Plain talk about fast tempos

“Billy, can we talk?”

Henry Fonda time. I see we need to have this talk again. Everybody wants to talk about ride cymbal technique for blazing tempos. A little perspective on the subject:  

About 15 years ago a couple of friends of mine were moving to New York, and were intimidated that they would not be good enough at playing playing really fast tempos— and a list of whatever hard tunes— so we did some regular sessions to work on that. 

We concluded, after a few months of this: half note = 150-160 was manageable and playable, 165-175 was getting frenetic, above ~ 175 was getting ridiculous and we could barely keep it together. That's the approximate range of tempos on Four & More. 

Many people never play anything faster than about the highest traditional metronome marking: quarter note = 208. They'll say “let's burn one” and then count off ~200 bpm. Most other people rarely get much above ~ Passion Dance / Chasin' The Trane tempo— let's say quarter note = 240. 

Roy Haynes's magic tempo, around half note = 143— the approximate tempo on his famous recordings of Matrix, Have You Met Miss Jones?, Reaching Fourth, All The Things You Are— is extremely fast for most people. I think it's a tempo at which every ambitious player should be able to really kill it— I'll call that normal fast.   

A little above that, we're getting into the high range where the subdivisions are playable and sound like regular notes, fast but not hyperactive. 

At the very high end, half note = 200 is a nice round number, and John Riley mentions it in his book The Art of Bop Drumming, so a lot of  us think of that as the number to strive for as our upper limit. And it's truly absurd. You'll hear things in that vicinity on records occasionally, and usually everyone sounds bad except maybe the guy who's session it is. As fast as those 60s Miles records are, they never get that fast, and they never sound bad like that. 

But I don't know, here's Woody Herman's band playing Caldonia, the tune Riley mentioned, and they keep it together at around 400 bpm. They were a touring band, so they were doing this together every night. And the rhythm section breaks it up by laying out a couple of times, and playing some half time. Bob Leonard is on drums, watch carefully what he's actually doing. Watch what everyone does at these tempos— most often they're not playing a complete, perfectly composed bebop drum part.

More often where those numbers come up in everyday life is when people get called to play with a touring performer, who calls at least one absolute barn burner. That's where normal players get burned— normal excellent players. It's an unfair situation, because they're probably just playing with the guy the one time.  

My principled objection to insane tempos is that they're BS. Speeding something up to the point that “the beat” is really a subdivision, and you're supposed to be creative in a subdivision of that— it's BS. It's not music, it's a jazz-cultural terror weapon.  

[...]

...which is totally irrelevant when you were called to play with Godzilla and he's making you do something insane, and you have to do it because you took the gig and you're on stage and this is happening. You get no opportunity to get up and debate the merits of it. There will be no opportunity to rationally present your position that your priorities were directed at more substantive musical pursuits.

So, I'm not saying don't work on this, just keep it in perspective— who are you going to be playing with, and when. If you want to do ordinary jazz gigs and jam sessions locally, just be very good within traditional metronome range, up to about 208. As a broad rule, everyone should be able to do that. And there is a lot of work to do just learning to play well in that range. That's the point of this entire conversation.

If you're a serious college level student, be pushing that up into that Passion Dance range— sounding very good at quarter note = 250+. You may be called on to hack through something faster than that. 

If you're very ambitious about your playing, and want to play with the very best players in any region of the country, you want to be able to kill it at Roy Haynes tempo. Check out the Pat Metheny record Question & Answer, which has a lot of fast tunes on it— you want to be able to hang with everything on there. When you can do that, that's when you should be thinking about how will I survive when thrust into a super-fast situation.

In fact you'll want to be able to hang and sound good in the full Four & More spectrum— say, half note = 145-175. At least be able to survive at the upper end of that. 

The absolutely absurdly fast range... if you can do these other things, you can probably survive, somehow. I don't know if anyone has that perfectly worked out in the practice room and ready to go in a fully finished state when called upon to do it. Max Roach had to learn to do it on stage, and most of us do not get the opportunity to do that any more.  

POSTSCRIPT: Oh, when my guys got to New York nobody they played with was playing fast, either, and they were all playing ordinary tunes. 

Listening to Kenny Clarke

Let's do a little guided listening. I caught this on Portland's excellent jazz station, KMHD— If you don't have a good station locally, and you probably don't, you should be streaming KMHD live 24/7. The tune is Bags' Barney Blues, played by French saxophonist Barney Wilen, with Milt Jackson (on piano), Percy Heath, and Kenny Clarke.

This recording should tell you some things about playing the ride cymbal. Like, the interpretation you use does not have to be consistent all the way through the tune. Clarke plays with a strong quarter note pulse throughout— not with the accent on 2 and 4 many associate with bebop. You can also hear that he varies how he plays the “skip” note— sometimes he plays it with a triplet feel, with all the notes at a roughly even volume, sometimes he plays a dotted-8th/16th feel, with a very soft skip note. His comping is mostly played with a triplet feel, and the cymbal rhythm agrees with that— he's not playing triplets with his left hand with the dotted-8th/16th rhythm with his right.

Whatever he was doing leading up to it, at phrase endings Clarke often plays the triplet feel very emphatically, while dragging a bit, clearly conducting the time. Listen to his beat 4s. He's really bringing up the rear timewise here— he's way on the back of the beat, while Wilen plays very much on the front of the beat. Wherever Clarke is trying to take it, he succeeds, and the tune ends a little slower than it started. In his smooth way, he's playing assertively, acting as conductor of this tune.

With his comping, you can hear a lot of what I once called “the Kenny note”, which is actually a regular punctuation in swing drumming: a snare drum punctuation on the & of 3 in the second or fourth measure. As pure independence, it's an easy place to start when you're inventing a vocabulary for comping on the snare drum. We also heard a lot of that from Max Roach recently. In general, most of his comping happens at the end of the measure, and end of the phrase.

Species of ride cymbal interpretation in jazz

Following up on George Collligan's commentary on this subject: The way you play the cymbal pattern is really the center of your artistry as a jazz drummer, so let's do a little survey of the ways of interpreting it— the variations in accenting and rhythm people do to make their personal thing, and to do their job within the ensemble.

I've written the patterns in the now-standard triplet form, but swing rhythm is more complicated than that; even more so with swing rhythm on the cymbal, which can vary dramatically depending on the player, the tempo, and the style. That's beyond the scope of what we're talking about here— just don't be too triplet-fixated in your swing interpretation.

And don't overdo it with the accenting; if you listen to the music, it's fairly subtle the way the players do these things. You have to find a musical balance: if the accent obliterates the other notes of the pattern, you'll be blowing a hole in your time feel. And the cymbal is going to be making this pattern all night, and if you're hammering the 2 and 4, well, people's ears will get tired of that after the fourth or fifth hour.


50s / bop / Blakey-like
For a long time this driving interpretation was just the way you played the cymbal. This is generally played repetitively, with a moderate-to-strong accent on 2 and 4. Listen to Art Blakey, Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Paul Motian, Philly Joe Jones, Art Taylor, and many others.

In attempting be “loose”, it's easy to play the unaccented notes sloppily, which can drop the bottom out of groove— so, articulate the 1 and 3 even as you accent the 2 and 4. This interpretation is usually supported by a consistent, strong hihat on 2 and 4, so, again, it's not necessary to overdo the accent on the cymbal.


Quarter note pulse
In recent years I've been favoring this as my default way of playing jazz time. It communicates a strong groove to the other musicians and to the audience. I've heard it be effective even when a drummer's cymbal pattern doesn't sound very swinging by itself— as soon as the band comes in, it sounds great.

I don't know if this feeling is accurate, but it seems to me that I've most seen this approach in veteran players who were young in the 70s and 80s, when big-drum Tony Williams influence was at its peak. Younger players seem to favor the other styles, and you can really sound different if you emphasize and sustain this type of feel. That's just my impression— maybe it's BS.


Elvin-like
Accenting the “skip” note, sometimes “ghosting” or omitting the note after the accent. Everyone does this today, but it was once very special. When I figured out that it was a thing, I thought I was the only person in the world doing it. This is especially helpful in making a two feel without sounding hokey. It also tends to make the music lay back, so you can deploy this if you need to make that happen. Doing this in an exaggerated, overly-regular, over-practiced way can easily sound stylized, so beware.

This is often done in a mixed rhythm, with a strong pull towards a dotted quarter note pulse:

Listen to drummers who do this interpretation, especially Elvin Jones, and in the 1960s and later, Pete LaRoca and Roy Haynes. In his jazz playing with Chick Corea, Steve Gadd does a form of this, with a legato, tending-towards-straight-8th swing interpretation.

Continued after the break:

George Colligan on playing the ride cymbal

THAT cymbal— listen and copy the sound.

Some good advice from former-New York/now-Portland/Jack Dejohnette-sideman/pianist/(and drummer, too) George Colligan, on the importance of your ride cymbal interpretation in jazz. The context is that he was judging student combos at the Reno Jazz Festival:

The ride cymbal is the most important part of a jazz beat. I would say that almost every other group I listened to in Reno had the same issue; on a swing beat, the ride cymbal was being accented on 1 and 3, rather than 2 and 4, and the hi hat was being used as a crutch to keep the 2 and 4 prominent. 

Now, I'm not saying that 2 and 4 have to be super loudly accented on the cymbal, and that you should never play the hi hat on 2 and 4. It's more subtle. To my ears, a strong accent on 1 and 3 on the cymbal sounds less than optimal( i.e. not swinging). Every jazz drummer from Max Roach to Jimmy Cobb to Billy Higgins to Ralph Peterson to Bill Stewart has a different way of riding on the cymbal. But I believe in all of the great jazz drummers, the ride cymbal beat is what makes them distinctive, and what makes the music flow the best. We can identify jazz drummers by their solo vocabulary around the kit also, but the great jazz drummers were and are in demand because of the feeling they gave the groove of the music, not because of their solos! 

I was on the road recently with Bill Stewart, and I think we were talking about rudiments, and Stewart said something like, "You might know all the rudiments but if you don't get the ride cymbal together, nobody is going to call you! So the point is, the ride cymbal has to feel good. Don't worry so much about the rest of the kit; I would rather have the ride cymbal be good than having someone play all around the kit without good time.

There's more good stuff on other subjects in the post, and I suggest you head over to Colligan's Jazz Truth blog and give it a read.

It's probably time for a little in-depth discussion on how to play the ride cymbal. It's not the 50s anymore, and we don't have the luxury of just being in the present and doing our one thing; we have to be able to cover ~50 years of history like we invented it. There are a number of popular cymbal interpretations, all of which I may use in the course of an evening's playing. Coming soon...

Annals of wrong things: ride cymbal technique

I try to run a positively-focused, ah, ship around here, and I hope not to make a regular feature out of this, but occasionally things are put before you that you just have to respond to, and crankily so. In this case, it's a video by someone who wants to help us with our jazz ride cymbal technique:




I was with him 100% until he started moving. After about 0:08, I have some complaints:

• The grip in “position 2” is unlike anything I've seen in drumming, and I don't want to be told that it's “important” to play this way. What he's doing appears to be an exaggerated form of the “whip” stroke some drummers do, in which the arm leads the motion, and the thing that actually contacts the instrument— the bead of the stick— is the last thing to move. I'm not really a fan of it, even when it's done correctly, which I'll go into another time. 
• I'm in favor of a solid quarter note pulse when playing a swing feel, but this thing he's doing with ff quarter notes and a pp 'skip' note, is not musically viable— utterly useless on a real ride cymbal, playing real music. I don't know where the idea that the skip note should be “felt, not heard” came from— it wasn't from listening to music or from speaking to a professional jazz musician. 
• The elbow motion he introduces after 1:55 appears to be totally gratuitous choreography, and not a natural part of the the stroke.  
• The end result does not swing, which is supposed to be the point of all of this. Playing your time feel this way would draw some strange looks from the other musicians in a real playing situation. 

Conclusion: There was a time when you could invent improved ways of doing things and have them utterly fail in anonymity, but now, thanks to YouTube, you get to do it on a world stage, while confusing many more people than was previously possible. The technique described in this video was invented in the practice room, and is only part way through its evolution; the remainder of it— which will occur on its first usage in an actual jazz playing situation— will play out approximately like the aftermath to this photograph:

Scholar's corner: Elvin Jones plays the ride cymbal

We'll see how long this new feature lasts. I've been coming across a good number of scholarly works online, most of them not worth sharing-- in fact, I have a draft of a long post collecting some analyses of swing interpretation, which I somewhat unfairly gave the working title "The Mother Lode of Suck." I wasn't trying to be mean; it just seemed like a natural fit.

But here's a good one we'll be seeing more of: a 225-page Master's thesis by Canadian drummer Barry Elmes, titled ELVIN JONES: DEFINING HIS ESSENTIAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO JAZZ. There's a lot of good analysis in it, and his writing is more accessible than you might expect, and I encourage you to visit his site and download the complete pdf. Here is a part of his discussion of Elvin's use of the ride cymbal:

"Listening to Jones perform (on his recordings and in person) one is struck almost immediately by the prominence of his ride cymbal. In terms of balance within the ensemble, it seems to be consistently in the foreground of the music, clearly audible at all times regardless of the dynamics of the rest of the band. Jones made sure of this, often resorting to using the butt-end of the stick for more power when necessary. Jones has commented on his use of the ride cymbal:

I always try to sustain some kind of continuity with the cymbal. That’s where the consistency really is, because we no longer use a strong 4/4 bass beat, or that rigid, up-and-down, 2 and 4 on the hi-hat. So the emphasis is on the consistency of the tempo and, of course, on the continuity of that cymbal. That provides what would be the clave [the central pulse] in a Latin orchestra. 

The listener’s attention is fixed, not just by the volume of his ride cymbal, by what he chooses to play on it. Instead of the usual statement of quarter-beat pulse or the common ride cymbal pattern, Jones offers a line comprised of eighth-note phrases that feature both rhythmic and dynamic variation. These phrases are rhythmically designed in the same fashion as those of a melodic soloist: using eighth notes and/or quarter notes, placed on downbeats and/or upbeats. In the absence of pitch capability, Jones infers a certain musicality to his phrases by accenting over a much wider dynamic range than is heard in the drumming of his contemporaries or predecessors."

Continued after the break: