Double time Reed tweak: one step beyond

Launching to the outer limits of what you can reasonably do with Syncopation, verging on losing the melody rhythm as a point of reference. Or not, see what you make of it. 

Using one of the more useful double timing things (the second item on this page of warmups), and changing what we do with bass drum. Reading from pp. 34-45 in Syncopation.

After playing the plain right hand lead version of the book rhythm with hands only, the steps are: 

• Do the added 16ths— single Ls = two 16ths / LR, two Ls = LRRL, three Ls = LRRLRL. 
• Add bass drum on beat 1. 
• Add bass drum to the added RH 16th notes— immediately after the snare drum. 
• Add bass drum on any remaining isolated notes of the melody rhythm. 

Here, figure it out: 

This actually creates a kind of a double time rubadub. The bass drum added on beat 1 is a little random— don't do it if it creates any kind of problem. Like if there's not a cymbal note on 1. 

On the second page of the pdf I wrote out how lines 2-3 of the p. 38 exercise will go, with each step. 

Doing all this systematically while reading full page exercises in Reed is rather difficult— we can give ourselves a pretty wide latitude for errors/inconsistency with that— if you can read p. 38 at a bright tempo with the bass drum part landing somewhere between items 4 and 5, you'll be doing pretty well.   

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Transcription: Dannie Richmond - Straight, No Chaser

For my man Michael Griener in Berlin, some more Dannie Richmond, this time with Bennie Wallace, playing Straight No Chaser, by Thelonious Monk of course. From the 1981 album Bennie Wallace Plays Monk, on the Enja label. I transcribed the section where he plays duo with Wallace.

His playing here is very similar to some things we talk about on the site— you can see here what I meant calling him a modern player, in a way that clearly evolved on the gig, a la Roy Haynes or Mel Lewis, rather than in the practice room. 

It's a good natural example of the right hand lead thing, or “non-independent” playing— driven by the cymbal and bass drum, in broken, syncopated rhythms, with the snare drum filling in. Contrast that with a real grounded bebop kind of playing, with a steady cymbal and hihat rhythm, independent left hand, with bass drum feathering and making punctuations.   

Generally he'll lean into beats 2 and 4, often ending measures and phrases on the & of 4, rarely landing strongly on the 1. A lot of it is phrased in syncopated three beat ideas, usually contained within two measure phrases. 

The transcription begins at 2:35 in the track, and they play five 12-bar choruses before the band comes back in. The tempo is quarter note = 238—  a number deserving of some kind of special status, because I see it a lot. Seems to be about the bottom fast tempo. A good first number to have in mind when learning to play faster tempos.  

I notated three cymbals here, but it hardly matters. There is probably more snare drum activity than I was able to hear— he plays it very softly at times. It's also hard to hear the hihat for much of it, and I gave up on including it part way in. Where I did write it, it seems significant to the way he's phrasing that passage. 

I may do some further analysis of this— there are clearly some emergent rubadub type patterns in there, and some kind of Reed system to be gleaned from it.   

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Transcription: Max soloing

On this second of two days of major acts of white supremacist violence here in this paradise we call “the USA”, let's retreat into art, with part 2 of the thing from the other day: Max Roach's drum solo on A Little Sweet, from his record The Many Sides of Max.  

That's what music is for. It's our job to do it with dedication in the face of a world gone totally insane. 

Max's drum solo begins at 1:49 in the track. 

Much of this consists of something I called “Max's rubadub”, because of its similarity to Mel Lewis's thing. The bass drum, cymbal, and snare drum are doing a kind of rolling, integrated, New Orleans type of thing. It's worth your time to learn some two and four bar excerpts from this, and some single measures. 

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Transcription: Mel Lewis comping

On Chess Mates, from a 1985 Joe Lovano record, Tone Shapes & Colors— a live recording with Mel Lewis on drums, and Kenny Werner on piano. A lot of what I'd call “non-independent” drumming here, lots of examples of his rubadub thing. A good example of how to play bright tempos economically while still sounding like you're doing something.

