DBMITW: the kind of playing I'd like to hear more of

With hyperactive fast-16th-to-32nd notes kind of dominating drummers' collective mindspace today, I love hearing some utterly happening 8th note-based playing:




Also:

Cracking 5/4: rock variations

I wasn't planning on making this part of this series, but it happened to come up. I was prepping for a recording session today which will involve a couple of tunes in 7/4, and I played a few pages of Even in the Odds while singing/humming/thinking the vamps from the tunes we'll be doing. I want to go into the session with my hands feeling well prepared to play easy stuff at the tempo of the tunes, so I improvised a few very basic changes to the written grooves. In keeping with the current series, I wrote out the examples in 5/4. These work best at brighter tempos:

The pattern to the variations should be clear, I hope. I played the right hand on the hihat for the first beat of each series, and then on the ride and crash cymbals on the variations. Notice that the cym/hh part on the first variation of each series is in 2/4+3/4-- you can also reverse that to make 3/4+2/4. Another thing I did was to improvise ghost/filler notes on the first and second grooves of each section.

Again the idea is not to play hip crap, it's to get your hands doing basic things perfectly in time, while giving you a feel for the shape of each measure of music in this time signature. As you can see, the triplet variations are a little irregular-- a single scheme doesn't work for the examples I've given. But since we're not doing this for reading practice, you can take a second to figure out a sticking that will work with whatever beat you happen to be playing. If you don't own EITO yet, you can write out your own beats in 5/4 with which you can run these variations. Start simply-- with one bass drum and one snare drum note per measure.

Get the pdf

"If I think of something beforehand then I should not play it."

Pianist George Colligan has posted a really great interview with drummer Jeff Ballard on his blog, Jazz Truth. It's really hard to excerpt anything from this because it's all so good; I put in a few ellipses at the beginning to pull the salient points and then gave up. Just go read the whole thing-- this is about 25% of it.


On technique:

GC: Can you talk about the difference between technique and music?

JB: I figure technique is a way to play music so it’s understood. That’s what it’s for. The technique is not something for itself. It’s something to have so you can play music very clearly. 

It’s a tool, it’s not an aesthetic [...] and I think that some folks confuse them. And I think it comes from the fact that in this day and age we have accessibility to lots of technique. It’s not something, in a way, that you kind of earned. 

Before, I think you earned technique, you earned it by discovering secrets… like how does Dizzy get some sort of fingering, or Art Blakey’s got a certain kind of flick, a certain kind of way of playing a shuffle that no one else plays. [...] And so someone has to go out and earn it [by listening and watching] rather than just get it from a book or a Youtube video. I think there’s something in the effort that you have to give to get that technique, which connects it to the making of music rather than just getting the ability to play something. [...]

GC: Do you think a lot of drummers get hung up on technique?

JB: Yeah, I think it’s kind of the nature of the instrument. Same with saxophones or the guitar, maybe, those kinds of things where the technique is not so difficult to get to. You can sound impressive just by having some technique on those instruments. It’s a hazard area.

More after the break, but really go read the whole thing.

DBMITW: Rated X

From Miles Davis's Get Up With It:



That's the great Michael Henderson on bass. From Wikipedia:

Davis saw the young Henderson performing [with Stevie Wonder] at the Copacabana in New York City in early 1970 and reportedly said to Wonder simply "I'm takin' your bass player." 

And I sense another 70's Miles Groove o' the Day coming up...

A couple of other versions after the break:

Groove o' the day: Billy Cobham in 7/8

Today we have another odd-meter Billy Cobham groove from the track "b. Spectrum" from his 1973 album Spectrum:

He plays the unaccented notes stronger than is customary today, and puts a light accent on the last note of the triplet; the natural sticking for that is LRL. If you're looking for opportunities to make variations, easy things would be to add a bass drum on the & of 2, or play it along with the hihat on the "&-a's" of 1 and 3.

From early in the track, here's a variation without the 16th note triplet, with an extra open hihat, and a different second beat:

YouTube audio after the break:

Fast singles played for a long time

Of marginal utility for anything other than moving a

single human with no cargo a quarter of a mile in a

straight line as fast as possible, while raising serious

questions about efficiency due to the  massive logistical

support and  infrastructure required. Consider trading pure

velocity for broader functionality and lower maintenance.

The word speed comes up a lot in discussions with young drummers, and it's always a little bit baffling to me-- on it's own, the word is meaningless, musically. Usually I conclude that what is meant is "a really fast single stroke roll, played for a long time"-- almost a pure athletic thing, in the manner of the "World's Fastest Drummer" enterprise.

Since that's one of the most difficult things in drumming, and we want to practice smart, it would be good to be clear about the real musical need and professional requirement for it; when there are so many important things to work on-- both in music and in life-- to invest as much time as is needed for the more extreme forms of that skill, it had better be pretty useful, or have a big positive effect on other areas of my playing.

Purely as a matter of basic competence, the major circumstance I can think of in which they would be absolutely required would be in an orchestral situation, when rolling on xylophone or timpani (with hard mallets, and/or with higher tunings on the smaller drums). On most other instruments-- any with a long sound-- more reasonably-fast singles will make the required long tone.

Quite a bit more after the break:

Cracking 5/4: the basics

It took me a long time to come around to accepting the type of method we're going to use here; for years the Syncopation-based interpretive method-- in which you think more like a horn player, creating a complete drumset part from a single written melodic line-- was the only legitimate one for me. 5/4, though, is so full of traps for improvising players that we need to take a more archaic-seeming "drummerly" approach, at least at first.

The first thing to know about playing in 5/4-- or any other odd meter-- is that each measure breaks down into threes and twos. In this case, 3/4 + 2/4:

Or 2/4 + 3/4:

This gets interesting after the break:

Interview on WHPK 88.5 fm Chicago Tuesday @ 7pm

I'll be doing a live interview about my new CD LITTLE PLAYED LITTLE BIRD on Lofton Emenari's show on WHPK 88.5 fm Chicago tomorrow evening-- Tuesday, June 11th.

Stream it live at 7pm Chicago time if you dare.

Visit Lofton's blog for more information about his show.

Groove o' the day: On the Corner

Today we've got Jack Dejohnette's James Brown-like groove on Helen Butte/Mr. Freedom X from Miles Davis' On The Corner:

There's an overdubbed part by Al Foster that's more forward in the mix, so it's a little difficult to hear once he comes in-- there's more of just Jack on the recording than you hear on the YouTube edit, so make sure you get the record if you don't already own it.

YouTube audio after the break: