Genre rant

A small complaint on genre in music, that has been hanging around my drafts folder a long time. Whenever I'm slow to write any new stuff, and am desperate for content, I dump one of these on you. 

So, genre: I hate it. I'm not given to hyperbole, but the word and concept are death.  

Genre = stereotype
It's a terrible way to think about music. Normal people are happy and comfortable thinking in terms of stereotypes, and will judge an entire field of music based on half-hearing a few examples of it, but musicians need to deal with specifics. 

True genre music is niche music, subculture music— Surf, Chanson, Gypsy Jazz, electric Blues, Rockabilly, etc. They have their charms, and some legitimate works of art, but continued exposure to them leads to a feeling of sameness. What attracts people seems to be a vibe, rather than any memorable or unique musical moments. 

Example: listen to Blitzkrieg Bop by The Ramones— it's a lot of fun, and a great song. But getting deeper into the rest of the album it's on, boredom sets in. It's all a variation on a formula— and there's not enough substance to the formula to sustain interest over a 29 minute album. Every song can't be Blitzkrieg Bop. They're not good enough writers. 

Here, listen to this one, all of it: 

That mild boredom you're experiencing? That's genre. 

You get something similar checking out some surf music on the strength of the Dick Dale track Misirilou, as used in the movie Pulp Fiction, or checking out 1960s French pop after hearing Francoise Hardy's nice little song Le Temps de l'Amour. In junior high school some friends had some Ted Nugent records— they liked hearing power chords on the guitar, and you could get the records practically free through Columbia House. We got bored with that fast, and we were 14 years old. Genre. Bad writing.   

Maybe the highest expressions of genre is in world music, in the music of local cultures. You'll find areas of music where everything by one artist basically sounds the same. It may be great music, but they're doing one narrow thing. Carlos Embale in Rumba, and Luis Gonzaga in Baiao are examples of that. As an outsider it can be hard to listen to a lot of that just via recordings, without the live social aspect. 

Movies
In Barton Fink a writer struggles dealing with genre— he's a theater writer who moved to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter, and has been assigned the job of writing a “rasslin' picture”, which he has no idea how to do. He can't write formula, and nobody around him can comprehend that:

You could watch Akira or Ghost In The Shell, and think, hey, I could get into this anime business. Then you try to watch literally anything else in that world, and it's absolutely the worst, most insipid, repetitive, formulaic, boring crap product in the world. You have just moved from the world of specifics, which is the world of art, into the world of genre. 

Now go onto whatever streaming service you use and search for any real movie: Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Dr. Strangelove, Repo Man, Down By Law, The Limey, Robocop, The Long Goodbye (yes, all Gen X guy-favored movies). Since they probably don't have the movie you want, they'll suggest some things “like” it, and notice how bloody wrong they all are. You have just witnessed the impossibility of algorithming art, of genre-ifying it.

What's not genre
Think for a moment: how many songs are there that are anything like Happy Together, Time After Time, Tax Man, When Doves Cry, Tears Of A Clown, Chain Of Fools, Pinball Wizard, Mexican Radio, Shock The Monkey, Sympathy For The Devil, I Wish, Sweet Jane, Don't Worry, Be Happy? Compare that Ramones records with Q: Are We Not Men? by Devo. They all go in the “rock” bins or the “R&B” bins, but they're unique works.  

The strength of American and British pop music is that within a basic framework, there's an attempt to be unique. Maybe they hit on a universal aesthetic as well, but mainly the music is not simply genre. The mission of pop craft is to hammer out a track that is instantly catchy and compelling, that demands repeated listening, that is also unique enough to stand out from everything else bombarding people's ears. 

The same is true of American Songbook tunes— the ones that are still played have something unique about them. The not-good ones are the same stock ii-V-I thing, and seem thin and not real satisfying when you play them. I can't think of any titles because I never thought about them ever again. Sonny Rollins is kind of perverse about playing bad tunes, so you could look in his catalog. 

Jazz is not genre
Jazz is the subject of a lot of genre thinking, but it is not genre— it's a field, a community, a lineage. When someone says I don't like jazz, or I like jazz, the correct response is, which jazz, what artist, what record? That's the only meaningful conversation to have about it. 

Duke Ellington is not genre, Miles Davis is not genre, Weather Report is not genre. There's only one Kind of Blue, Out Of The Afternoon, Out Of The Cool. You'd think, OK, most records are just 3-5 dudes playing tunes, then why is there only one Lester Young Trio, Milestones, Nefertiti, Real McCoy, Three Quartets, Trio Jeepy, Time On My Hands, Live At The Pershing?  

There are a few people who have recorded so many records you start to feel some of that genre type of boredom through over exposure, and maybe they didn't have a real special plan for any one record. I'm not naming names. Maybe they were on a European label that was excited about them, and they were touring a lot, and put out way too much. Can't say. I'm thinking David Murray. 


More regular blog stuff coming— I'm very busy with unrelated things, but I've also got some exciting new stuff brewing. Stick around. 

Feel and style

Just a brief discussion of the musical terms feel and style. In normal professional musician usage they are often interchangeable, referring to the type of accompaniment to be played by the rhythm section. What kind of a feel do you want on this? What's the style? Swing, Bossa, Funk, Ballad, Calypso, etc. 

Possibly feel is more immediate to actually playing music, style may be more common in general conversation. Or not. That's my impression, different people/communities talk differently. Often terms are never explicitly defined, you just learn them in the field, in the course of lessons, playing, hanging, and rehearsing. 

We also say feel to mean playing in a way suggestive of a meter different from what is written. We may play a half time feel on a tune that is a fast 4/4. Or a double time feel on a slow 4/4. Or a 12/8 feel on a 4/4 ballad.  

In internet drumming conversation feel usually refers to the idea of having some kind of personal groove, a personal “feel.” “I need to work on my feel.” “My playing lacks feel.” I almost never hear professionals use the word that way— maybe in casual conversation, very broadly. 

That amateur usage is nice and non-specific— it's mysterious, so there's no way to be wrong, and you can talk about it forever. And it excuses lack of success, like, I just ain't got it. Usually what will improve a player's so-called feel is to fix their dynamics, time, and accuracy. And listen better, and play better stuff— all the things professionals spend their time thinking about. 

There's a common amateur usage of style is closely related to that— they'll talk about “my style”, meaning “the few things I know how to play, and like to play.”

That's similar to style in terms of being a stylist— not usually a desirable thing for players. It means you do your one thing and that's it. The focus is on creating a style and that's the product. Listen to any rock singer— Sting always does his Sting thing, no matter what he's singing. Watch the old We Are The World video from the 80s— all of those rock guys put their whole personal thing into the four words they get to sing. Billie Holliday is a pretty quintessential stylist as well. 

I don't know how a supporting player even does that, it's more a thing of front line performers— vocalists and some horn players. A telling exchange in an Elvin Jones clinic in Portland— he's normally thought of as being a very high-style player, right?— was when he was asked about developing “his style”, and he was skeptical that he had a style. I had to think for a long time about what's he doing then? 

Elvin has a particular voice, but it's a by-product of doing the real job, which is to build a piece of music with other musicians. It's not something you contrive. 

Among musicians, style is also used more broadly, relating to genre— a set of stylistic features and ways of writing, playing, and arranging that define a genre.

It's good to try to lose those amateur definitions— they just lead to fuzzy thinking about all the wrong things. 

Snare drummers vs. drum set players

This came up in the Neil Peart piece: the idea of snare drummers as opposed to drum set players. People who play the drums as a single four limb instrument vs. people who are essentially hands players, rudimental players.

In this video (embedding is disabled) Jeff Hamilton distinguishes between snare drummers and cymbal players— cymbalists, if you will. I would say whole drum set players, because there's a lot more to that approach than just playing a cymbal. But the cymbalist label is accurate to the extent that a lot of what you play follows from what you do with your right hand.

This extended quote from Elvin Jones, from his 1982 Modern Drummer interview by Rick Mattingly, became the foundation for my concept of the drum set:

“[The drum set] is one instrument, and I would hasten to say that I take that as the basis for my whole approach to the drums. It is a single musical instrument of several components. Naturally, you've got tom-toms scattered around, and the snare drum is in front of you, and the bass drum is down there, and you have cymbals at different levels. But all in all, just as a piano is one instrument, a drumset is one instrument. That is not to say that the cymbal isn't an instrument. But in order for it to be an instrument you have to use it as an instrument. They are individual instruments if you have them set up that way and you have a tom-tom player and a bass drum player and so on. Okay, then they are individual instruments. It just depends on how one chooses to apply it. So I think that's probably where people get confused. 

In a dance band, or a jazz band—small group, big band, combo— then this is a single instrument. You can't isolate the different parts of the set any more than you can isolate your left leg from the rest of your body. Your body is one, even though you have two legs, two arms, ten fingers, and all of that. But still, it's one body. All of those parts add up to one human being. It's the same with the instrument. People are never going to approach the drumset correctly if they don't start thinking of it as a single musical instrument. 

We live in a world where everything is categorized and locked up into little bitty compartments. But I have to insist that the drumset is one. This is the way it should be approached and studied and listened to, and all of the basic philosophies should be from that premise. If you learn it piecemeal, that's the way you're going to play it. You have to learn it in total.”

It was settled once and for all after I spent about ten years in the 00s-10s working out a lot of snare drum stuff, only to discover it made zero difference* in my actual playing. No matter how much snare stuff I got together, I couldn't sit down at the drum set and just play hands stuff. Or rather I did not, because it's not how I play. I didn't start hacking out snare drum stuff in my solos.

You can recognize the difference if you listen to someone and a lot of rudiments jump out at you, and if you see a lot of hand to hand motions. Banging out accents on the toms, with more worked out crossover licks and whatnot. And more sparse, traditional, and simplistic— or more worked out— use of the feet.



Drumset guys will be guided more by the right hand, and will have more interactive use of the feet, and be more sound oriented. They will sound more melodic (or melodic in a more sophisticated way), and textural, and less choppy, maybe with more worked out patterns between three or four limbs.



You might give a listen to these players, while thinking about these categories of approaches:

Snare drummers:
Buddy Rich
Louis Bellson
Ed Shaughnessy
Philly Joe Jones

Drum set players:
Mel Lewis
Roy Haynes
Paul Motian
Jon Christensen
John von Ohlen
Tony Williams (60s!)
Bob Moses

Obviously it's a complex thing, and often players won't fit neatly into one category. To me the whole instrument approach is more modern and more conducive to musicality, but there are obviously a lot of great drummers who did the other thing. And assessing players is really not the point— we're just looking for something to inform how we think about our approach to the instrument. We'll do some guided listening about it later.

* - Not zero difference; it did give me dynamic control. But for the actual content of what I played, it made no difference.

Page o' coordination: Cinquillo

Here's an easy page o' coordination based on a basic bell rhythm, known in Latin music circles as “cinquillo”— which basically means quintuplet. It's not a quintuplet, it's the indicated 5-note rhythm, but that's what the word means. It's a good rhythm for a variety of Latin feels, or pseudo-Latin feels, especially for bright tempos, R&B situations, show music situations, or situations where the other players aren't real sophisticated, and get thrown off by more complex bell patterns.

Learn all the patterns with your hands only, then add the right and left foot parts, one at a time. Then you can combine the different feet parts. You can move your left hand between the snare (rim click) and high tom for most of these. If you want to get deeper into it, you can do the stock moves I always do with these POCs, and vary your articulations and dynamics— rim shots, dead strokes, buzzes, whatever. Play the right hand on a cowbell, cymbal bell, hihat, or the rim/shell of the floor tom. Play it as rim shots on the snare drum (snares off) for a pseudo-calypso feel.

Get the pdf

Drumming myths

A decent piece from the Modern Drummer site— 12 Drumming Myths Debunked. Here are the entries that interest me, with my comments on them:

2. Mistakes are always bad.
Honor thy mistakes with repetition—I think the legendary Brian Eno said that. If it’s the right mistake, and you react quickly enough to it and then either repeat it artfully or create some cool variation of it, you could end up being called a drumming genius. 

Plus, if you obsess over playing everything just right, you’ll likely have trouble relaxing enough to groove well. And you’ll have trouble opening yourself up to the unknown, which is something great artists continuously strive for. 

So you blew that fill—what are they gonna do, arrest you? Lighten up and have some fun.

As I always tell my students, mistakes are real music trying to happen. They're things you know how to play, but that you haven't accepted you know how to play yet. Obviously, there are mistakes and there are mistakes; you don't want to drop beats or rush terribly. But things that you didn't mean to play, but are basically in time with a good sound, are not mistakes. It's an especially valuable philosophy in the practice room: playing out of books, mistakes are actually natural variations on the written thing. When they happen, recognize what you did “wrong”, and learn to play that on purpose, as well as the “correct” pattern you were trying to learn. Learning the written idea, plus all of the things you did leading up to learning it, it becomes living vocabulary; a little related body of stuff to play, instead of just the one written-out book-thing.

3. More resonance is always good.
About fifteen, twenty years ago, the drum industry fell all over itself trying to create mechanisms that allow toms to resonate as freely as possible. The trend continues today, with some manufacturers shackling their otherwise gorgeous kits with hideous-looking suspension mounts in response to this “need.” 

It seems to me that a blind ambition toward more resonance represents a case of art following technology, rather than the other way around. Yes, a less choked drum can often mean a better-sounding drum, and the resultant longer sustain of a note can be a desired effect. The opposites are obviously sometimes true as well, given the existence of things like Moongel and electronic gates. 

In cases like this I find it helpful to think about all of the profound pieces of recorded music that were produced before the advent of suspension mounts. Would Bonzo’s drums on Zeppelin IV sound better if they’d been recorded with hung toms? How about Art Blakey’s on Orgy in Rhythm? Or Nick Mason’s on Dark Side of the Moon?
And check this out: Freely resonating toms can actually make it harder for you to be heard. Controlled drum sounds can be more easily mixed, manipulated, and amplified, allowing them to be better heard without obliterating the other instruments. 

While it’s cool that mechanical “improvements” like suspension mounts give us more options, be careful to separate the marketing from the motivation. In this day and age of overly programmed music, it’s always wise to question the importance of any piece of technology, no matter how seemingly benign.

Mind you, Bonham's drums and Blakey's drums were basically unmuffled on those recordings. The author seems to mainly be taking issue with mounting systems. Personally, I don't think RIMS-type mounts vs. standard mounts is the big issue— it's more about unmuffled, single ply heads vs. dampened heads. There is a time and place for each; for many years I had all my drums, bass drum included, wide open in all situations. As it turns out, there are times you want to use some muffling: when playing on the softer end of the spectrum, or with incompetent soundmen, or in the recording studio, based on consulting with your engineer.

Several more after the break:

Hot takes: 49 Styles Every Drummer MUST KNOW!!!

Not a cha cha. Not anything.

Note: The random Internet-sourced written example to the left is included for comedic purposes only. Do not learn. Groove not good. 

I was flipping through an old copy of Drum! Magazine (issue 215, May, 2014), and saw this article: 49 Styles Every Drummer Must Know. It's a subject I wanted to talk about, and if someone else has already done most of the work, all the better. It's a decent piece, but maybe it's not actually possible to cover the subject adequately in a single magazine article. That's fine. What I'll do is just give one garden-variety professional's opinion about the styles listed, and their importance for a working drummer as I see it. I'm not going to print out the grooves from the article, but I'll try to give some kind of link or book reference. It's better to listen and copy than it is to just read a one-measure beat out of the magazine and leave it at that. There are a lot of these, so I'll do the quickest takes possible: 

Samba
Immediately you realize that, no, you can't really communicate a style in one paragraph and a single, one-measure groove example. My book Playing Samba and Bossa Nova I think is about the shortest practical introduction possible for a major style, of which samba is one.

Mambo
I don't know why he sandwiched this Cuban groove in between two Brazilian grooves. Cuba != Brazil. This is a major drumming genre, and a demanding one at that, and everyone should spend a good amount of time with it. The language applies to a variety of Cuban/Salsa styles, as well as north American quasi-Latin styles.


Bossa Nova
If you do gigs with jazz musicians, you will play a lot of bossa novas, and you have to have some kind of personal relationship to this music to make it not suck for everyone. My samba/bossa nova field manual is highly recommended. Highly recommended.


Reggae
Everything I know about reggae I learned from the Peter Tosh album Equal Rights, and a handful of other things. If I was going to get serious about this music, I'd be doing it on a 70s model, working on getting together the sound of my drums, my old school one-drop, and my lead-ins. In more modern playing, you can almost just play straight pop/funk stuff, and let the context make it be reggae. You do have to do some listening, though. It's been awhile since I've done a straight bar band gig, so I don't know how often this comes up these days.


Ska
Everything I know about ska I learned from one record, which I love: I Just Can't Stop It by The English Beat. I'm going to honor the great Everett Morton by just trying to play like him on the rare occasion that a ska tune comes up.


Rumba
He's not referencing the Cuban style, but basically a rock & roll rhumba— a Latin-flavored groove played on the drums, with a ruff leading into beat 2, and a tom tom on 4&; with that information and by listening to a couple of recordings, you can come up with your own way of playing the feel. Usually I spell this north American style: “rhumba”, and save the “rumba” spelling for actual Cuban music.


Cha Cha
This is a basic, essential Cuban/Salsa style that applies to a few different genres. I'm mostly called upon to play it as kind of an old fashioned ballroom thing, and also with a Latin show band. It has a straighter 4 feel than other Cuban styles, with quarter notes played on a high-pitched cowbell, and the clave rhythm somewhat deemphasized. Keith Copeland's cha cha groove is very handy for most of my purposes.


Soca
Never had to play this style, but if you get a job on a Caribbean ship, you might want to download Arrow's song Hot Hot Hot, copy the beat, and play along with it.

Many more of these after the break:

Afro 6/8 with a backbeat

In my day we didn't have fancy drum blogs giving us near-daily pages of nicely formatted, well-thought-out drum exercises free of charge. Our teachers just scribbled something in the margin of our tattered copy of Syncopation, and we liked it! We loved it! Life was a carnival.

That's today's groove— a funk-style Afro 6/8— as presented to me by Tim Stodd, my teacher back in 1983, along with my own primitive scribbling. The right hand was to be played on the hihat, and the circled notes had bass drum with them; I was left to make my own variations, and turn it into a fully-realized thing on my own. Here's how we do things now:

Start by learning the hands part alone, observing the dynamics— the notes in parentheses are played very softly; also play the right hand part in isolation. The groove is felt in 2 or in 1— two beats per measure of 6/8, or one. Once the hands are together, the bass drum parts should come pretty quickly.

The first four lines give the normal bass drum parts associated with this style. Lines five and six give more of a sixtuplet funk feel, and the last two lines are given as coordination exercises.

Get the pdf

A crash course in the ECM feel

Look for the photos with water
and the Helvetica font.

The "ECM feel", as it's now being called, is a style that evolved in the late 1960's and 70's, and has since become one of the major time feels of modern jazz. It's associated with the ECM record label because that's where you find most of its major early practitioners and first/best recorded examples. Before you do anything, I suggest hitting the read more link at the bottom of the page and listen to the audio examples.

Some of its features: Even 8th notes, non-repetitive, linear, broken-up (pick your adjective), possible suggestion of a backbeat, Brazilian influenced. Light, airy, ride cymbal based feel (get yourself a Paiste 602 Flat Ride to complete the period effect). Had it's beginnings in the 1960's work of Tony Williams, Roy Haynes, Paul Motian and Barry Altschul. The drummers it is most generally associated with include Jon Christensen, Jack Dejohnette, Bob Moses, and Airto.

