Groove o' the day: Mickey Roker Latin

Fantastic, I hadn't planned it this way, but here's yet another thing you have to buy— a Latin groove by Mickey Roker, on the tune Woody'n You, on McCoy Tyner's album Live At Newport:

Roker plays a Brazilian-style bass drum pattern (very softly) under his quasi-Afro-Cuban bell and tom part— a very common thing for many years, but which doesn't really fly these days. I really think we should lose that part of the American drumming literature. You could play the bass drum lightly just on 1 and 3, or try this more contemporary-sounding pattern:

That seems a little closer to an authentic salsa pattern. If the band were actually playing off of clave, this bell pattern suggests a 2-3 orientation, in which case we'd be wanting to punch the bass drum on the & of 2 of the second measure instead of (or in addition to) the written b.d. part here. It doesn't matter; we're not playing salsa, we're just trying to make a reasonably hip Latin groove for a jazz context.

Rumba clave basic coordination — hands only

Per the title, here we have some basic coordination with rumba clave, for hands only. The first set are just logical patterns based on clave— notes in unison with it, before it, after it, or filling in all of the gaps in it. The other sets build some common bell patterns from scratch, one part at a time, so you can be sure the coordination is completely solid.

If you want to add your feet, some obvious default patterns would be:

Hihat: 2 and 4, 1 and 3, or all four beats
Bass drum: & of 2 of both measures, or & of 2 of the first measure.

You could also do the exercises with your right hand + your left foot playing clave.

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Snare studies for developing some Afro-Cuban bell patterns

There is so much heavy coordination involved in learning the Afro-Cuban styles that it's easy to neglect simply getting the bell patterns right— which is a lot like playing jazz without spending any time working on your ride pattern. So what I've done here is make some snare drum exercises which will help work on one aspect of that: conditioning the hands to consistently hit the right accents. In the left hand column there are some stock salsa bell patterns, and on the right are the matching exercises:

That looks like a lot of heavy mixed stickings and flams, but the difficult part of each of them uses this one flam pattern:

It may help to see the same thing written in 6/8— count each of these out loud when you work them up:

After you can play those warmups, learn the patterns for the Chacha, the Songo, and the Abakua, and then the rest of the patterns. It may be helpful to exaggerate the dynamics at first, being especially careful not to accent the flammed notes. Don't fixate on attaining absolute, mechanistic, precision; the end result we're after is a nice, grooving, bell pattern, with a little bit of that special Afro-Cuban swing, if possible— playing and listening to the music will get you to the correct interpretation.

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Cascara coordination — 01

OK, I am seriously in need of a break from working on the book— finishing the damn thing is always the hardest. So here's a page of exercises for developing coordination with the cascara, a common Afro-Cuban/salsa feel, with clave in the left foot. The method of the Elvin Jones Afro waltz series is working well for me in my own practice, so we'll use it again here. The left hand parts are  written purely based on a logic of physical coordination, and are not “correct” to the style at all. Working on Dahlgren & Fine and Ralph Humphrey's materials I've found that drilling wrong things actually helps the right things sit better.

The patterns are based on basic coordination with the singles and doubles in the right hand part, and filling the gaps in the right hand part. It should be easier to get these when you understand what's going on, but the logic can be a little obscure just looking at the page, so I've given a summary of each exercise. The right hand is normally played on the shell or rim of the floor tom, and the left hand on the snare drum as a rim click, but you can also play the right on a cymbal or cowbell— or anything else that works for you— and we'll be doing the tom moves I've outlined previously with the left.

I've written the patterns using 2:3 son clave; you should also play them with the measures reversed to make 3:2 clave. You may find some of the patterns easier at first if you start them on beat 2, or on the & of 4 of the second bar. It's certainly worth doing these patterns with hands alone, too.

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Basic Mambo

I guess I had to eventually post something directly drumming-related on my drumming blog, so here is an older piece I'll be sharing with a couple of students today- some variations on a generic, very basic one-measure mambo-type Latin pattern. Some form of this is usable in actual playing where strict authenticity isn't a primary concern (and there are many such situations), at bright tempos, or when playing with inexperienced musicians unable to follow the more correct patterns.

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Drum chart: Mamblues by Cal Tjader

Here is a chart of Mamblues, from Cal Tjader's album Soul Sauce, transcribed by me. It's a pretty straightforward (but burning!) salsa tune on a blues form, with a cascara groove, mambo on the vibes solo. If you haven't played a lot of this type of chart, note that the written grooves are for illustration only- you should play whatever version of the grooves you have together, making sure to follow clave. The roadmap is straightforward- take the repeats for the solos, then the DS and coda.

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YouTube clip after the break: