VOQOTD: Joan Miró

In the beginning, it’s a direct thing. It’s the material that decides. I prepare the ground-by cleaning my brushes on the canvas, for example. Spilling a little turpentine can also work quite well. If it’s a question of drawing, I crumple the paper. I wet it. The water traces a form .... This mark determines what happens next.... It’s the medium that directs everything .... The painter works like the poet: the word comes before the thought. You don’t decide to write about the happiness of men! If you do, you're sunk.

Make a scribble. For me, it will be a point of departure, a shock. I attach great importance to the initial shock.

- Joan Miró

I'm huge in France

Apparently a track from my 2009 CD 69 Année Érotique (the music of Serge Gainsbourg) made it onto Une brique dans le ventre, a program on French national TV this month (it starts around 4'50"). Unfortunately, the licensing bastards won't let us view it in the US- "you find yourself in a country in which the diffusion of this program is not authorized", it informs me. If anyone is able to view it, and is adept at ripping video from sites like that (they have Firefox plug-ins for that), please let me know...

This is a good time to mention that purchasing the CD is a great way to support the blog. It's been played on the radio in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany, and made a few jazz writers' "best of 2009" lists, supported me through two Europe tours, yada yada yada... if you like the content I'm providing free of charge, please consider it.

Oh, and I also have some extrêmement sexy ladies t-shirts featuring the "soixante-neuf" design from the CD cover. I'm blowing them out, so they're the same price as the CDs. If you would like one, hit the purchase link and specify t-shirt, color (red or black, with the 69 in gold) and size in the "notes" box.

Todd's methods: Afro-Cuban in 6/8 and 3/4

Here's something I wrote strictly for my own use, which I thought I would share for you to make of what you will. The Afro 6/8 has been one of my stronger vehicles for a long time; my approach has always been very Elvin-like- very whole-instrument- and I've recently been working towards more jazz-like freedom with my left hand and right foot. The coordination is an order of magnitude more difficult than in jazz, but just working with it should allow some new things to happen spontaneously even if it takes some time to get full conscious control over it.

One of the major features of African rhythm is that one pattern or one piece of music can be subject to a number of different primary pulses. What I've done here is present the same patterns as 8th notes in 6/8 and as 8ths and 16ths in 3/4, which puts the pulse on the "big" 3- equivalent to half notes in the original 6/8, or a half-note triplet if we were dealing with triplets in 4/4. It's difficult to conceive in the original 6/8, but very straightforward when we put it in a single measure of 3/4.

Get the pdf.

Paradiddle round-up

In case you haven't gotten enough to work on with the paradiddle things I've posted, here are some exercises gathered from around the web. I've only linked to pages that actually use notation- I'm a little fed up with people who present things with video only- write them out, doodz. Anyway, there should be something in here for just about everyone:

First, via my pals at Drum! Magazine, here from Danny Gottlieb is a Joe Morello exercise for developing uptempo jazz.

Good Lord. PIT's Chuck Silverman gives us a big page of stuff- you'll likely get sidetracked on the way to the paradiddles. Here's another page of his using paradiddles to outline clave. This will probably get its own post later on.

Here's something very special, via Music For Drummers: a free download of Dave Tough's paradiddle book. It's out of print, and God knows who owns the rights to it. According to MFD there are three library copies in existence. If that link goes dead, you can try one of these.

Bill Rotella's Drum Beatings has a pretty hefty offering of paradiddle inversions in 16th notes and triplets, plus a couple of serious "diddle mania" pages, plus a page of paradiddles extended within 5, 7, and 9 note odd rhythms.

Tiger Bill's Drum Beat has a decent page of paradiddle inversions and combinations, along with several Accents-and-Rebounds-type applications.

A number of other worthwhile things, from basic to advanced, after the break:

VOQOTD: Pete La Roca on backbeats

What an insult for Fusion to impose the repetitive BackBeat on Jazz drummers! How ironic, since the BackBeat is merely the handclap used by American slaves when they were forbidden to have drums! How bizarre to haul a set of drums just to do what people did without drums!

- Pete LaRoca

Two videos

Here are a couple of nice videos from my fellow drumming blogs while I recover from my little Oregon coast mini-vacation:

First, a video on practicing by Steve Smith, from the excellent new Melodic Drummer blog:



I've been meaning to post this Ed Soph improvisation master class, but as is often the case, Four on the Floor has beaten me to it:

Very occasional quote of the day: Brian Eno

I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to “get” any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.

- Brian Eno from a new interview in Salon- highly worth reading!

The great Jeff Berlin metronome controversy

This has been floating around for some time. His observations are mostly good, but I don't happen to agree with his conclusion. Watch the video, and I'll give a few thoughts about it:



His major points seem to be:

1. Learning new things is not and should not be done in time. 

Discarding the rhythmic element- as he is basically suggesting- is one way of learning new music. I don't believe it's the only way. I follow the jazz musician's view that rhythm is primary and the notes are secondary- "get the rhythm and the notes will follow" is the philosophy. I've developed some strategies for taking things not quite out of time which I'll be sharing soon. At any rate, in African-influenced musics (e.g. American music) the rhythm is the thing- lose that and you've lost the fundamental idea.

He seems to be arguing against the idea of learning new material with a metronome from the very beginning, which I certainly wouldn't recommend either. I'm sure there are some bad teachers who do that- in fact I kind of get the feeling this is just an infight with some adjunct faculty at MI (or with MI students' teachers back in Iowa).

Transcription: Four - more intros

Once you get going on these, it's hard to stop. And it looks like I'll have to do one more, because in a near-inconceivable oversight, I left off my favorite one, by Tony Williams on Four and More. Anyhow, here are some more intros to the tune Four, by Miles Davis. Two of these are live performances with Jimmy Cobb, from 1960. The other is an earlier performance in the UK with Kenny Clarke, which I mentioned in our previous entry.

Get the pdf.

After the break- YouTube audio: