Daily best music in the world: Dannie Richmond with Don Pullen / George Adams

Title track from Earth Beams, a great record by George Adams & Don Pullen, with Dannie Richmond on the drums— all three are Charles Mingus band alumni. Richmond was a key partner in that relationship for a long time, and is one of my favorite drummers. 

This is really fundamental to what a jazz musician is— the groundedness in blues, the way they handle the jazz musical environment. Not about chops, or even pure groove— in the details the time and rhythm can be a little squishy, though the overall feeling of drive is there, and overwhelming. You can tell players who just live in that playing environment. Polish is not the point.    

Here's another one, a gospel 5/4, which you didn't even know was a thing. It's so deep it took me a minute to realize they were playing in 5. 
 

This is what anyone would call modern playing, but it's defiant to analysis— by me, anyway. I can't approach it looking for vocabulary. The point is the total playing entity.   

One measure 5/4 triplet fills with Reed!

Another one of my hack and slash jobs. This is something I improvised in a lesson— a student is working on some of the Pages o' Coordination in 5/4, based on an Elvin Jones groove, and we made some fills using the accented triplet pages from Syncopation, alternating between one measure of groove, one measure of fill. There's a good way of handling triplet stickings so you always come out on the right hand here, in whatever time signature. 

First, we'll be using the accented triplet pages from Syncopation, putting them into 5/4 time, playing the first five beats of each line, repeating, as I've brutally scribbled in here: 

Here are all the one line exercises copied and pasted in into 5/4, jammed onto one page: 

Get the pdf - Reed accented triplets in 5/4. There is another pdf to download below. 

On the drum set, the accented notes are played on a cymbal, with the right hand, supported by the bass drum, and the unaccented notes are played on the snare drum— and later moved around the drums. 

To get the cymbal notes onto the right hand, and to get in and out of the fill easily, we had to use some different stickings. Following some simple-ish rules:

All cymbal notes played with RH 

All snare notes start with LH: 

1-2 notes on SD: LH only
3 notes on SD: alternate - LRL
4 notes on SD: LH paradiddle or inversion: LRLL, LRRL
5 notes: alternate - LRLRL
6 notes: LH double paradiddle or inverion: LRLRLL, LRRLRL 
7 notes: alternate - LRLRLRL
8 notes: LH triple paradiddle or inversion: LRLRLRLL, LRRLRLRL

You get the picture:

•  odd number of SD notes = alternate
•  even number = alternate with LL double at end, or RR double after first note 

I prefer the second type of paradiddle sticking, but there are good reasons to do either. The timing of the next cymbal accent may influence what feels best to somebody. 

This page illustrates all the above possibilities, in the two-measure phrase I described:

When the fill begins with snare drum, you can add bass drum to the last note of the groove measure— to begin the fill more strongly. 

Get the pdf - Reed triplet patterns as fill with Elvin Jones groove

Stick Control in 7 by Ralph Humphrey

A little item from an old issue of Percussioner International magazine, which I just found in my mom's basement— the Steve Smith issue, from November 1987. 

Here Ralph Humphrey shares some paradiddle-based stick control patterns in 7/8:

Humphrey says:

Practice each exercise with the written accents. But remember that when you begin to apply the patterns to the drum set, you might choose to keep the accents intact, or try a linear approach and set the hands off so that you hear the rhythm that each hand creates. This may change your accents and also change the way the rhythm sounds.

The main drum set application he suggests playing the patterns right hand lead style, with the R on the cymbal and the L on the snare drum (and moving to other drums), adding bass drum as follows: 

The choice of  bass drum placement depends on the style you wish to create, and/or helps to support one of the hands. Notice that not all of one hand's pattern is supported with the kick as this would create a heavy or over-active bass drum part. Learn to abbreviate the kick part so that it supports the hands and stands by itself. Experiment! 

Basically, he adds bass drum along with some, but not all of the RH notes. 

Also see my Stick Control in odd meters posts, and Dahlgren & Fine in 5/4, for some other possibilities for adapting those books into odd meters. And see my Stick Control related posts generally, there's a ton of stuff. 

Solo transcription: Joey Baron - Goldfish

Joey Baron's solo over a 7/4 vamp on Goldfish, from Dave Douglas's 1997 album Stargazer, to which I'm listening a lot this week. 

There's not a ton of drumistic content to it, it's more of an attitude— it's a power solo, playing off the structure, for impact. Mostly pretty simple syncopated melodic things on the snare and toms, with big accents on the crash cymbal, with the bass drum or snare drum. You can play this way, solos don't have to be technical.  

Actually the vamp is three bars of 7/4 plus one bar of 9/4. 

Here we go, tempo is 142 bpm: 

He plays quarter notes on the hihat with his foot part of the time, but it's not really central to what he's playing, so I left it out. Play it if it helps you, especially setting up the syncopated rhythms he's playing on the rest of the set.  

He's two crash cymbals along with the ride cymbal— one of them is pretty trashy, almost a China sound. The ride cymbal is not the usual taped up thing he was using at the time, every other aspect of his sound is familiar, from that period— punchy toms, very fat snare drum (I still copy that sound, to some extent), he wails on a 16" crash pretty often, 20 or 22" bass drum tuned for a full sound. 

There aren't a lot of internal dynamics happening— things are mostly pretty strong, at a pretty even volume. It's a different thing, playing bam-bam style, vs. playing with a lot of soft things mixed in with your loud things.  

He does play big dynamics on that single stroke roll at the beginning. That takes a lot of ability. 

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5/8 flam accents

Page of rudimental patterns in 5/8, based on a flam accent #1. We've just extended it a couple of notes. You could connect some of these with a whole lot of rudiments: flam drags, pataflaflas, flamadiddles, flamacues. Do these along with my 5/8 control pages from last year. 

Pretty straightforward. If you use a metronome, put it on the 1, or the 1 every two bars, or on the 1/3 or 1/4 of the 5/8, or set it for quarter notes in 5/4, resolving with the 1s in unison every two bars. I guess if you should be doing that, you don't need me to tell you...

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EZ rock in 5 - 3+2

Extending this EZ fast rock / rock in 3 series, with quarter notes on the cymbal: here are some beats and ideas in 5, phrased 3+2. I wrote this series to illustrate the difference between 4, 3, and 5, using similar materials, for a younger student who asked about it. 

Learn the beats, then combine them? That may be a more difficult problem than we're generally dealing with here— most of my students for whom this is intended will be preoccupied with staying oriented just in one measure of 5.  

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The big 7

Please pardon the lack of content. I've been occupied with other things this week, like our upcoming cymbal meets in Germany, and those couple of gigs with all the odd meters.  Which worked out well— I learned a lot from it. I'll do a full run down of what we did, but first let's talk about one angle on playing odd meters. 

Usually, when playing odd time signatures with an 8 as the bottom number— 5/8, 7/8, some forms of 9/8, 11/8, etc— the measures will have a lopsided feel, with long beats and short beats: 

Which you play from a foundation of groups of two and three 8th notes: 

Often that will be counted in 2+2+3/8: 1-2-1-2-1-2-3. 

Several of the tunes we played were written in 7/8, but were better felt in 7/4, with a steady quarter note beat, instead of the uneven quarter-quarter-dotted-quarter beat. A couple that were written in 5/4 strongly suggested a 5/8 phrasing. So there was (almost) always a strong feeling of */8 and */4 versions of a meter happening at the same time— 7/8 and 7/4, or 5/8 and 5/4. 

Because of that, many of the grooves had a partido alto-like feel to them— with several quarter notes in a row, alternating with several &s in a row: 

Part of one arrangement was in 6/4, with a similar rhythm: 

There was also a section of a tune in 9/8: 

Which I played like: 

And if you transcribe the main pulses of two measures of the 7/8 rhythm at the top of the post into one measure of 7/4, you get this: 

A notable thing about how you play that, and my main point here: when the tune is written in 7/8, with chords changing on the 1, but you're playing it in a 7/4 feel— the chord will change in the middle of the measure, on the & of 4. So you need to build that anticipation into your main groove. So this will be your rhythm framework, rather than steady quarter notes: 

Playing the big 5 in 5/8 doesn't seem to help much— or it didn't with this music. The problem with 5 generally is that it turns around so fast you're never get fully grounded. More on that later. 

5/8 control, part 2

Hastily scribbled practice notes

It has been an interesting journey this week, preparing this challenging music— moderately challenging, I guess; there are a few grooves in time signatures I'm not used to, but I'm being ambitious about how I want to play them. When it's all over I'll give you a complete rundown of all the tunes, how I handled them, and how it worked out.

If you're in Oregon, you can come see us at the 1905 Club in Portland at 5:30 pm on Friday the 10th, or the Old World Deli in Corvallis at 7pm on the 11th. Antonio Sanchez is playing with Thana Alexa right after us at the 1905, so you can make a night of it.  

Yes, it is a little intimidating knowing King Kong may be in the house while I'm playing this stuff. But whatever, if I eat it somehow, and he's even around, I'll remember Frankie Dunlop. 

The 5/8 thing is coming along nicely. I needed to figure out a way to vamp on it, and learn a few key rhythms— claves, almost. Generally learning a lot of simple variations on basic things.  

Here's another page of 5/8 patterns based on the notes above, that I wrote while I was practicing, and some practice notes— to myself, they may make no sense to you.  

You can fudge it 
You don't need to play a perfect 5/8 subdivision all the time. This is not prog. In fact, if you're playing off the 1, a lot of almost-normal stuff can happen in the middle. 

And 5/8 rhythms can resemble normal things, pushed around a little bit, for example: 

But increasingly I've found I can just stay on the quintuplet groove— it just requires a focused and deliberate approach. Which is not my forte— as a musician I'm actually kind of a feral individual. Just playing the notes feels like cheating to me.   

Recovering from mistakes. 
I'm learning to bail out fast when something lands in a way I didn't intend— without immediately hitting something else, which will also be very wrong, to try to save the continuity. 

You also have to have the 5/8 in your ear well enough that you can drop in a note, and know where you are from hearing it. 

Playing free
It's also possible to just play free over the vamp— but there's a right way to do that. You have to listen, and you can't lapse into playing patterns that fight with the vamp. It's also nice to be able to play four measures totally free, and land on the 1 with the band, which I can do.    

The actual parameters
You look at a chart like that and you think oh my God I've got to learn to play 5/8, but really, it's one six minute tune, and one tempo. On the 5/8 portion of the head the drums are doing a light percussive background thing. The middle of the tune and the horn solo are in 6/4. The drum solo in 5/8 is really equivalent to an 8 measure break in 4. And the other players are used to holding it together with different drummers who don't know their music real well— or they better be. They won't be relying on me to be their foundation. 

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5/8 control

Sid Catlett would always tell me, “Art, when you're in trouble, roll. Just relax, you know what I mean?”

Let's talk about something I'm preparing for, kind of a hairy gig coming up next week, playing with a trumpet player and guitarist from New York, who are touring and picking up local drummers. 

...which is a little nuts, of them, because some of the music is rather hard. The rhythm sensibility is generally rather abstract, there are some odd meters, with a couple of tunes in 5/8, or a 5/8 feel— possibly the unfriendliest odd meter. I wouldn't want to trust my luck with local musicians with that. [Or not— one of the other drummers is D'Vonne Lewis, a great veteran player in Seattle.] On the recordings there's that generally twitchy New York type of thing happening in the drums, with the recorded drummers playing a lot of stuff that I don't hear, and would never play.   

My thought process approaching this music is kind of involved— we're talking about taking a complicated organism— a mature player's performance vocabulary— and quickly mashing it into shape for a kind of alien environment. Maybe the atmosphere has less O2, gravity is 120% of Earth's, and the locals have started forming their own language.  

You can listen to the main tune I'm concerned with here, an arrangement of a Schumann piece— the body of the tune is in 5/8, the trumpet solo is in 6, and back into 5/8 for the drum solo:





The drummer on that record is Dan Weiss, and apparently that's his thing. Me, I've never soloed in 5/8 in my life. At this tempo, it has to be felt as a fast lopsided 2, or a slow 1— a quintuplet, and if you deviate from it, it sounds really wrong and you get really lost. If you let your hands go on their own for one second, you're dead. Counting in 1, the drum solo is basically eight measures of 4, in quintuplets. Long enough to embarrass yourself, too short to develop much... or to recover your dignity if you blow it, hahahahaha. 

So I wrote up a page of stuff to play through to get my hands better oriented, blocking out at least the outlines of some drumming content for this meter and feel. Maybe I'll also review this little etude in 5/8 I wrote a few years ago.

Like I say, an uncomfortable feel to play on the drumset. Playing alternating 8ths, you land on the opposite hand every measure. You can impose a lead on it by using a sticking that starts every measure with the same hand. Or you can try changing it into a mutant duple meter by playing RLRL and resting on the last 8th of the measure, and having that be your "grid." There are also some key rhythms you can hang things off of.   

If I don't feel great about making a continuous solo texture, I can take an attitude of backing off and jabbing— but you have to be able to hear it. Interestingly, as I prepare, I notice it's sort of possible to play loosely as long as you're playing off the 1. And why not— you can get to a quintuplet rhythm by massaging normal rhythms, why not the other way around? 

In the end, I won't go into a performance and be dominated by the music, or by another drummer's concept of how to play it. I can float a solo out of time, while still feeling the major pulse, and listening hard. The solo is so short I'll have to be aggressive, and hit that right away, to have time to establish that and bring it back around to the 5/8 feel. 

And hell, if it comes to that, painfully blowing it in public is a time-honored tradition in jazz, so I'll have that to fall back on if all else fails.  

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EZ ECM: entry to 7/4

Hey, a few broad, non-technical creative possibilities for playing a straight-8th, ECM-type texture in 7/4, which also apply to using Ted Reed's Syncopation on the drum set broadly.  

First, we need some rhythms to work with— print my photoshopped page of Reed rhythms in 7/4, or use Syncopation itself and read creatively— two measures of 4/4 minus one beat at the end of either measure = 7/4. In this post the rhythms used are all from page 34 in Syncopation, converted to 7/4 time. 

Start by playing the rhythm on the cymbal— here's the line 4 rhythm converted to 7/4. Play it on a cymbal with one hand, or on two cymbals with both hands, with an improvised sticking: 

Here are some possible rhythms to add with the left foot: 

And some possible bass drum rhythms: 

You can add snare drum and bass drum based on long and short notes— add snare drum on some or all of the 8th notes, add bass drum on some or all of the quarter notes and tied notes:  

Also try filling in the gaps in the rhythm on the snare drum, and add some bass drum in unison with the right hand:
 

We don't want to be always tied to the 1, so try this two measure practice phrase, with an added tie on the last note of the first measure. For general fluency, and so you don't blow it and get lost when this type of anticipation comes up in playing. 

Get my archive of sampled practice loops, find the loops in 7/4, and play along with them— start with two moderate tempo ones by John Zorn: Hadasha and Hodaah.  

Practice loop in 7/4: Freddie Hubbard / Heidi-B

While I finish up my taxes, here's the practice loop I was playing with when I was doing that Reed in 7 thing: Heidi-B, from Freddie Hubbard's album Sweet Return. Tempo is quarter note = 189. Scroll through this if you're hurting for things in 7 to practice.

Have a blast: 

Reed in 7/4

Another one of my little photoshop* pranks of an existing drum book— here putting some rhythms from Progressive Steps to Syncopation into 7/4 time. It's fun. 

* - Actually I do it using Paint.NET. 

I was doing this on the fly this when I was practicing along with a loop in 7/4 yesterday— playing four variations for each line in the book. Looking at two measures of Reed:

First variation: drop the last beat of the second measure

Second variation: drop the last beat of the first measure

Third variation: drop the first beat of the first measure

Fourth variation: drop the first beat of the second measure. 

 

Some of those will be duplicates, which is why there are only three examples for some things on my photoshopped page. 

Groove o' the day: Afro 10/8

An interesting groove by Billy Kilson, on A Seeking Spirit, from Dave Holland's Prime Directive album, one of the big records of the late 90s. If you're not familiar, he had a very high powered band that did a lot with odd meters. 

There's a strong quarter note pulse throughout, so this could easily be counted in 5, but there's something interesting happening with the bass drum rhythm, and in the percussion part, which suggests a kind of 10/8 Afro phrasing: 

Compare with the usual form of that rhythm in 12/8:

That 10/8 bell rhythm essentially shaves two 8th notes off the end of the traditional rhythm:

There are some other interesting things happening as the track progresses, which pull it some other directions, so it's worth some further analysis— maybe I'll get into that later. 

Having done this, I'm not finding a free way to listen to it online, so you'll have to buy the record, or sign up for Amazon music, or YouTube music, or something. 

Transcription: both versions of Flower Punk

I can't believe I never posted this. Back in 2017 I transcribed both versions of Frank Zappa's Flower Punk— the original, played by Jimmy Carl Black, on the Mothers of Invention album We're Only In It For The Money, and the version where Zappa had Chad Wackerman re-record the drums, released on The Lumpy Money Project/Object. I was going to do an e-book of Zappa drum transcriptions, but Zappa Corp has such an active legal department, I figured I'd probably get a cease and desist letter, and be forced to take it down. 

I like both versions. The Jimmy Carl Black version is kind of raggedy, but I like the energy with the broken up bass drum. Here are the first two (of four) pages of the transcription:

The Wackerman version is more solid, with some nice tom fills. His drum sound with Zappa is always kind of interesting. I can't recall hearing a sound like that anywhere else. The toms are somewhat reminiscent of Billy Cobham's sound— sort of an 80s version of that sound.

After 10 years I'm starting to feel kind of silly posting so much stuff absolutely free, so let's try something new: if you'd like to get these complete transcriptions, send $3.00 for both to: 

Venmo: @todd-bishop-16
PayPal: toddbishop@[cruiseshipdrummer dot com]  

Include your email, and the thing you want— Flower Punk transcriptions. 

In fact, if you'd like any of my e-books (see the sidebar), and don't feel like going through Amazon, send $5.00 via the above means. Print books you still have to order through Lulu, although I may start carrying them and shipping them myself soon.

Page o' coordination: basic triplet texture in 5/4

Continuing this little series. You could warm up for this by just playing the original 4/4 page, repeating beat 1 at the end of each measure— effectively playing ||: 1-2-3-4-1 :||. Like we originally played it in 3/4 by just chopping off beat 4. That's kind of fun. 

But I wanted to place the bass drum differently— this page better suits what I want to do with 5/4: 

It's very straightforward. Just play them down, and begin improvising similar textures on your own. 5/4 is a peculiar time signature, and not easy to feel at all at first, so you should probably be counting your way through. See my old series Cracking 5/4 for some pointers on that, and try playing along with my corny Jesus Christ Superstar loop.    

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Hemiola funk patterns in 5/8

Here's a nice easy page of hemiola funk patterns in 5/8— based on our friend the 3:2 polyrhythm. World's fastest way of getting your students playing hip stuff in 5, if you already (wisely) ran them through my previous hemiola funk pages. 

These will also work in a bright 5/4— 8th notes = quarter notes, in that case. You can also swing the 16ths, add hihat (on 2 and 5) and alter the cymbal rhythm (add skip notes on 2 and 5) to make a 5/4 jazz feel, which is an excellent idea.

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Page o' coordination: yet another Elvin 5/4

Here's a page o' coordination based on Elvin Jones's playing on Lazy Afternoon, from Grant Green's album Street of Dreams. It's a medium slow 5/4— the tempo is about 109. He plays the ostinato below fairly regularly, with many small variations. I've given the approximate default thing he plays on the snare drum, and then my usual kind of independence exercises with the ostinato:

Try my dopey old Jesus Christ Superstar loop with this one. Once you learn the patterns, move your left hand around the drums— improvise the moves, or use this set of stock moves I do with all of these. Add the circled bass drum note in the ostinato if you feel like it. 

See my other Elvin-like POCs, based on his playing on Your Lady (adapted into 5/4), a variation on that, and on That 5/4 Bag, 

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Page o' coordination: pseudo-Latin in 7 - 01

A page of independence patterns for a quasi-Latin groove in 7/4. The cymbal part is based on a Mozambique rhythm, and there the similarity to any real Latin music ends. This is not a style, that I'm aware of, but things like this turn up in modern music. The idea is just to learn how to play in 7 better by doing something familiar. Hopefully you can already play the Mozambique rhythm before doing this. 

The bass drum and hihat parts are pretty minimal, and you can omit them at first if you want. You can also try them without the circled snare drum notes. Learn the page, then practice it using all of my stock left hand moves.   

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Another set of patterns for improvisation

File this in the same category as the recent “extended shuffle” stickings page— it's a unified set of patterns based on a simple idea, organized to make them easy to improvise with. They're not new patterns, but we haven't seen them collected as a single idea before. 

These are right hand-accented, alternating stickings ending with a RRLL— or a RRL with the odd-numbered patterns. Get a feel for the premise by playing the first pattern on the first five lines— they all lean heavily on the strong beats. The last three patterns are really just inversions of the extended shuffle patterns, but I've included them so you can play them as an extension of this basic idea. 

Practice tips:

• Play them as 8th notes, 16th notes, or triplets in any time signature. 
• They are for soloing, for playing texturally, or for playing an ECM-type feel. 
• It's easy to play them fast, but they're meant for all tempos. 
• Play the hands on different instruments/sounds, and improvise moving them around the drums.
• Play with the RH on a cymbal, with the bass drum in unison.
• Add/vary accents with the left hand.   
• Try other stickings with the same accents, as in my harmonic coordination method. Best to start with straight alternating, and single-handed. 

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Syncopation in 5/4 - another format

A little throwaway item, as I continue working out the formatting for my upcoming book, Syncopation in 5/4, to be released God knows when. The problem is how to deal with phrasing the measures 2+3 or 3+2— both normal ways of phrasing 5/4, that affect the way you write the rhythms. Here I've borrowed the format used by Rick Kvistad in his accents book I reviewed recently— he just writes back to back measures of 2+3 and 3+2.

It's a pretty good option for one-line exercises. With the full page exercises I may have just do them half in one, half in the other. As always I welcome any feedback.

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