Jazz waltz triplet burnout - 01

Updating this page as my purposes with it have evolved, into an endurance drill. I've made it harder, with larger changes from measure to measure, with an eye on how it progresses playing through it two beats at a time. 

This is a good long term project, you can work this up to about quarter note = 238. The Chasin' The Trane tempo. You'll get there quicker using the previous page. 

Play whatever hihat rhythm you want. This whole mess could be done substituting the hihat for the bass drum— for me that is a separate mission. It's too much to do all together, and the hihat will bog you down. 

In case I didn't give you enough practice options, I was also playing it in 4 by repeating the middle beat. So this written measure: 

Is played like this: 

Another thing to trick you into doing this longer, which is the whole point, do it for a long time. 

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Triplet burnout with the jazz waltz telephone page

Here are some things I do over the course of 15-20 minutes playing that jazz waltz telephone page, in addition to just playing repeating measures as written, in 3/4 time: 

1. Play each measure in 4/4 by adding the first beat of the following measure. 
2. Play each measure in 4/4 by adding the last beat of the previous measure.
3. Play in 2/4 by playing just the first two beats of each measure.
4. Play in 5/4 by adding the first two beats of the next measure. 
5. Play each two beats of each line, moving ahead one beat at a time. 
6. Play each 3/4 measure within 4/4 time. 

 

The page is just for illustration, you do these looking at the original page. I won't necessarily rigorously play through the entire page each of those ways, but I'll do them for awhile, moving quickly from thing to thing— it's a lot to play through. Obviously you have to have this stuff together already pretty thoroughly, so it's about conditioning, rather than learning new stuff. It's a triplet burnout drill. 

I play the cymbal as written through all of those changes, and add hihat as appropriate for the time signature. 

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Jazz waltz telephone - 01

This is a writing experiment, starting with a jazz waltz cymbal rhythm with triplets filled in, changing one note per measure— or two notes. The cymbal rhythm stays the same, and bass drum is added, but no hihat. Everything here is handled in different materials already, I just like coming at things from different angles. This will be useful for at least one student of mine.

Play one measure at a time, then complete lines, then the full page. You could also alternate measures, say, the first measure of line 1 combined with every other measure on the page. Pencil in hihat rhythms if you want. 

UPDATE: This is actually good. This is what anybody should be playing when they sit down to do this kind of thing, and for about the amount of time it plays through the page, playing around with each measure a little bit. The hidden thing with all the one measure drum patterns out there is that you're supposed to play it for a long time, and make some variations on it. So materials that trick you into doing those things = good.    

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Groove o' the day: Elvin waltz by Kenny Washington

Here's Kenny Washington playing an Elvin Jones-type of waltz groove on Simple Waltz, on Clark Terry's 1991 record Live at the Village Gate. It's kind of an obscure item now, I bought the record then to check out some Kenny Washington. I used to play along with it a lot. 

It's actually really Elvin like, though Washington has a different way of playing time from him— and sound, and touch. See my groove o' the day and transcription of John Coltrane's Your Lady. There's also a page o' coordination based on it. 

On the intro he plays the ties, when the band comes in he plays the straight cymbal rhythm as written, no ties. 

A basic waltz vocabulary - 01

I was working with a student on a jazz waltz, played at a brighter tempo than he was real comfortable with, so we needed to come up with some easy things to add to his basic feel. The first thing to do with any style is to get some simple options for things to play.  

We'll use this as our basic time feel— everything else will be added to that, or modify it: 

Use the 8th rest pages from my book, Syncopation in 3/4, which you should own. The first three lines of p. 18 have a single beat of 8th notes/rests per measure, and some quarter notes:  

Normally people just tell you to play the rhythm on the snare drum, and play it on the bass drum, and move on, but let's change it to make it more like something we might actually play when playing this style:

1. Play just the 8th note.
2. Play the 8th note plus the note after it. 
3. Play all the notes. 
4. Play all the notes, minus the note after the 8th note. 

Using line 1 above, along with our time feel, that would go: 

Seem convoluted? Not really. You want to be able to look at a rhythm and just play part of it. 

