekeeping vocabulary is concerned. 

This is a summary of a lesson item I've done with a number of students— adding easy things to a varying basic rhythm played on the cymbal. Use the rhythms in pp. 10-11 in Syncopation, or pp. 14-15 in my book Syncopation in 3/4. Or pp. 6-7 in Joe Morello's New Directions in Rhythm. You could spend some extra time on the rhythms that are most like the normal ones; lines 2, 4, and 15 in Reed pp. 10-11, for example.

These are quite easy, so you can just memorize the concepts, and practice them in a free form way— after playing through them, with all of the cymbal rhythms from the books, working out the coordination with the standard hihat/bass drum rhythms.  

Play the rhythm on the cymbal

The top line rhythms in the book, on a cymbal, with your right hand. Swing the 8th notes, and play them with a strong quarter note pulse, and a steady rhythm.

I'll use those same two rhythms for all of the other examples.

Add standard rhythms with the feet 

In 4/4 play 2 & 4 on the hihat. In 3/4 play 1 on the bass drum and 2 on the hihat:

I won't write these parts into the remaining examples, but you can continue playing them while you do the other things. Or not. If the rhythms conflict with the later things, or if the groove starts suffering because there's too much going on coordination-wise, stop doing one of the things. There's time for punishing rigor later. Do what you can do reasonably quickly, while making the cymbal rhythm sound good.   

Hey, there are a lot of examples— let's put a page break....