There is no standard method that I'm aware of for developing this feel, but if you work through one or more of these suggestions and do a lot of listening and playing you should begin to find it

UPDATE: In the comments Clint lets us know that Berklee professor Skip Hadden has a method book and mini-series of videos at the Vic Firth site dealing more broadly with this style. Onward:


Practice methods:

Basic coordination using the 8th/2-16th cym pattern. You can also think of it in cut time:

Use regular jazz vocabulary with even 8th notes (converting them 8th note patterns to 16ths if you're thinking of it that way). Working out the same materials with two or three more complex cymbal patterns- and with plain 8th notes- would also be helpful; you could pick a pattern from Syncopation pp. 34-37 (new edition) and put it in double time, for example.

Stick Control- the first section, and maybe the flam section- and the same part of Syncopation as above, plus the long syncopation exercises. Play this (and all the following) with the right hand on the cymbal and the left on the snare. Also play the first section with the hands together on the cymbal and snare on the Rs, and the bass drum and/or hihat (w/foot) on the Ls.

Paradiddles and paradiddle-diddles and their inversions, plus plain old doubles- RRLL and RLLR RLLR- with/without a flam at the beginning of the R or L hand double:

And Swiss triplets in a 16th note rhythm. They make a 4:3 polyrhythm, so find a place to stop to fit them within one or two measures of 4/4:

Using the feet:

Again, with the right hand on the cymbal and the left on the snare, play all of the above over an ostinato with the feet; either samba or baiao, or double some/all of the right hand part with the bass drum. Also play an ostinato with one foot let the other play sporadically to fit with the hand part.

Note: It would seem to be an obvious choice for developing this style, but I don't like to recomend Dahlgren & Fine's Four Way Coordination to anyone seeking immediate results; as I've written before, I've seen it turn into a bit of a tar pit for more than one young drummer. But if you keep your eye on the practical result you want to achieve, and don't get bogged down with the need to learn it "completely", it should also be useful here. Vol. 2 of Dahlgren & Fine's Accent On Accents would be a good substitute/supplement for Stick Control for the exercises above, though.

Audio examples and discography after the break:

Survival tips for cruise ship drummers

My man Willie Blair, the only person
I know who could get away with
flouting most of the non-musical rules. 

I guess I had to actually write about drumming on cruise ships at some point, hey? Here are some tips for not getting fired, for not hating your life, and for generally acting like a pro when working that kind of gig.

Keep a positive attitude. Many if not most of the people around you are going to be really negative about the job, especially if they've been doing it awhile. It's important to not let their misery effect you, otherwise your contract can start to seem like a prison sentence. Keeping a positive, professional attitude will make you more attractive to people you are working with who may want to hire you or refer you for non-cruise ship jobs. And remember that you are getting paid to play the drums, which I thought was supposed to be your life's dream, or something.

Be easy to live with. Be reasonably quiet, clean, tidy, non-smelly, and non-funky, but don't be over-fastidious, either. Be aware of your habits and how they effect the person or persons you will be sharing a cabin with.

Learn to keep a low profile. Stay out of people's way- passengers, crew, staff, ship officers, security. If you're a loud talker and/or dresser prone to a lot of public clowning, change that. The crew should not notice you sunbathing eight hours a day.

Adapt to the situation, but not too much. Check yourself if the tacky/skeevy gold chains and silk shirts for sale in the ports of call start looking attractive to you. Usually this starts happening after a year or more  on  the job. Question the wisdom of the whole band buying custom golf clubs or bowling balls because there is an opportunity to use them a couple of hours a week. This  over-adapting to overseas postings is what Marines used to call "going asiatic"- adopting native behavior/dress, becoming over-reliant on houseboys to do things like polish your boots, becoming addicted to opium, etc.

Much more after the break: