Elvin's Biddy Oats

No, this is an ALL Elvin Jones site. I think we have to earn it if we're going to talk about him, put in some work, have some humility, don't be a leech. I imagine at D*umeo they refer to him as a “premium name”, with the monetary impact every time they use him all mapped out. Optimizing the Elvin Jones product to attract high-value consumers and suck off the most credibility and appearance of soul algorithmically.  

It's not cool, Elvin Jones is special. 

Anyway, following up on that post about that Haskell Harr march he played, I've transcribed exactly what he plays, more or less. There were some minor variations on the different recordings. The main difference from the original version is the added bass drum, the fp rolls at the beginning of the second half, and the roll off at the end:

The rolls are all multiple-bounce. The 5 an d 7 stroke markings are from the original piece, I didn't check to see if he did them that way. On the fp rolls he sometimes does that Elvin thing of putting putting in an extra bass drum note before the downbeat.  

A scholarly cat could dedicate some study to just how he handled the roll off solo break off on all the different recordings. He played it pretty loose. My scholarly instructions would be to vibe it, and don't be too exact about it. Make them come in on the 1 where you put it, not where it would be if there was a metronome running. 

In fact I think the study of Elvin Jones requires a serious commitment to figuring things out by vibe. It can't all be done analytically. Let's talk about that sometime. 

Get the pdf

Here it is on the new bootleg recording they just put out: 

Elvin's march

“I did go through [Harr's snare drum book] as a matter of fact. I went to public school in Pontiac, Michigan, so I didn't do anything extra. [...] I didn't have that advantage of being able to take private lessons, so I had to get everything that I had, at least up to that point, for myself. [...] So I got that book and that night I went home and sat over it and pored over it and read it from cover to cover, trying to make some sense out of it. Finally, all of a sudden I understood what it was. I knew exactly what it meant, what all of it (meant) from page one to the back cover. I pondered over that the next day, and so I learned how to do it. In two days, I mastered that book, and the rudiments.”

- Elvin Jones, Percussive Notes interview

UPDATE: See this post where I transcribed the way he actually plays this, usually. 

A little piece of Elvin Jones musical lore here today. Elvin has a march beat he plays, maybe most famously on Zoltan, from Larry Young's album Unity— I got this record in 1987:

Here he is playing it with his trio, I don't know this tune— maybe he wrote it?  

[Update: It's Keiko's Birthday March— thanks Ed Pierce! -t]

[Update again: It's also The Long 2/4 by Donald Bird! Same tune, released on Pepper Adams's 10 To 4 At The Five Spot in 1958— I don't know what happened there, but thanks Paul Wells! ]

I'm sure there are other recordings— he also played it at a clinic I attended in the early oughts.

It basically comes straight out of Haskell Harr, book 2— page 80 in my edition. He plays this almost verbatim on both records:  

He's playing bass drum on some of the accents. He plays longer rolls in the middle of the second line, after the repeat sign— 13 stroke rolls with an extra bass drum note at the end. He also hits the cymbals there. On the live thing he ends it with his own kind of roll off— it starts normally, and ends with a big Elvin style fill. 

On the live video he plays the full thing with repeats at the top, and after his solo. On Zoltan he switches to the Latin groove in the fourth measure of the repeat of the B section— the organ march vamp starts at the top of the repeat of the first part, then the horns come in with their fanfare thing in the fifth bar, and then the organ starts the Latin vamp in the fourth bar of the repeat of the B section. The fanfare section is 15 bars of 2/4 total. I wrote out the Latin groove from this tune in 2016. 

There you go— I've been listening to him play this for about 35 years, and just thought to look it up in Haskell Harr today. 

A different kind of march

Playing a traditional/military-style march is something we have to do occasionally as drummers, so we may as well learn a few different ways of doing it. This is a hip, interesting take on the concept by Lalo Schifrin, from the soundtrack of the 1970 Clint Eastwood movie Kelly's Heroes. The rhythms here have more to do with samba than they do with Haskell Harr. I don't know who the percussionists are on it— I assume Emil Richards is in there, Joe Porcaro, maybe Paul Humphrey. The part is certainly written by Schifrin.

There are two snare drums being played on the recording, and sometimes the parts differ slightly. There are probably more flams being played than I have notated. That's traditionally the nature of percussion in a quasi-military band— the composer writes out a basic rhythmic part, and the drummer makes whatever rudimental embellishments he can get away with. Here the differing parts fatten up the sound and contribute to the ragtag vibe they're certainly going for with the composition. There are cymbals played in unison with all of the bass drum notes; if you wanted to work this up on the drums, you could play both feet in unison for that.

Get the pdf

http://www.cruiseshipdrummer.com/2015/05/transcription-billy-higgins-shimmy.html

Transcription: Blues March - two intros

Two intros to a famous tune: Blues March, by Benny Golson. One is by Art Blakey, from the Jazz Messengers album Moanin', and the other is by Lex Humphries, from Art Farmer and Benny Golson album  Meet The Jazztet.

Swing the 8th notes on both intros, except the roll-off in the last two measures, which is played with straight 8ths. And of course the 16th note part of the Humphries intro does not swing. Rolls are all multiple-bounce— 16th note pulsation 5-stroke and 9-stroke for the short rolls, triplet pulsation 13-stroke for the longer rolls. Both drummers play their flams pretty flat; the grace note is so tight against the main note it's sometimes hard to tell if they are playing flams. It's noteworthy that on each recording when the band comes in the tempo slows down— to 130 on the Blakey version, and 140 on the Farmer/Golson version. Maybe that happens all the time; it never occurred to me to check that on other recordings.

Get the pdf

Audio of the tracks is after the break.