Meter-within-meter phrases

A page of meter-within-meter phrases— three beat rhythms played over four measures of 4/4:  

You'll want to be very familiar and comfortable with this kind of rhythm— it happens a lot in jazz, and if you get lost you're dead. Count through the sounding rhythm of each phrase: 

Also play just the first two measures of each line, played twice to make a four measure phrase. 

You can do this with my book Syncopation in 3/4— four measures of any materials in 3/4 = three measures of 4/4. 

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Triplet burnout with the jazz waltz telephone page

Here are some things I do over the course of 15-20 minutes playing that jazz waltz telephone page, in addition to just playing repeating measures as written, in 3/4 time: 

1. Play each measure in 4/4 by adding the first beat of the following measure. 
2. Play each measure in 4/4 by adding the last beat of the previous measure.
3. Play in 2/4 by playing just the first two beats of each measure.
4. Play in 5/4 by adding the first two beats of the next measure. 
5. Play each two beats of each line, moving ahead one beat at a time. 
6. Play each 3/4 measure within 4/4 time. 

 

The page is just for illustration, you do these looking at the original page. I won't necessarily rigorously play through the entire page each of those ways, but I'll do them for awhile, moving quickly from thing to thing— it's a lot to play through. Obviously you have to have this stuff together already pretty thoroughly, so it's about conditioning, rather than learning new stuff. It's a triplet burnout drill. 

I play the cymbal as written through all of those changes, and add hihat as appropriate for the time signature. 

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Solo ideas in 3/4

We'll be seeing more with this format— solo and fill ideas for a certain amount of space between cymbal/bass drum accents. It's the normal frame for fills, but I don't see fill studies written that way often.  

This page has some three beat ideas for soloing in 4/4— they aren't necessarily meant to be played in a 3/4 environment. See the 4/4 phrase at the bottom of the page to see how that works. It's a common thing. 

The ideas themselves are not difficult, the main practice concern will be to get fluent moving them around the drums, and speed, maybe. 

Note that 10 and 11 use a “Bishopdiddle” type sticking, with the diddle up front. Number 8 is sort of a special one— the sticking isn't easy; playing it a lot will be good conditioning. 

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Transcription: Elvin Jones - Foolin' Myself - 04

UPDATE: Boy I suck. This is of course the third solo chorus, and the fourth total entry in this series. I'll fix that... sometime. 

Continuing that Elvin Jones transcription from late last year— Elvin Jones playing on Foolin' Myself, from Lee Konitz's album Motion. This page begins at 2:55 in the track. We're getting into some more involved stuff here. 

You can see he plays some denser 16th note stuff in the sixth line— that's the last four bars of the bridge. I've adjusted them slightly to make them practiceable licks. In the first three bars he's playing a three beat pattern: 

Play that in 6/4 to add hihat the way you'd play it in 4/4:  

In the last bar of that line he plays a six note pattern, twice, with one note different. You can practice it either way: 

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Best books: The Art of Modern Jazz Drumming - Dejohnette / Perry

“As our mental image becomes more precise, we are better able to select muscle movements which will achieve our goals quickly, efficiently, and accurately.”

I'm surprised I haven't written much about this book already— The Art of Modern Jazz Drumming, by Jack Dejohnette and Charlie Perry. It's my favorite jazz drumming book, after Syncopation. Together with Bob Moses's Drum Wisdom, it makes up a pretty expansive 60s-70s era doctrine of creative jazz drumming, that I very much agree with.  

It includes a lot of practice materials, but also a lot of informational text, which may be the most important parts of it. There are sections on listening, the general elements of contemporary jazz drumming, a historical overview of modern drumming, improvisation, drums-band interaction and improvisation, the cymbal line, cymbal interpretation, interaction of parts of the drum set, meter-within-meter playing, song form, the rhythm section, clave rhythm, phrasing, muscular tension, and body motion. Each thing is well illustrated, with recorded examples cited. Now that all music is instantly available on the internet, I need to reread it and actually listen to the recordings I was never able to find as a student.  

It is purely a book about creative playing, for the drum set as a four limbed instrument. There's nothing in here purely about the hands. Not much about the job of playing structurally, except broadly. 

Book I deals with meter-within-meter playing— mostly, playing 3/4 ideas in a 4/4 setting. Some of the patterns are similar Mel Lewis's rubadub idea. There are a lot of practice patterns written in a very loose format. It's a very valuable chapter that nevertheless could have used some editing/polishing— that doesn't matter, you figure out what to do with it. 

Book II deals with triplet patterns with the hands and feet, played as solo patterns, and played along with a cymbal rhythm. 

Book III deals with modern feet and left hand independence with a cymbal rhythm, in triplet partials. I certainly practiced this a lot; today I feel like there may be better ways of developing the same thing. Then again, we're not supposed to be living in book exercises, you're supposed to use them as a starting place. The entire book requires you to take a creative approach— you practice the pattern a little bit, then improvise with the broad idea of it. 

My complaints/caveats are: 

Too focused on triplets. Triplets are a fairly narrow range of what happens in jazz drumming. I think it's better to have 8th notes— swung or not— and quarter notes as your primary orientation. 

The book may even over-emphasize the creative, improvisatory, interactive aspects of playing. As a feral young jazz student, it took me awhile to figure out that my job was also to provide a foundation. My education was imperfect, that's not the book's fault. 

The meter-within-meter section could have been more developed, and polished. Many of the patterns seem redundant as written. It takes some creativity to get full value from it.  

The notation style is somewhat archaic, though that doesn't wreck the book, as it does many others. 

That's all fine— I don't think it's good to be looking for complete answers from any book. 

There's a big contrast in attitude between it and the most popular jazz drumming book ever— Art of Bop Drumming. AOBD is largely a style guide— a creative framework within a pretty particular set of boundaries. AOMJD is more of an open ended map of the creative terrain. They do serve different purposes. In retrospect I could have use some of the boundaries AOBD provides; I think many more people are missing the perspective AOMJD provides.  

120 pages. 

Transcription: Roy Haynes - It's Time

Roy Haynes playing behind Herbie Hancock's solo, on the title track of Jackie McLean's record It's Time. There's a lot of what people call “broken” time here, and meter-within-meter playing. The tune is in 4, but Haynes is playing with a strong broken up 3 feel all the way through. If you check out my “world's shortest Roy Haynes lesson”, and play those 3/4 patterns over 4/4, you'll have some similar stuff.

Tempo is 266— generally the range where a swing feel evens out into straight 8ths. Haynes is playing a very legato swing feel here— almost straight 8ths, not quite. It would be a good analysis project to print this out and add phrase markings indicating his two, three, and four beat phrases.   

The transcription was a little tricky to make, and may be a little deceptive— there are lots of tied notes and ghosted notes— there's so much quiet stuff happening, it suggests a lot of physical activity where no notes are sounding, or barely sounding. The transcription could turn into a real nightmare of random looking stuff if I tried catching all of that, which is really not central to the main idea of what he's playing. 

There are a lot of unisons happening— both hands together, both feet together, and everything together with the cymbal. Not much linearity, or “independent” lines against an ostinato. The hihat is quite sparse, and often in unison with accents on the bass or snare. A few times he'll play it on 2 after a couple of measures of floating meter-within-meter playing. The bass drum is less sparse, and there seems to be more activity than I was able to notate. For the most part the bass drum is not loud— his playing here seems centered mostly on the hands.  

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Extended shuffle stickings

This is just a little exploration of a special set of stickings for drum set. I wrote it to practice myself, and see if it's worth developing as a concept. A lot of what we do here is play around with different approaches to ordinary ideas, to see if it helps us use them creatively, or practice them productively. That's all. 

You could call these extended shuffle stickings, after the RH rhythm of the three note pattern. They're mostly-alternating, and starting and ending with a single right hand. Sometimes we have to add a double left near the end to make them come out right. 

Three notes: RLR
Four notes: RLLR
Five notes: RLRLR
Six notes: RLRLLR
Seven notes: RLRLRLR
Eight notes: RLRLRLLR
Nine notes: RLRLRLRLR

Clearly this is not about playing shuffles— these are all common, useful stickings in other contexts. On this page I've written them as 8th notes in their native meters, and in their closest opposite type of meter— simple (straight 8th) and/or compound (triplet feel). The tick marks on some of the examples show where the pattern begins. 

Play the right hand on the cymbal, left hand on the snare drum. Add bass drum on some or all of the cymbal notes. Add a simple rhythm with the left foot. Vary the dynamics with the left hand. 

You don't have to play these only in the written time signature. The 5/4 and 15/8 versions of the five note pattern, for example, are just to show you how that odd sticking lays in a straight 8th or triplet feel. I'll be playing most of them in 4/4, 3/4, or 12/8. 

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Building rubadub - 01

For intermediate jazz students, here is a page for learning the basic pattern for Mel Lewis's rubadub concept (as helpfully explained by Chris Smith), about as thoroughly as possible, while also developing solid execution with swing rhythm generally. The only thing I've really left open to question here is the ability of the student to interpret swing 8th notes. We can't do everything in one page. Another page is coming for putting this into 4/4 time.

This is approximately what I would have a student do in a lesson if he was not immediately able to play the pattern, or was having problems with the rhythm. I prefer to do this verbally, but it helps some students to see it written out. It looks like a lot, but it's really only nine actual things.

As you can see, we are learning the pattern starting on each of its notes— first the partial pattern in 2, stopping on beat 2, then the partial pattern in 3, stopping on beat 3, then the full pattern in 3, stopping on beat 1. Each of those is written twice, with the right hand staying on the cymbal, and with the right hand moving to a tom tom. Practice each pattern played once with a long pause or a measure of rest afterwards, then play them repeating. I suggest learning it at three tempos: ~100-120, ~160-200, and at a bright tempo with straight 8ths.

That's a lot of ink dedicated to only one pattern, but it's an extraordinarily useful pattern, but one that can get inexperienced players in trouble. And again, we're using this as an excuse to polish the student's execution of swing rhythms overall. The page can be worked through quickly, and will isolate and correct anything problematic with the student's execution.

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Max's rubadub - triplets added

Wow, slow posting in August. This is something more to do with that Max Roach rubadub-like system I've been writing about recently. Here I've added some filler triplets to the original transcribed phrases I posted before— rather sparsely; I'll take this one more level of density in a few days.

Swing the 8th notes, of course. When you can play the patterns, practice them along with my recent Tunji practice loop.

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Dannie Richmond comping

Dannie Richmond is one of my favorite drummers, who we don't talk about much mainly because he's often hard to transcribe, and a lot of what he plays is so context dependent that it can be hard to draw general drumming lessons from it. You just have to listen and get why he's great. As a drumming conductor, he is one of the very greatest. For his playing with Mingus, I think he's right up there with Mel Lewis, Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, or any other big band drummer you can name.

This is from The Clooker, from the George Adams/Dannie Richmond album Hand To Hand on Soul Note Records. This is his playing behind George Adams's solo. Like I said, he can be hard to transcribe, and the sound here is not great, so treat this as a sketch:

There is a strong quarter note pulse, and strong hihat on 2 and 4. It's notable that his cymbal rhythm is often a little crushed— he doesn't play a wonderful, perfect cymbal rhythm a la Tony Williams. It's more about the overall energy. He plays strong accents on 1 and 4 at the beginning of a chorus or section, and also hits the 4 with the bass drum often. The dynamics of his comping are dramatic, with very soft and very loud notes. I almost certainly missed some of the very soft notes. Comping here is really about creating forward momentum. What he plays (or what I hear that he plays) is very simple, but it's aggressive, and is not predictable. Towards the end he plays some things that are basically in 6/8 within 4/4— I see these as Mingus-like horn backgrounds.

The most interesting thing to me right now is in bar 45, at 1:22 in the track; he's basically doing rub-a-dub. He does some different things than we've been doing with it— he mixes it up. If you want to learn his ideas, you could take any three beats of that four measure phrase and plug it into my Equinox exercise so the cymbal accents line up. I'll probably write this up soon, actually...

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Developing a method for rub-a-dub

I've been working up a practice method for learning what Mel Lewis called rub-a-dub— I hate to use his term, because I only just saw it explained for the first time in Chris Smith's video. I don't know enough about how it applies to Lewis's playing to claim I'm doing his thing. But I've used the same basic idea for many years, usually in the context of a modern, ECM-type feel. I can write about that, and work out a way of applying it to ensemble figures, and maybe approximate Mel's thing as explained by Smith. Or maybe it will just be something different, but still useful.

Basically it's a simple all-purpose idea for playing and filling around big band figures, and I'll be exploring some ways of working it up using the syncopation exercises from Progressive Steps to Syncopation (pp. 32-44 in the old edition). This will certainly evolve as I continue working with it. For now I'm trying to develop a very basic interpretation so we'll have some hope of executing it on the fly with the full page exercises in Reed.

Here's the basic rub-a-dub lick, played with the left hand on the snare and the right hand on the cymbal:

The snare and bass rhythm without the cymbal:

That rhythm written as one voice occurs throughout Syncopation, so that will be our main place for introducing the rub-a-dub:

Here's the rhythm in Syncopation— we most often see it starting on beat 1 or 3, less frequently as an equivalent rhythm starting on beat 2 or 4:

A basic way of playing that figure rub-a-dub style would be:

That ending quarter note could be played on the snare or bass drum.

In other instances that 8th-quarter-8th rhythm includes rests, which could be played by just dropping snare drum hits to match the written rhythm:

The 8th-quarter-8th rhythm repeating give a clue on how to handle running 8th notes:

This is only a beginning, of course. We're reconciling a few different concerns: doing the rub-a-dub lick, designing a system that will be readable with the long exercises in Reed, while making sense in terms of playing big band figures. Somewhere on the radar should be the idea of suggesting a standard time feel— jazz, funk, or samba— for when there is no obvious rub-a-dub type interpretation for a rhythmic passage, or when we need some variety.

Playing out of the book will be challenging, especially with the full-page exercises; interpretation is very dependent on the context. The way you play a rhythm will depend on what comes before and after it, so you may play a rhythm differently in the full-page exercises than in the one-line exercise. You can use a simple long-note/short-note interpretation with the cymbal in unison to get through parts where it's not obvious what to do.

Anyone actually playing around with this rub-a-dub idea should also check out Jack Dejohnette and Charlie Perry's book— they outline a method very similar to what Smith describes, that will be very helpful in working it up.

Meter-within-meter: 5/8 in 4/4 rock - 01

This is something inspired by Joey Baron's playing on Bill Frisell's Child At Heart— I always come back to the same few things, and that's a particularly fertile, mainly simple, piece of drumming. Some of what he does sounds like it's derived from another meter, which leads us to what we're doing today: playing a rock beat in 5/8 in 4/4.

I'll state up front that the “metric modulation” thing currently fascinating the internet is not what we're about here. This is more about bringing a way of phrasing into your rock playing which you would not arrive at just thinking in straight 4/4.

On the page we have the basic idea in 5/8; then played twice metered in 5/4; then in 4/4 several one, two, three-measure (with an extra measure of 4/4 time at the beginning), and four-measure practice phrases, with the 5/8 pattern starting on 1, and with the 5/8 pattern on the end of the measure— the last five 8th notes of the measure. The accents are mainly for the hihat, but you can also accent the bass drum— notice that the first note of the 5/8 pattern is accented, and the last is not. It's not a terrible idea to count out loud in 4, especially on the longer practice phrases.

Practice the phrases, run them with the Child At Heart practice loop, and let this idea come into your actual playing in an organic way. You should at least hear some new phrasing possibilities even if you don't want to do this thing exactly.

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Transcription: Joe Chambers - Granted

Here's a transcription of some jazz comping with a 3/4-within-4/4 feel, by Joe Chambers. This is from Granted, on Joe Henderson's album Mode For Joe. It's sort of a companion to the Elvin Jones Groove o' the Day for Rose Marie, where Elvin does something similar. I've just written out the first chorus of the trombone solo— because, hey, I've been slow posting stuff and I need to make it easy on myself. But this small sample is illustrative of what he plays for much of the tune.

The dominant theme with the comping is a running dotted quarter note rhythm alternating between the snare drum and bass drum; he does it from the beginning of the transcription, breaks it up a bit in measures 9-10, then picks it up again by measure 12, continuing— mostly unbroken, but with variations— until the last measure where he breaks it up for a punctuation at the end of the chorus.

The tempo is bright, but the 8th notes still swing. It's not necessary to play this up to speed to get the rhythmic thing that's happening with Chambers's comping. The notes in parentheses are played extremely softly— almost soft enough to omit altogether. Listen to the recording, and make sure the dynamics of the snare drum and bass drum parts communicate that dotted quarter note pulse.

And, just for interest, I'll note that the tune begins at 257 bpm, pushes up to about 270 by the end of the trumpet solo, and around 276 by the end of the last solo. It begins to back down on the unison horn part at 6:45, and by the head out, the tempo is about where it started. If you compare those on your metronome, they're like gradations of the same basic tempo idea— the slowest one is more deliberate, for the horns to execute the complex unison figures, and the faster tempos are more energetic, and building intensity for the solos. This is expressive use of time, and is not a fault.

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Flam accent #2

NOTE: Blogger is doing one of its occasional bloggery things, and the download is not working, despite me typing the link in correctly. Also the same handed flam accents in 7/8 isn't working. Older downloads are working fine. For now, if you want to print the pages, save the jpeg of the whole page to your computer, and print that. 

Everyone knows the Flam Accent #1— alternating triplets with flams at the beginning— but, curious, frisky beings that we are, we may wonder What of the Flam Accent #2? Is there such a thing? What is it? Is there a Flam Accent #3? What's going on?

OK, you wouldn't say “what of” it, but you might have wondered about it for a second or two. The Flam Accent #2 exists, and is a rather hokey rudiment, used in olden times for playing 6/8 marches. You could call it a swing-feel flam tap:

Useful if you're playing The Liberty Bell for a living, but otherwise uninspiring. It's more interesting and useful to jazz drummers when you change the rhythm, so the accents don't always fall on the beat. I've written a page of simple practice phrases using that idea:

The first two exercises are just the plain rudiment written in its normal form in 6/8 and in 2/4, after that we do them cross-rhythm style. After you get the first few exercises you'll be able to smoke the whole page— the endings are where the interest is. Use a metronome for reference, and be able to count quarter notes out loud as you play them— just “1-2-3-4”, or “1-2-3-4-2-2-3-4-3-2-3-4-4-2-3-4” on the long exercises.

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RLF pattern in 7/8!!!

UPDATE: I made a couple of small changes which I found helpful in practicing the patterns— in the first set of exercises there are some optional notes in parentheses, and I've changed line 6. I've also posted the practice loop. Get the new pdf here.

People, we've got a series going here— several pages aimed at getting basic vocabulary together for an up tempo 7/8— specifically, Solitaire, from John Zorn's album O'o. It's not usually that challenging an odd meter, but this tempo makes it not-easy in a couple of ways. Don't take this attention we're lavishing upon it to mean that I think this is a really important subject; but if you're playing a lot of modern music, someone's probably going to hit you with a fast 7/8, sometime. Maybe. Today we're looking at staying oriented playing the super-useful, super-familiar 3/8 pattern RLF:

The goal here is just to be able to improvise with this 3/8 pattern in 7/8 without getting lost— it won't be a technical challenge; everyone can play RLF at the speed required. You really need a point of reference, so it's best to play this page along with the practice loop, or with a metronome that can give you a dotted-quarter/quarter/quarter note rhythm.

The method here is very straightforward— just repeat each pattern many times, listening closely to the loop/click. You can your hands around the drums as you like. Also play these with the measures reversed, as well— it's easy to feel the two measures of 7/8 as one measure of 7/4, with a riff of 1-2-3--&-&-&--, which obviously can put the second measure on slightly odd footing.

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Daily best music in the world: Connie Kay swings

We don't get to hear much of Connie Kay— usually he's buried in the back of the Modern Jazz Quartet, playing very conservatively. Here, with French(?) guitarist Andre Conduant, we get to hear him forward in the mix, and sounding great. The tune is in 4, but he plays in 3 in parts of the solos— showing some contemporary influence with some meter-within-meter playing. I believe the cymbal he's playing is a 17" A. Zildjian medium-heavy; I have one of these in 20", and it has a very interesting, moderate, high-pitched wash, which you can also hear in this cymbal.

Page o' coordination: Elvin's waltz in 4/4

It could look an awful lot like I'm phoning it in with all of these Pages o' Coordination— well, I am phoning it in, a little bit, but that's not to say the pages aren't useful. Each one serves a special purpose, and I play through at least two of them every day.

Today's entry is just a little addendum to the original Elvin's Afro-Waltz page, which started this series. If you learned that page well, your learning curve here should be very shallow indeed. Here we're making the shortest possible meter-within-meter phrase out of if, playing the ostinato over two measures of 4/4. Remember, what we are doing with the jazz-oriented POCs especially, are just calisthenics, approximating the densest playing you may do during a piece of music. Hopefully we're laying the groundwork for some interesting and unexpected things to happen during those very dense parts of the music.

Blah blah blah do the tom moves. I do them about half the time. Treat all the POCs as page-at-once exercises— play the entire page every time you practice them, and don't get too hung up on any one pattern.

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More meter-within-meter phrases

Here's a little supplement to the meter-within-meter introduction of a few days ago: some additional two, four, and eight measure practice phrases:

It's easy to get yourself into trouble with this, so it's important to count out loud until you're very familiar with how the 3/4 lays against the longer phrases in 4/4. Once the phrases are feeling good as written, substitute the alternative 3/4 patterns from the previous entry. Also practice alternating each phrase with a few measures of normal jazz time— paying attention to how you get into and out of the 3.

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Getting started with meter-within-meter

Playing meter-within-meter— playing in one meter during a tune in a different one— is a very common rhythmic element in jazz, which became fully realized in drumming during the 1960's by Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones, and Tony Williams, among others. It's an essential element of modern playing, and, as I said one of my earlier posts on polyrhythms, it's not a show-offy effect or trick; it's just an ordinary part of the fabric of jazz rhythmic phrasing. It's not a fixed thing, but I see it as underlying much of what we play in a way not too dissimilar from clave in Cuban or Cuban-derived music. Most common is 3/4 (often with a strong 6/8 inflection) played within 4/4, and that's what we'll deal with here:

The methodology here is pretty straightforward: play the waltz figure in 3, then play it in the given phrases in 4, counting out loud the entire time. That last is very important: it's easy to get lost doing this type of playing, at first, and verbalizing the counting while practicing it will insure that that doesn't happen. The snare parts here are simple, but doing the standard tom moves will provide a little interest, and force you to concentrate a little harder. After you learn the phrases with the 3/4 patterns given here, you can try using your favorite patterns from any of the pages o' coordination in 3, or use your own patterns.

See The Art of Modern Jazz Drumming by Jack Dejohnette and Charlie Perry for more about this type of playing.

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