Making bird drawings

Just so you know I haven't forgotten about you- I'm seeing a lot of great posts from Trap'd, FOTF, and The Melodic Drummer, and Dave Aldridge and feeling bad that I'm posting kind of sparsely while I'm working on new record/tour stuff. Right now, for example, I have these bird drawings to make, and I, ahm- it will make sense later...

So feel free to root around in my archives while I tend to this pressing matter. Like, have you read and re-read all of the interviews, or fully digested my transcriptions and original exercises yet?

Barry Altschul interview

Barry Altschul has been on my mind a lot lately- this performance kind of got stuck in my head, plus I was listening to a lot of Paul Bley before my recording session last week- he really puts you in a mindset to be reaching for pure music, as opposed to that of delivering an "amazing" performance; so Altschul (along with Paul Motian and Billy Elgart) came up a lot- particularly on the great Ballads album.

Anyhow, here are a few excerpts from a 2010 Altschul interview from Burning Ambulance, a jazz/arts blog I haven't read before. Like most interviews it's more about current events, career and listener issues, than about things drummers/artists want to know, but there are some interesting things.

Here, you can re-listen to these great clips in another tab while you read:

PIGEONHOLED
...a lot of my recording career has been what we’ll call the avant-garde. Yet a lot of my professional career has been fairly equal between playing with avant-garde people and playing with inside people, but my reputation is pretty much avant-garde. I remember once going out with Art Pepper, and we were on the road and one of the newspapers said, “The surprise of the evening was the avant-gardist Barry Altschul swinging.…”

  Q: Did you ever feel any sense of regret or frustration about this idea that you had been painted into a corner?

BA: I feel frustration about it because I think that it has affected my work—not my playing but my ability to get gigs. I think a lot of people when they think of me, think of me a certain way and feel that they can’t think of me another way.

[...] I do know that certain musicians who are close friends of mine have told me that other people have asked them about my abilities. “Can he play time more than three bars in a row?” Or, “Can he really swing?” There have been some of those questions asked to friends of mine who came back to me and told me that.

FREE vs. BOP
I remember one time, playing at Slug’s with Paul Bley. I’m not going to mention names, but one of the more established trumpet players almost got physically violent [when he heard] the music that was being played. He was very upset that we could do that to music.

...the more inside musicians felt that the players that were playing more out had to establish themselves first. They felt, I think, that you had to prove yourself that you can play a certain way before you took the liberties of extending.

Continues after the break...

It's a five-off

Following the lead of Four On The Floor's 5 Beat Groupings (including a hip way of using Stone on the drumset), and Trap'd's 5 beat figures in triplets, here's another variation of the paradiddle exercise we've been using a lot lately, this time using quintuplets- 16th-note fives. As always, play each measure individually many times, then combine measures one, two, or four times each, then reverse the sticking for the entire page.

And yes, I know my made up rudiment names are stupid, but at least I don't put the word "cheese" in there... that's just nasty... 

Get the pdf.

What I was doing yesterday

Here's one of the rough mixes from yesterday's session- Ornette Coleman's Lonely Woman. I hadn't planned on recording this tune, and we didn't rehearse it, but we had nine tunes in the can, and a few minutes before Weber and Bill had to leave for their gigs. I thought it turned out rather nicely:



The band is Tim Willcox on alto saxophone, Rich Cole on bass clarinet, Weber Iago on piano, and Bill Athens on bass. The CD will be coming out in 2012, about the time of our Europe tour in April- info on pre-ordering coming soon...

In the studio today

DBMITW: models of simplicity

There are thousands of examples of simple pop drumming which achieve a kind of craftsmanly invisibility, but here I've chosen a handful of favorite tracks in which the drumming actually stands out artistically for its simplicity:

Sly Stone - Thank You For Talking To Me Africa - Greg Errico


More goodness after the break:

Putting together a jazz drum set

The Gretsch Catalinas on my 2010 Europe tour.

A good point in the comments of the How to be a jazz drummer post- the sound of your instrument is very important. If you've been playing rock, have a lot of cymbals with "POWER" printed on them, or have one of those generic drum sets with the 22" bass drum and the big tom toms, this may mean buying some new gear. Fortunately, everything you need can be bought inexpensively used- here at Cruise Ship Drummer! we don't throw money at our problems, and we don't much give a crap about flashy new gear. The sound is what matters.

So here we go- my epic user's/buyer's guide for getting your jazz instrument together:

Cymbals
Cymbals, particularly the ride cymbal, are the most important part of the set for a jazz musician. Part of the philosophy- I'm paraphrasing Mel Lewis here- is that you treat every cymbal as both a ride and a crash; so you don't want your ride be too heavy or your crash to be too small/light. Your ride cymbal should be 20 or 22", light to medium weight; your left-side cymbal can either be a 17-18" thin to med. thin crash, or an 18-19" light to medium ride, or "crash-ride"; hihats 13-15", light to medium.

We're in a golden age of cymbals right now, with people like Bosphorus, Zildjian, Sabian, Paiste, Meinl, Istanbul, and many smaller companies making incredible hand hammered cymbals. One side effect of which is that the prices on regular old professional quality cymbals of the 70's-90's have come way down; and people have gotten pickier about appearance, so really dirty, funky-looking cymbals are even cheaper. People who only care about the sound can find some real bargains in A. Zildjians, Sabian AAs, Paiste 2002s and 3000s. Grungy-looking is good, tiny cracks (less than 1 cm) are acceptable (and will bring the price way down), "keyholing" is perfectly fine for you, but a good bargaining point for bringing the price down further.

Keep reading- it's a long post and there's much more information after the break:

Coordination "kernels" - further examples

You may have noticed I've been on rather light posting this last week. Expect that to continue for the next several days; this week I'll be recording my new CD for the Origin label, Little Played Little Bird (the music of Ornette Coleman; stay tuned for info on pre-ordering!), and have been very busy with pre-production stuff. Mainly obsessing over my charts- transcribed off the record and arranged by me- and practicing.

Today at least I have some examples relating to my earlier coordination kernels post. These are taken from Jim Chapin's Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer, plus a couple of generic versions of the Afro-Cuban cascara, which you can read more about in Malabe & Weiner's Afro-Cuban Rhythms for Drumset, among other places:

Refer back to the original post for instruction on how to apply my method. Note that each cascara groove is composed of three "kernels". Learn each one individually, and then put them together as outlined previously; first with open space between each kernel, then gradually flowing from one to the next until they make the desired rhythm of the complete groove.

Get the pdf.

A lot of hard sight-reading

No entry for getting lost,
panicking, and soiling oneself.

An interesting day yesterday- I played two sessions in which we played through a bunch of really challenging reading. It's an interesting dynamic when a group of excellent musicians is on the raggedy edge of losing it- not what you would expect.

First, my man David Valdez had a stack of a dozen tunes by pianist George Colligan, who recently moved to Portland from New York. Colligan is a true heavy cat- he's currently in Jack Dejohnette's band, and has recorded with Bill Stewart, Lenny White, Billy Hart, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Al Foster, and... practically everyone else. He's also the author of the Jazz Truth blog- here, you're going to want to read his post on jam session etiquette if you're going to be a jazz drummer.

So, unpredictable would one of the first words that come to mind in reading through Colligan's tunes- they're generally defiant to any kind of comfortable, clichéd approach, with very few familiar turns. The melodies were very elusive of the type of support I'm used to giving, and I found myself latching onto the harmonic rhythm for dear life. Many delightful "oh, haha, that was the top of the form- I guess we're in bar three now" and "oops, I think that intro in 9/4 was supposed to be part of the solo form" moments were had. By the time we got to the head out I would be beginning to feel not horribly uncomfortable; I'm definitely looking forward to a second or third reading.

The second thing was a sextet project by keyboardist Andrew Durkin, who moved to Portland from LA a couple of years ago. Durkin is a self-taught (I think) composer and also an occasional blogger- he's the author of Jazz, the music of unemployment. His material is tough for a different reason- in addition to the rampant meter changes and unusual moves, his chart-writing style is a little bit naive, with a complete drum part sketched out note for note, with no indication of whether something is part of the time feel, part of an arranged passage, or an optional fill, making it very difficult to think of anything but the six inches in front of your face. It does encourage you to make a straightforward treatment that is actually very agreeable, once you give up needing to make a big personal statement out of it.