The YouTube video won't embed, so hit this link to hear it.

The form is short and unusual, I guess we'll call it ABC: 

A - 12 bars  |  B - 4 bars 3/4 + 1 bar 4/4  |  C - 8 bars  

That B section is not a trap— it has 16 beats total, same as four bars of 4/4, so on the blowing you could miss it and not get lost. He probably actually wrote the whole thing in 4/4— on the solos Mel plays it like it's a figure in 4/4. Playing the head it would be easier to count it in 3/4; I'm writing it 3/4 to outline the figure, which is played pretty strongly even on the solos.   

Here are a couple of choruses of Mel's playing during Kenny Werner's piano solo, starting at 4:32. Tempo is 258. 

He plays the hihat pretty softly— not necessarily quiet, but with a soft foot, not a lot of force, with some splash sounds, and the volume is irregular. He's mashing the stick into the snare drum a bit, so a lot of the notes have a wide attack, not quite a buzz stroke. All of the tom tom notes are played with the right hand. Any time the bass drum is played on an offbeat, it's not played strongly.

There's a little more happening with the bass drum than I notated, but I'm not hearing any evidence of regular “feathering”, that he talks about so much. Maybe he's doing it, it's up to you how much you want to struggle with that. 

Bars 3 and 4 have the fundamental rubadub lick he plays throughout this. Maybe the best individual phrase of that is bars 30-33. Also note the fills in bars 25 and 46— sticking is RRLL RRLL both measures.

Also look at the way he phrases the last four bars, 47-50— he does that kind of phrase often: 

First bar: big accents on 1 and 4. 
Second-third  bars: nails down time, brings the hihat in. 
Fourth bar: fill / end of phrase

He does that most of the time here, actually.

What he's doing is modern, but this is definitely night club drumming, an evolved texture from playing in clubs, doing that job. There's nothing contrived about it, none of our usual jazz student worry about ideas or creativity or being interesting or using our technique.      

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You'll have to hit this link to hear the track in a new tab. 

Art Blakey - The Core

Here's something great that deserves much better than the cursory treatment I'm about to give it: The Core, from Art Blakey's record Free For All. Blakey's doing a little bit of an Elvin Jones thing on this record— like it says, it's very hard core. 

On a forum someone asked what he's doing on this tune. On a big part of it he's playing off of this piano figure from the intro, that recurs for extended passages throughout:

He does a sort of rubadub treatment— these are two two-measure examples from the intro: 

It gets pretty raggedy, so the transcription hardly does it justice. The occasional triplets are hardly calculated; when playing at the edge of your abilities things can weird— things emerge that are not in your control. A lot of other stuff happens. There's a section with some horn hits. Part of the solos swing. Sometimes he deviates from that basic figure during those sections— he'll extend playing in 3 over 4/4 time a la Elvin. It's hot as hell in my office right now (101° in Portland today) and I have neither the patience nor the focus to listen through and figure out the form.  

Jazz fills with Stone

Another item from a drum lesson. A student and I were playing around with Stick Control, using it as a launch pad for jazz fills. The starting place was my post on rubadub using Stick Control— we went someplace else with it. We can use some rubadub type moves, but it's not the main thing. 

First, play one measure of any line from Stick Control, pp. 5-7, on the snare drum, swing interpretation. Let's start with line 4: 

No problem. The nature of a fill is that it happens in the context of a time feel, so we need to get away from the cymbal, and back to it. Put the last note of the pattern on a cymbal, on the & of 4— as always with a cymbal accent, add bass drum: 

Playing a fill in jazz time, it's most natural to end the time feel on 1, and then start the fill— whatever is written in the book, the 1 of the fill measure will be a RH on the cymbal: 

That's the basic framework. You can then try moving the right hand around the drums: 

To get a non-hokey swing interpretation, usually you'll emphasize the right hand, and don't habitually accent the down beats with either hand. 

With sticking patterns ending with a left hand, you have some options for how to end the fill. You could end with an accent on a drum on the & of 4, and come in with time on the cymbal on 1, normal volume— no accent:

You can add cymbal to that & of 4 accent: 

Or you can just end on the & of 4 with a cymbal and bass drum accent, played with hand indicated in the sticking, or just with the right hand, regardless of the written sticking: 

It's a starting point for trying some things. Play around with it for a few days, and you'll find some useful patterns, and some patterns that don't want to sound goo— so you play them a little longer trying to figure it out. A lot of things in drumming you don't need to work comprehensively— relentlessly drilling all 72 patterns at all tempos— to get something useful from them. Better to find a few easy things you'll do all the time, and improve at some ideas that are hard for you to make sound good. 

EZ set ups and partial filler

I'm working through this with a student. It's an easy reading item for the drum set, with a narrow set of parameters, using my tresillo inversions page (lines 1-8 only), my tresillo inversion combinations page, and one of my full page reading pages— the one comprised of all notes at two- and three-8th note intervals.

The idea is to become familiar with some basic ways a drummer fills out a rhythm, adding set ups to the syncopated hits, and adding a little more filler to create a rhythmic flow, almost in a rubadub style. In this same unit of stuff I'm also having the student fill out the complete 8th note grid, which we don't need to talk about here. 

Start by printing out the pages above, and playing through them, with the entire rhythm part played with your right hand on a cymbal, plus the bass drum in unison. Ignore the stems-down “bass drum” part. Then add the left hand the following ways: 

Adding set ups
A set up is something a drummer plays to help the band catch a syncopated ensemble hit or figure. For example, if the horns play an isolate accent on an &, the drummer may set it up by hit a single note on the down beat before it.  

So anytime a note on an & comes up on these pages, set it up with the left hand on the snare drum on the downbeat before it: 

If there are two or more closely-spaced &s in a row, set up only the first one: 

So this line from the full page exercise above: 

With set ups added, would be played like this: 

 

More filler
You'll notice that on all of these pages, the notes are spaced at two- and three-8th notes intervals. The parts are 100% quarter notes or dotted-quarter notes— or their equivalents using ties and rests. To develop a more flowing texture, we'll add a left hand note at the end of every dotted quarter note or equivalently-spaced note. So the plain tresillo rhythm, which starts with two dotted quarters, would be played like this: 

Play this equivalent rhythm the same way: 

So, reading these exercises you have to be able to distinguish between a quarter note spacing and a three-8th note spacing: 

With the extra filler, play that line like this:

Another line with the three-8th intervals indicated: 

And how you would play it: 

Here's how you would play that same line, playing only the set ups, according to the rules above: 

Play this entire method with the right hand on the cymbal, left hand on snare drum. You could reverse the hands if you choose. I would also play it entirely with the right hand, and entirely with the left hand— and possibly with both hands in unison, playing two different cymbals, and unisons on two different drums, or flams on the same drum.  

This is not really a natural reading situation, of course— I narrowed the parameters to just those two rhythm intervals for the sake of overall simplicity, and for establishing a flow. This has been partly a reading/interpretation exercise, illustrating the way you might actually interpret rhythms on a chart or lead sheet; and partly a way of generating a certain type of improvised rhythmic flow. 

Mel Lewis intro - One for Pat

I'm just taunting myself now— I've got this book of intros sitting around, almost completed, and I keep finding new things that should probably go in it, but I don't have the nerve to open it up and add them it because it will mean reworking the whole thing. That's probably what's going to have to happen.

Whatever. Here's a little intro by Mel Lewis, on the tune One for Pat, from Got 'Cha, Lewis's first record as leader, released in 1956. I never saw or heard the record before, I just saw it listed in Chris Smith's book on Lewis, The View From The Back Of The Band— it's out in paperback now, so there's no excuse for not buying it.

The tempo is around quarter note = 250, and it's a funny little thing— as Paul Motian said about Max Roach, “not-so-correct”: 

The main attraction is the rubadub passage from the middle of the second measure to the middle of the last measure. Just move your right hand to the tom tom in the third measure; left hand stays on teh snare drum. The hihat is played open all the way through.

Transcription: Max Roach comping

Part 3 of a little mini series, looking at some comping examples by Tony Williams, Mickey Roker, and now Max Roach. This is Max's playing during Clifford Brown's solo on Flossie Lou, from Clifford Brown & Max Roach at Basin Street. The solo is 32 bars long, and the transcription begins at 0:45.

Max plays the hihat on 2 and 4 throughout, but I've only written it where he plays something different, or where seeing it will be helpful. He also plays the bass drum throughout, but I've only written the accents. It's audible between those frequent & of 3/& of 4 comping hits, but I mostly didn't write it in. In this small sample, Max always hits the cymbal on the downbeat after an accent on the & of 4; compare that with the Mickey Roker transcription, where he would often not hit the 1 (or ghost it) after an accent. It's a subtle point, but that's the kind of stuff we check out.

Note the rubadub-like meter-within-meter phrase in the last four bars of the chorus. I always check out what drummers play in the first 1-4 bars behind a new soloist— that's the last bar on the page before the slashes.

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Rubadub with Stone

Reversing a years-long boycott, I've been using the book Stick Control quite a bit for drum set applications lately. I guess it's unavoidable that sometimes in playing the drums, we think in terms of stickings. This is an easy drill for doing a rubadub-type move with the exercises on pp. 5-7.

In its basic form, rubadub, as described by Chris Smith, is a three-8th note pattern played in */4 meters. The sticking is LRR, with the L on the snare drum, the first R on a cymbal + bass drum, and the second right on a tom tom:

The sticking alone is:

After learning to play the basic lick in 4/4, you then improvise with it, mix it up, and move it around the drums in different ways. If you can't do that by just winging it, this Stone-based method will help in opening up some possibilities.

It's quite simple. Start by playing the patterns with this basic drumset orchestration— I've started calling this “natural” orchestration: 

R = right hand on cymbal + bass drum

L = left hand on snare drum

Play with a swing feel. 

Then, wherever there are two Rs in a row, play the first R on the cymbal/ BD, second R on a tom tom:

Do that with patterns 3-4, 5-8, 14-18, 24-26, 33, 35-36, 41, 44-46, 65, and 68. 

You could do the same move where there are more than two Rs in a row. Just hit the first one on the cym/BD, and the rest on the toms:

I suppose you could default playing the Rs on the toms, only moving to the cymbal when there's more than one R. So pattern 5, a paradiddle sticking, would be played:

Here's that same sticking with my regular orchestration:

With anything to do with rubadub I would be thinking about moving both hands around the drums, and playing ideas as part of a regular jazz texture. Since it is used as a way of playing setups and kicks, and filling in between them, I would be aware of the rhythm of the cymbal/bass drum notes— those are the kicks that the rest of the pattern is setting up. A subject for another post, probably.  

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 - cells

This Max Roach Freedom Suite transcription is like a text book on jazz comping— one method of it, anyway. I'm having my students extract some two and three beat cells from the transcribed excerpts; here I've written them out for the first three examples from that original page. You can easily do this with the other excerpts— I don't know, some people need to see something written out and an “official” lesson made out of it to take it seriously.

Don't think of this as an ostinato based system; we're not starting with a cymbal pattern and adding “independent” snare and bass drum parts. These are all complete three-voice ideas in themselves— and that's the way you should learn them, all at once.

Play these with a swing interpretation. Try it with the Tunji loop. The cells in 3 you can also play in 4/4. They'll resolve to start on beat 1 after three measures. You can also get some usable 5-beat “cells” from that original page of excerpts, or my page with triplets added, as well.

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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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Max's rubadub - transcribed phrases

Some excerpts from a very large transcription I'm working on— Max Roach's entire performance on Freedom Suite, by Sonny Rollins, which I plan on releasing as an e-book. All 19 bloody minutes of it. These excerpts from the first section of the piece highlight Max's rubadub-like thing I mentioned in the linked post.

The concept and underlying pattern is almost exactly the same as Mel Lewis's thing*, except Max maintains the complete cymbal rhythm, which stays in 4, or shifts backwards/forwards once or twice in a four bar phrase— it doesn't have the running 3/4 feeling of Mel's thing. Max's thing really seems to hang off of a RLRR RLRR sticking pattern, in swing 8th notes; there are a lot of snare hits on the & of 1/3. Hit the link above to see that broken down.

* - That is, Mel Lewis's thing as we've been exploring it on this site— which is entirely based on Chris Smith's very helpful explanation of it. I need to make some transcriptions of Mel's thing and get a clearer idea of how he actually played it.

To highlight the idea we're studying here, I've removed all dynamics and articulations, and edited a few of them slightly. Many of the four bar examples can be played two bars at a time, repeating. On the recording there is very little audible hihat played with the foot; you can play it on 2 and 4, or leave it out.

I've been focusing on how this connects to Mel Lewis's playing, but also see Billy Higgins's playing for something very similar to this. Higgins was a generation later, and was very influenced by Max.

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Page o' coordination: Max's rubadub?

This is a page of jazz comping exercises based on Max Roach's playing on Sonny Rollins's Freedom Suite, which I'm transcribing right now. There's a lot of interplay between the snare drum and bass drum, and there's clearly a concept happening; everything seems to hang off of comping notes on the & of 1/& of 3. It jumped out at me immediately like “this is a thing”, very similar to Mel Lewis's rubadub thing, but not.

How many pages of jazz coordination patterns does the world need? I don't know. This isn't about writing more patterns, it's about forming a concept. Max's playing on Freedom Suite, Mel Lewis's thing, those are concepts. Also with John Riley's thing, with all the things we do with Syncopation, there's a concept. You don't really get that by just playing through the endless junk in Advanced Techniques, or whatever jazz book.

Swing the 8th notes. Use patterns 1, 7, and 13 as your key. Think of them as a sticking pattern played in a swing rhythm: RLRR RLRR. Or RBRR RBRR. Or the two combined with ex. 13-18. Use those as your foundation, learn them well, and hang the added notes off of them.

If you listen to the recording there's a lot more happening than is represented in this one little idea. I'll probably rewrite this page, or at least add to it, if I can deduce any kind of formula to Max's thing.

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Rub-a-dub lesson: Fables of Faubus

Another example of rub-a-dub applied, using a passage from the Charles Mingus tune Fables of Faubus. In previous lessons we've just used this idea on the head of some tunes as an exercise. Here we're using rub-a-dub for its actual purpose: setting up, playing, and filling in between arranged ensemble figures. When you play Fables of Faubus, you could actually play this part of the tune this way... if you choose, after having duly listened to the way Dannie Richmond plays it on Mingus's recorded versions.

Which... by the way: if you do play Fables, and are reading it out of the Real Book, that chart has this figure notated incorrectly. It puts the hit on 3 in the third measure on the & of 2— it's written as 1&-&. That's wrong. Make the band get their pencils out and change it to what is written here.

Practice each line individually, repeating several times at least— the figure doesn't repeat on the actual tune though, remember. The accents just indicate the rhythm of the figure; you don't necessarily have to accent all of those notes on the drums. I've given the running rub-a-dub lick in all its inversions, and a couple of lines with the lick modified to better fit the figure. As always, this is written in the initial orchestration, with the right and on the cymbal, and left hand on the snare drum. As you learn it you can move the left hand around the drums, and move the right hand note with no bass drum to the toms or snare.

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Here, I've made a loop which with which you can practice this:

Two hemiola coordination patterns

This is partly about rhythmic education, partly about drilling a couple of basic drumset coordination ideas, and partly about education on the polyrhythmic foundation of common funk rhythms. It is based on this page of hemiola variations, starting with the snare drum, and with the bass drum. I've put the patterns in some common meters, repeating unbroken, and in single measures of 2 and 4, which disrupts the pattern. I've also inverted those single-measure patterns, putting the beginning of the pattern on beat 2 (in 2/4) or 3 (in 4/4). The logic should be obvious when you play through the exercises.

You'll note a certain similarity to our recent rub-a-dub series of posts— file them in the same family of materials.

Put these patterns in context by playing them along with any of my practice loops. Playing through both pages of patterns a few times should be enough to learn everything you need from this.

Patterns with a bass drum on 1 and/or a snare drum on 2 and/or 4 suggest a funk time feel; patterns with the snare drum on 1 suggest a funk fill. For patterns starting with cymbal only, you can try adding a bass drum on 1.

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Rub-a-dub lesson: Doxy

Another rub-a-dub lesson— getting as much of this in as I can before the end of the year, so there's a robust section on it in the upcoming 2018 Book of the Blog. This page is based on Doxy, a tune that should be familiar to everyone studying jazz.

I've done two different versions; the first sticks as close as possible to the basic rub-a-dub pattern all the way through. There are a couple of small deviations, but it's remarkable how well simply playing the pattern fits the tune. The second version starts on a different inversion of the basic pattern, and the pattern is changed more to fit the tune musically. The straight pattern may work surprisingly well, but it can sound a little formulaic if it's not broken up.

The stems-up part is the drum exercise, and the stems-down part is the rhythm of the tune:

Swing the 8th notes, of course. After you can play the exercises as written, you can begin moving your left hand to the tom toms, as well as any right hand notes that don't have a bass drum in unison. You could also omit any bass drum notes that are not in unison with a melody note, and move all of those right hand notes around the drums.

Here's a familiar lead sheet for Doxy:

Reminder: While it may come in handy for soloing over this form, and for playing some parts of the tune, this is not a lesson for how to play Doxy. You have to listen to recordings for that. What we're doing is learning to use this drumming pattern to set up and accompany normal jazz rhythms, of which this tune is a good example.

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Here is a practice loop for working on this, sampled from the Miles Davis album Bags' Groove. It includes the head of the tune plus one chorus of Miles's solo:

3+2 rub-a-dub phrases

Continuing in eking out a way of learning this rub-a-dub concept, here are a couple of pages of combinations of three-beat and two-beat patterns:

Practice these in the written meters, then try putting them into straight 3/4 and 4/4... and 5/4, if you want. There are a couple of ways you can do this:

1. Play the practice combination one time during a two or four measure phrase in 3/4, 4/4, or 5/4 time. As needed, add beats to the combination to complete the phrase. For example, if you're playing the seven-beat 3+2+2 combination in a four-measure phrase in 3/4:

Or the five-beat 3+2 combination played in two measures of 4/4:

You could also add the extra beats at the beginning of the phrase, and play the rub-a-dub combination at the end. At first play the extra beats as quarter notes on the cymbal, then improvise a time feel in the style you're practicing, or a fill.


2. Repeat the combinations, with no extra beats, along with a metronome or practice loop in 3/4, 4/4, or 5/4. Obviously, if you're playing a five-beat pattern in an eight-beat phrase (two measures of 4/4), the beginning of the pattern is not always going to fall on the first beat 1 of the phrase. Play along and listen to the click, then try counting out loud in the meter of the phrase while playing the practice pattern.

Some combinations of patterns/meters/phrase lengths will take a long time to resolve back to the beginning of the pattern falling on beat 1 of the first measure of the phrase. You can work that out if you wish; I think learning to count an eight-measure phrase in any meter while repeating the practice pattern is enough for this stage of learning this system.

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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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