In jazz, you don't generally play a repeating rhythm every single measure— let's play them every two measures: 

Simple. We're looking for basic, mundane vocabulary. 

We're not going to do a lot with the bass drum here, but try playing it on the note after the 8th note: 

When you do that in the two measure phrase, don't hit both 1s with the bass drum, for example: 

Use your own judgment in how you do that, which measure of the phrase gets the 1 on the bass drum. 

After you can do all of the above in the two measure phrases, improvise similar things, while thinking your way through a tune, or playing along with a record. Something like All Blues or Someday My Prince Will Come, or Up Jumped Spring.

We'll do a little more with this later in the week. 

Reed tweak: alternating triplets in 3

This came up while I was practicing out of my book, Syncopation in 3. An extremely ordinary practice system used with Syncopation is to a) swing the top line rhythm, b) fill in the remaining triplets softly, and c) play the whole thing with an alternating sticking. For example: 

a) Book rhythm: 

b) That rhythm swung: 

c) Triplets filled in, played with alternating sticking: 

Using this on the drumset, there's some value to being able to consistently land with the right hand on 1— it takes a little extra attention to land on the left. With alternating triplets, your right hand lands on a downbeat every two beats— your hands are telling you you're playing in 2.    

So, following are some ways of always landing with the right hand on 1, some of which I've been doing for years, without thinking about it— it only just now occurred to me to write it down. We get into some cool Elvin-like stuff here. 

Playing book rhythms that have a quarter note on the third beat, like the one above, there are a number of interesting options— I'll write it out for drum set, playing the accents on the cymbals, with bass drum in unison: 

Typo alert: I left off the accents on some of the cymbal hits on 3. Accent all the cymbal notes, or don't.

Some of those work better than others, depending on what's happening on the 1 when you repeat, or in the next measure, if you're reading the full page syncopation exercises. 

If the book rhythm ends with an 8th note on the & of 3, it's simpler— just don't hit the cymbal on that note, but do play the bass drum. So these two rhythms: 

Would be played: 

And you can take that a little further with some Elvin type things: 

You have to take a loose attitude about all of this stuff— the goal is not always to do a pristine rendering of the system, it's to make something musical out of it that is personal to you.

WSRHWL addendum!

A couple of pages to go with my wild, sprawling, scattershot world's shortest Roy Haynes waltz lesson. That contains a lot of raw concepts for someone who is listening to a lot of Roy Haynes to come up with their own version of his kind of thing, in 3/4 time. Or a 3/4 feel in 4/4 time. 

Here I've given some sticking patterns, put them on a cymbal and snare drum, and then changed them a little bit: 

Like a lot of my stuff, the point is to work through a lot of basically equally-difficult things in one session. See the original WSRHWL for suggestions on where to take these. Briefly: 

•  Add stock rhythms with the feet: BD on 1, HH on 2, or 2 and 3
•  Add BD along with some or all of the cymbal notes. 

There are some more advanced options involving the left foot:

• Play the LF in unison with the LH, or replacing the LH, or replacing the LH on some notes. 
• Along with whatever you do with the LF, add BD along with some or all of the cymbal notes.   

Some things to try. Listen to a lot of Roy and play them your own way, and don't stop for mistakes.    

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Page o' coordination: Juju

I'm transcribing a little bit of Elvin Jones's playing on the Wayne Shorter tune Juju, which I originally did off the LP around 1988. It'll take some time to finish it, so here's a page developing the main groove from it— a version of the thing I've been calling an “Afro waltz.” Most people would probably say “Elvin waltz.”

Slightly different format from the usual POCs, exercises 1-10 build the particular groove Elvin played on the recording, and have specific drums assigned, including some changes to the bass drum rhythm. Exercises 11-18 have other left hand rhythms for basic fluency. 

Swing the 8th notes. Practice with and without the tie on the cymbal rhythm in the first measure. On exercises 11-18 you can do the stock left hand moves I use with these pages. 

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Here's the tune, it's a record you should know well:

Three Camps in 3 - jazz waltz -02

Another set of Three Camps-form exercises in 3/4, for the drum set. The first two have alternating triplets between the snare and bass, the last two are based on a dotted quarter rhythm, with an extra note in there. 

Still digging this format— it makes you practice one thing for as long as you're supposed to, with minor variations. Good alternative to practicing out of Reed and having to deal with a lot of reading. 

Check out the forms carefully— the circled bass drum notes are added or swapped for the snare drum on some of them. Learn each two measure phrase, then put them in the form to make the complete exercise.  

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Three Camps in 3 - jazz waltz - 01

Continuing the thing from the other day, here are some drum set variations on Three Camps, in 3/4 time, in a jazz waltz feel. I practice this same type of thing using my book Syncopation in 3, which you should own, but it's nice to have a clean, structured shot at some simple variations on one idea. And the Three Camps format makes you practice it for about as long as you should practice it. 

Practice each measure by itself, then put them together in the form given at the top of the page. Add hihat on beat 2, or beats 2 and 3, pencil it in on the a partial on 1, and on beat 3, Elvin-style. Anything. Scratch out that middle bass drum note on the D part of the dotted quarter version if you want— it doesn't fit the pattern, exactly. 

Practice it with my loop of All Blues. 

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Page o' coordination: basic triplet texture in 3/4

Same deal as the recent triplet texture in 4/4 page, done in 3/4. A simple linear triplet pattern with added bass drum variations. I already did this with a student, looking at the page in 4— we just ignored beat 4. Similar to the other thing we did recently putting Chapin in 5 by repeating beat 1 at the end of the measure. Both of them work surprisingly well. It's an easy way of adapting your normal jazz materials into other meters. 

Here I've rewritten the bass drum parts to put them in a more logical order for 3/4: 

Play them through, and have fun. This is an easy way to get novice students into an Elvin Jones type of texture. Try playing them along with my All Blues loop when you're ready. 

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Transcription: Al Harewood - All Blues

I've been looking into Al Harewood quite a bit lately. He's one of those drummers who's on a lot of stuff, but is still easy to overlook. He's on a lot of Blue Note records in the 60s. I wouldn't call him a modern player, exactly; more of a hard bop guy with a strong R&B edge. Here he is playing with George Benson— this is Benson's solo on All Blues, from his live album Witchcraft. The transcription begins at 1:51.   

All Blues is conventionally written in 6/8, but the drummer plays it as a jazz waltz, so that's how I've written it, in 3/4. Two bars of 3/4 here = one bar of the 6/8, to create a 24 bar blues form— if you're reconciling it with a lead sheet, for some reason. There's no reason for a drummer to ever look at a chart when playing All Blues, incidentally. 

Harewood's foundation here is very simple; there's not a lot of variety to his basic groove. What he does do is make a lot of featured, fill-like comping ideas outlining the form of the tune. He plays them loud, with a lot of variety, pretty regularly at every phrase ending. It's normally not a way we think to play— it would be easy to sound bad doing this.  

You could say his dynamics are dramatic and very local, too— he uses lots of crescendos, and a lot of subito ps. He gets louder from chorus to chorus, but within that there will be a lot of dynamic changes. He doesn't stay loud after a crescendo. I've marked his dynamic changes in moderate detail on the first page. 

In terms of the kind of physical coordination at work, there is a good amount of layering happening— harmonic coordination, if you will— multiple limbs playing at the same time, in rather complex combinations. See measures 5, 28, 32, and then in the last couple of pages especially. 

Some of the rhythms written as triplets get a little distorted— if you see a tenuto mark over one note of a triplet, that indicates that note is a little longer than its normal rhythmic value, and the note after it falls a little late. Almost a 1e-a 16th note rhythm. That happens in measure 136, for example.  

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Jazz fundamentals: playing basic rhythms on a cymbal

Usually people start with jazz coordination by playing snare drum independence patterns along with a static cymbal rhythm— see Jim Chapin's Advanced Techniques, for example. It's a thing to do, and it should be done. But it's not the only thing to do, and I don't think it's the directest way to becoming a functional jazz drummer. Jazz does not necessarily require a rigidly unvarying cymbal rhythm, and  complicated left hand activity. 

What it does require is a cymbal rhythm played with a strong quarter note pulse. If you can do that, and play some simple things with a little creativity, you're in OK shape as a novice jazz drummer— at least as far as pure timekeeping vocabulary is concerned. 

This is a summary of a lesson item I've done with a number of students— adding easy things to a varying basic rhythm played on the cymbal. Use the rhythms in pp. 10-11 in Syncopation, or pp. 14-15 in my book Syncopation in 3/4. Or pp. 6-7 in Joe Morello's New Directions in Rhythm. You could spend some extra time on the rhythms that are most like the normal ones; lines 2, 4, and 15 in Reed pp. 10-11, for example.

These are quite easy, so you can just memorize the concepts, and practice them in a free form way— after playing through them, with all of the cymbal rhythms from the books, working out the coordination with the standard hihat/bass drum rhythms.  

Play the rhythm on the cymbal

The top line rhythms in the book, on a cymbal, with your right hand. Swing the 8th notes, and play them with a strong quarter note pulse, and a steady rhythm.

I'll use those same two rhythms for all of the other examples.

Add standard rhythms with the feet 

In 4/4 play 2 & 4 on the hihat. In 3/4 play 1 on the bass drum and 2 on the hihat:

I won't write these parts into the remaining examples, but you can continue playing them while you do the other things. Or not. If the rhythms conflict with the later things, or if the groove starts suffering because there's too much going on coordination-wise, stop doing one of the things. There's time for punishing rigor later. Do what you can do reasonably quickly, while making the cymbal rhythm sound good.   

Hey, there are a lot of examples— let's put a page break....

Roy Haynes waltz lesson - practice suggestions

So, I wrote that Roy Haynes waltz lesson in about ten minutes— I just listened to the tune and picked out the most obvious possible ways to cop the basic thing he's doing there. And since I titled it WORLD'S SHORTEST ROY HAYNES WALTZ LESSON, one could get the impression that it's something you can learn to do quickly. Not so! Just playing through the things on the page takes some time, then you have to learn to improvise a texture from those ideas. When I sit down with something like that I inevitably do a lot more with each thing.

On this page we'll look at the first pattern for that lesson, and run through some of the things I play when I practice it. I do as many of these as I can on the fly, but a few of them I would need to see written down. Not all of these are suited for the tempo on the Chick Corea recording— not right away, anyway.

I would also play the bass drum one note per measure, on every single note of the cymbal rhythm, especially if trying to cop the Roy thing. There's only so much you can put on one page. You can add the hihat on beat 2 and/or the bass drum on beat 1 wherever you like. Swing the 8th notes.

Continue thusly with the other sticking patterns on the lesson page. I hope everybody knows you have to find your own groove with these things— you speed through some things, and work longer on the ones that are harder for you, or that have a lot of creative and musical possibilities for you. That goes for everything else on the site and everything else in drumming. No written materials anywhere are a linear map for getting good. 

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World's shortest Roy Haynes waltz lesson

UPDATE: See the page of practice suggestions for more on this!

Someone on the internet asked me to explain what Roy Haynes is doing on the Chick Corea tune Windows, from the album Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, so I wrote up a little lesson on some of the basic elements, on getting started making the approximate vibe:

Listen to the recording, play through the page in all of the suggested ways, then improvise combinations of things to make a continuously developing waltz texture— that's the part that will take some practice; the ideas themselves are not difficult. Vary the dynamics and articulations with your left hand— use buzzes, rim shots, etc. Roy really exaggerates his accents, and tends to put them in odd places.

Obviously there are some other things happening— he plays some triplets between the snare and bass drum, and plays both hands on the snare drum occasionally— usually 3- or 4- stroke ruffs, open, as singles.

To continue developing this beyond the scope of this page, you should be able to play a regular jazz waltz, and have some basic coordination together with that. See Joel Rothman's 3,5, 7, 9, Jazz! or Joe Morello's New Directions in Rhythm for materials. Get my book Syncopation in 3/4 for more practice resources.

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Page o' coordination: Olé - 01

A Portland jazz educator asked me about what Elvin Jones was doing on the tune Olé, by John Coltrane, so I wrote this up. He plays a few different major patterns, and this might be the easiest one— and I've simplified it a little bit.

There are a couple of different options with the bass drum; you can eliminate the circled note, and/or add bass drum on 2 or the & of 2 in the first measure. Or, hell, you could eliminate the bass drum altogether while you get the hands happening. You could also pencil in a hihat on 3 in the second measure if you want. He often plays it on 2 in the first measure and 2 and 3 in the second measure.

Do my stock left hand moves. With this Elvin type thing, maybe play the snare drum hits as rim clicks.

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Listening to Keith Copeland

Let's listen some more. This is Charlie Rouse playing After the Morning, a tune in 3/4 by John Hicks. The great Keith Copeland, who left us too soon, is on drums. This is normal modern, mainstream jazz drumming to me— having obviously assimilated a lot of developments since Philly Joe Jones's day.

It was recorded in 1981, and the drum sound is quite dated now: there's a 20", non-tonal bass drum, and a wet, Steve Gaddish snare drum sound. Drum sounds today are very cute in comparison. And Copeland is playing with a somewhat Gadd like energy, very deep in the pocket. It's a sound and feel I associate with people who have also played a lot of R&B— with a lot of bottom. There is a lot of activity with the bass drum and snare drum, and they really drive the groove. A lot of what he plays you would get by doing normal jazz triplet methods with my book Syncopation in 3/4.  For the most part he's keeping a straight waltz rhythm happening with the cymbal and hihats. It's kind of an exceptional level of independence, given how expressive he is with the two drums. In my listening, I feel like most players don't bother with it.

The tune has strong harmonic motion, and he's largely playing in support of that. It's a good example of playing actively but not intrusively. He does interact with the soloists, but when his rhythms line up with them, he doesn't do the obvious college student thing of continuing it and making a big climax out of it. He lets the parts diverge, and finishes the phrase differently. And he doesn't obviously jump on the soloists' rhythms to begin with.





Courtesty of Daron in the comments, here's another great version of this tune, played by Hicks, Cecil McBee, and Elvin Jones.

Practice loop in 6/4: Journey In Satchidananda

Another groovy practice loop, sampled from Journey In Satchidananda by Alice Coltrane. It's a slow, 97 bpm swing feel in 6/4— good for getting into both of my ways of doing Chaffee's jazz thing, as written as triplets, or as 8th notes in 3/4.

The time fluctuates a bit at the beginning of the sample, before the drums come in. A couple of beats just drag a bit, and I found it not to be a problem. It sometimes happens in playing that the group decides to make a beat too long, and you have to adjust. I probably wouldn't want to be practicing to something that rushes, however.

Jazz waltz with Chaffee

Let's detail something I mentioned in the Chaffee jazz post: using the patterns in that system as 8th notes in a jazz waltz. They're three-note (or rest) patterns, so playing them two times = a complete measure of 8th notes in 3/4 time. This gives a strong feeling of a dotted quarter note pulse starting on the 1, & of 1, or 2— an Elvin Jones-like thing. I've found this to be a very interesting form of conditioning.

As I said, Chaffee's system should really be used by people who already have a working jazz vocabulary. What we'll do here is actually more practical than the regular system, but still, if you need more explanation than I'm giving here you probably shouldn't be doing it.

We'll play the patterns as 8th notes in 3/4, along with a jazz waltz cymbal rhythm. It is slightly odd to make that translation by looking at a single beat of a triplet rhythm, so here are the pattern rhythms as they appear in the book, and how they will be played in this waltz method:

I suggest playing it both with swing 8ths and straight 8ths. You could also also just play quarter notes on the cymbal, or a different jazz waltz rhythm.

There are a lot of patterns to cover, and it's very difficult to give them all equal attention. But if you have an appropriate level of experience to be doing this, you will have played many of them already through other methods, and you can move through them very quickly. Play maybe 2-8 measures of each pattern, more on the ones that are more difficult for you.

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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