Just did a gig playing all samba and bossa nova, so I've got Brazilian music on the brain. Here's an old record offering a little round up of styles in Brazilian percussion: Batucada, by Paulinho e sua Bateria. Things will have evolved somewhat in the 60 years since this was made, but hey, jazz records from 60 years ago are still relevant. This is good for getting the broad concept. We're just looking to inform the way we play sambas and bossas in a combo setting, ideas to draw from beyond a groove in a drum book.
Open it up on YouTube for the track listing, which names the styles involved.
Another set of three records is by Luciano Perrone: Batucada Fantastica, also from the 60s, which rounds up some percussion styles, and the individual instruments. Here's one of the volumes on Soundcloud. Here's a track demonstrating the tamborim, accompanied by surdo and snare drum:
Another funk groove with a Brazilian flavor, from Shebaba by the guitarist Bola Sete. The album must have been recorded in Los Angeles, because on it are the saxophonist Hadley Caliman, and my old combo leader at USC, the pianist Dwight Dickerson. He used to do our rehearsals and then go play his regular gig with Tootie Heath.
This is an instrumental arrangement of the Gilberto Gil tune Roda. The drummer is Ronald de Mesquita, a Brazilian who did a lot of road gigs and also lived in LA then.
This arrangement adds a funk interlude and intro:
It's a partido alto funk groove, which you can see most clearly in measure 5— compare that to the Airto and Ivan Conti recordings under that link. He's playing it pretty simply here, basically a Brazilian bell rhythm with snare drum and bass drum added on the accents.
The tune starts at 17:00 in the video, and the transcribed groove happens at 18:33.
This is a collection of two measure practice phrases based on the concept of the partido alto rhythm, which typically has 3 or 4 quarter notes alternating with 3 or 4 upbeats. I've expanded on that, and written all the possible practice rhythms using 1-6 quarter notes, along with the opposite number of &s, to make seven notes total.
It's really a library item; it may turn out to be very useful, or not very useful, or useful/not useful for certain people doing certain things. Most of us just plow through Syncopation and do our best with what's there, but sometimes it's better to have a single rhythmic idea presented all together like this.
Use these the way you use anything in Syncopation. Obviously they will make good left hand independence rhythms in bossa nova/samba, of left hand and bass drum in a jazz feel. They're also good for playing in 2/2, filling in the 8th notes. See my Funk Control series for examples of possible orchestrations. It could also be used for practicing big band style kicks and set ups.
Another practice loop, sampled from the tune Partido Alto, from the Azymuth album Light As A Feather. Ivan Conti is on drums. As I mentioned before, Partido Alto is the name of a Brazilian rhythm, a songstyle or genre of samba using standard instruments, a tune title (more than one, I'm sure), and a fusion-like drum groove. It probably refers to some other things, too— my factual knowledge of Brazilian music is not that deep. In this case, we're dealing with the 70s fusion tune, the drum groove, and the rhythm.
I'll say it is one of the great rhythms in music, which doesn't get the same attention from north American drummers as does clave, its Caribbean relative. Clave has a built-in resolution, so it's almost like a repeating “shave-and-haircut” ending— I was embarrassed to relate clave to something so hokey, but apparently the similarity has not gone unnoticed by actual serious Cuban music people. That's where its power comes from. But Brazilian music is nothing if not about forward motion, and, especially, continuation, and the Partido Alto rhythm does not have that built-in stop, and keeps skipping ahead, forever. Come to think of it, despite its similarity to clave, the Bossa rhythm (so-called “Brazilian clave” or “Bossa clave”) is the same way.
Anyway, here's the loop:
Here's the basic rhythm as it occurs in this tune; it's easy to get lost at first, so it may help to note that (in this case) there are 4 notes on the downbeats, and three on the upbeats. The half notes are just for reference, but you can play them along with the rhythm to help keep track of the downbeats.
Also try this variation, with a couple of notes added:
If you've been reading the blog regularly, you probably know that partido alto is the name of a rhythm used in Brazilian music. It's also a style of samba, a funk samba groove, and the title of a famous tune by Chico Buarque, and also a fusion-era tune... which uses that funk samba groove. There is some overlap between those things— an actual Brazilian music expert might be able to explain the distinctions between them precisely. We're transcribing the fusion tune, as recorded by Airto in 1979, on his album Touching Me Touching You. I've written it out just up to the beginning of the solos:
The phrasing is ambiguous, and at first it may be difficult for some people to even find the 1— the “downbeat” of the groove lands on the & of 1, with the snare drum (do watch the rhythm video above for help with that). Each four measure phrase could begin at the start of each line, or it could begin on the third measure of each line— the melody does land strongly on the third measure, and the solos begin on the third measure. But the keyboards enter at the beginning of a line, and putting the phrase on the third bar puts a phrase break in the middle of the unison ensemble figure (@ bars 41-44, and several other places). And that puts the bulk of the melody in the second half of the phrase, which I just don't like. The way I've written it, it's a little bit of a fractal; the shape of the larger structure is similar to the shape of the (two-measure) groove. They each start weakly, and are strong in the middle; the groove has the solid down beat on the bass drum in the second measure, and the phrase has the melody of the tune landing on bar 3. Try feeling it either way, and see what works for you.
To master the basic groove, you could just play the second and fourth lines many times. Airto appears to be using five tom toms here— if you don't have them, it doesn't matter; just play the written rhythm on whatever drums you want. The break at measures 45, 53, and a few other places, feels a little weird; make sure you take a moment to actually count it out— you may be able to listen and guess at it and be close, but you want to know exactly what's going on. Airto is not guessing at it. The starting tempo is half note = 78, but by the end of the solos it has picked up to HN=88, and settles a bit to HN=85 when the tune comes back in.
Here's more from Brazilian drummer Ivan Conti, of the band Azymuth. The tune is a moderate-tempo samba, Nome Dele E Joan, from the band's 2002 album Partido Novo. I just transcribed a few bars from the first little B section:
If you've been reading our new book Playing Samba and Bossa Nova (Kindle | print), you'll notice several things I mentioned there, starting with the set up at the beginning, on the bass drum— you hear Brazilian drummers do that a lot, Americans, not so much. He hits it lightly here. The rhythms he plays on the hihat should feel familiar if you've played through the practice rhythms in the book; the left hand is not playing an independent rhythm, it's just following the hihat, partially in unison. Notice how he handles the little ensemble figures— he plays the figure exactly on the drums, or drums and cymbal, without the bass drum continuing the groove underneath.
The partido alto rhythm, in this case; it's also a Brazilian song style, a type of funk groove, and a tune (see below). It's one of the major rhythms in Brazilian music— several of the batucada instruments often play versions of it, as do drums, piano, and guitar in groups with a bossa nova/jazz instrumentation. The basic idea of the rhythm is that there is a series of notes played on the beat, and then several offbeats, usually crossing the bar line. It's become a very important rhythm for me, in all straight 8th note styles.
To illustrate the basic structure of the rhythm, the first set of exercises changes from downbeats to offbeats at the bar line; I can't recall hearing the rhythm played that way repetitively in actual Brazilian music. More often the change happens in the middle of the measure, as in the second and third sets of exercises.
Also play the patterns with the measures reversed. You can use these as the left hand part on a bossa nova, or with both hands in unison on a samba, for starters; you can also build a half time feel funk groove like this— later we'll have more on how to do that:
This is something I've been meaning to do for some time. I like the page of bossa nova bass drum variations I did before, but it's a little difficult to visualize the left hand part along with them, so I've gone ahead and added one here. I've used the partido alto rhythm, which I favor over the standard left hand part— maybe at some point I'll slap this together with that rhythm for you. Once again, these variations are good for phrase endings and breaks— they are not meant to be played repetitively when you use them in actual music. It's a good idea to practice these along with a recording of actual Brazilian bossa nova— get hold of some Milton Banana recordings.
We're actually developing a little bit of excess capacity here, because in most of the bossa nova I listen to, bass drum variations are infrequent, and when they do happen, the left hand does not continue its independent part— it either stops, or follows the BD variation somehow. In fact, a good way to practice this page is to stop the time feel on the second measure and just play the right hand (on the cymbal or hihat) in unison with the bass drum. You can feel free to mix in the left hand (either rim click or on the drum normally) in unison with the RH/RF as well. What you're basically doing there is practicing your ensemble figures— they are usually handled simply like that.
Well, we're all samba all the time around here these days, but what the heck- the point of this enterprise is for me to post things I'm interested in, and working on, and right now I happen to be doing a lot with samba.
Samba cruzado is a way of playing samba on the drum set in which the left hand crosses over the right to play the toms. This is a style I resisted doing for some time, because role of the hands is reversed- the right hand does the filling in while the left keeps the "ride" part. For that reason none of my regular instinctive stuff works- you have to relearn how to make a phrase ending, how to fill in with the "off" hand. The reason for the crossing over is to compensate for weak left hands- apparently it was easier for Brazilian drummers to reverse the lead than it was to develop the left so it could play the snare parts cleanly.
What I've done here is begin to integrate the cruzado thing with the third surdo parts from O Bataque Carioca, played on the bass drum, while filling in with the right hand on the snare to outline caixa-type patterns. In batucada, the third surdo is the lead voice of the surdo section, filling out the quarter notes of the first and second surdos.
The exercises here are mostly little more than warm-ups- once you've gotten comfortable introducing the snare drum parts, do most of your reading from the O Bataque... page. It's a good idea to review the other samba things I've posted (under the labels at the bottom of the post, hit "samba") as well as Ed Uribe's and Duduka's books. And listen to and play as much samba as you can, of course.
Here's a little method I improvised for developing some flexibility with the samba- I put this together pretty quickly away from the drums, so I'm sure I'll add to it as I work with it in my own practice. The idea here is to get comfortable with bringing the feet in and out, making changes in dynamics, and using the bass drum independently, like a surdo player, instead of being locked into the usual dotted-8th/16th pattern. Check out the notes at the end for some fairly important things about interpretation. A good first approach is to work from a base of the most comfortable hand part, and practice making adds and changes to that.
