From the zone: The Wizard, by Albert Ayler

I've been preoccupied the last few days whipping into shape the 2013 Cruise Ship Drummer! Book of the Blog (available for order next week), so here's a quick little something from my old notebooks: a transcription of the tune The Wizard, by Albert Ayler, which I made in 1999 or so:

Here's the original audio, if you want to check my work. The album is Spiritual Unity, with Sunny Murray and Gary Peacock— if you're going to play free jazz, you need to have a smoking bassist with some classical chops:

HFS III: the book reviewening

NOTE: This is something I started writing some months ago, never quite finished, and was unsure I even wanted to post it if I did. I'm putting it up now just to share some thoughts with a Drummerworld forum member. Please forgive its half-bakedness; maybe there's some entertaining reading here: 


A student loaned me his copies of both volumes of Mike Mangini's book Rhythm Knowledge, and they have rather blown my mind. Mostly not in a good way, I'm sorry to say. I hate to be critical of another drummer's work, but I also hate for drum students to get what I think is unhelpful information, so I'll go ahead and give these a frank review. I'm not trying to be negative, I'm really just trying to understand my reaction to this product, and the philosophy behind it.

I'll start by saying that, if you don't know who he is, Mangini is a rock drummer, and one of the leading guys in the current absolutely insane technical monster field of players, and likely has as much facility as any drummer who has ever lived. I am aware that he won the “World's Fastest Drummer” event at some point in the last few years. As a musician, he is probably best known as the current drummer for the prog-rock band Dream Theater. He also taught at Berklee for several years. Most of what I know about him as a musician I learned from watching this video, from the “WFD” event:





So: The books are unlike anything ever written for the drums, and are extremely ambitious in scope; he's basically attempting to rewrite the methodology of the instrument from scratch. Since there is a good amount of material dedicated to explaining fundamentals of rhythm and meter, including arguments in favor of things as basic as learning to read music, I assume that the books are geared towards novices, which is a good deal of my problem with them.

First: He is in dire need of an editor. There is a lot of text in these volumes, delivered in a frenetic style. He gets so far out into the weeds with parenthetical statements, explaining the meanings of ordinary words, and addressing his readers' presumed misconceptions, that points are completely lost. I'm all for people being exposed to far out concepts that seem incomprehensible on first exposure, but what is here is largely just incomprehensible, full stop. I know this subject well, and recognize most of the concepts he is attempting to communicate, but I have to work hard to grasp his explanations. One example:

To a Musician, especially a drummer, counting is the least intrusive method of connecting yourself to the otherwise intangible concept of time (something tangible is something we can physically feel). Since we use the muscles in our throats to count, we can feel, or be physically connected to, time. Counting also has the advantage of being a very accurate way to keep time. This is because of the relationship between effort and control. The more effort it takes to do something, the less control we have (try touching your nose with the tip of a pencil, then try touching your nose with the tip of a 100 bl. iron bar). Moving our throat muscles requires much less effort than moving our arm or leg muscles, so we can count more accurately than we can play. 

Communication issues aside, I don't know if agree with his premise, completely— most humans are well practiced in moving their arms and legs rhythmically, maybe not so much the voice. The voice connection is very important, not because the voice is better at rhythm, but because it is expressive; we want to make our playing more vocal, less mechanical. It's a small point, but the there are many more of these just-slightly-wrong-to-me things.

More after the break:

DBMITW: my fat bass drum

Just sharing a little piece of my own development here. From the early 90's, until I finally submitted to the too-soft, you-don't-really-want-drums-on-this-gig-do-you craze of the mid-oughts, I played a 20" Gretsch bass drum with Remo Ambassadors on both sides, tuned wide open. In the 80's I had seen Art Blakey play with an obviously unmuffled drum, and Steve Smith came to the University of Oregon, with his shockingly wide-open 24" Sonor drums— he was still with Journey at the time, and had them tuned that way with them. But it was these two recordings that really got me using that as my thing all the time.

First, Roy Haynes playing with McCoy Tyner on an almost-lost tribute to Coltrane album from the late 80's— I used to listen to this track on cassette over and over walking from the practice annex on Figueroa to my apartment on Adams, when I was at USC:




And then the opening track on Where In The World?, a masterpiece Bill Frisell album from 1991. Coming at the end of the fusion era, Joey Baron's sound here, produced by Wayne Horvitz, was pretty extreme. Frisell had just moved to Seattle, and the Pacific Northwest was forming up in my mind as actually being a place, and as having some kind of regional aesthetic, and I gave up on LA, and moved to Portland:

What it is: rock & roll

Submitted without comment:

Another list of standards

On George Colligan's Jazz Truth blog there is a group email sent out by a student who sounds nearly as dickish as I was in college, with the heading:

The George Colligan Standards List...LEARN THEM IN ALL 12 KEYS!

1. Stella By Starlight
2. All The Things You Are
3. Autumn Leaves
4. What Is This Thing Called Love
5. There Will Never Be Another You
6. Tune Up
7. Cherokee
8. Beautiful Love
9. Alone Together
10. Body and Soul
11. Confirmation
12. Someday My Prince Will Come
13. Footprints
14. Bye Bye Blackbird
15. On Green Dolphin Street
16. There Is No Greater Love
17. I Love You
18. How High The Moon
19. Just Friends
20. If I Were A Bell
21. Night and Day
22. Au Privave
23. Moose The Mooche


It's a fair college-level list. Traditionally in Portland we would substitute Scrapple From The Apple for Moose, and possibly Blues For Alice or Cheryl for Au Privave. I would get Softly As In A Morning Sunrise in there just because. And I guess they're assuming that everyone learned Blue Bossa, Recordame, Song For My Father, Stolen Moments, All Of Me, Billie's Bounce, Solar, Caravan, Take The A Train, and things of that ilk— only slightly more chestnut-y than the things they've included— in high school, because they still get played a lot, too. If you're plotting a move to Portland, you should also learn Milestones (old), Stablemates, The Night Has A Thousand Eyes, Invitation, I'll Remember April... well, call me...

More after the break...

Groove o' the day: Tony Williams — Footprints

Here's a Latin-style groove Tony Williams plays at one point in the odyssey of jazz percussion that is Footprints, a tune by Wayne Shorter, from Miles Davis's album Miles Smiles. The tune is in 6/4, phrased like a waltz, as 3/4+3/4:

But Tony's groove at around 2:20 in the track is in 2, based off of a dotted 8th note, or 4:3 (four quarter notes played in the space of three) pulse:

You can read more about how this 4:3 polyrhythm works, if you'd like, but it's not strictly necessary here, and may actually slow you down a bit. Just be aware that he is playing off of a four note pulse, floated over the waltz feel of the bass line.

So here's Tony's groove in its “native” 2/2— you can also think of it as 4/4, like in the second example below. Learn it this way, then we'll figure out how to fit that with the 6/4:

If he plays any bass drum on it, it is irregular and/or inaudible. He plays this hihat part for a few measures, then goes to straight “quarter notes” (thinking of it in 2/2).

Here you can see how Tony's groove lines up with the bass line, and with the “downbeats” within the 6/4. The only notes that will line up exactly are the dotted half notes in 6/4— beats 1 and 4— which correspond with the 1 and the 3 in the groove in 4/4:

We could write out Tony's rhythm literally in 6/4 by dotting all of the notes in the 4/4 pattern, but what would be the point? You can play it as cleanly as Tony does by just learning the pattern in 2/2 or 4/4, and then fitting it together with the strong beats in the bass line— the 1 and the 4, in 6/4.

Finally, the recording. Tony starts playing this groove, and variations on it, at about 2:20. You can hear that it's rather loose. None of this was pre-planned, and I don't believe the players have the mathematics and internal coordination of the rhythms fully worked out. Just the way I like it:

How to play Dear Old Stockholm

Dear Old Stockholm is the English title of a traditional Swedish song, which, you are probably aware, has become a jazz standard. I don't know who first started playing it as a jazz tune, but Miles Davis's version (arranged by Stan Getz, according to Wikipedia) is to me the definitive one. Recorded by Davis in 1952, and again, with embellishments, in 1955, the arrangement has some bells and whistles, and tweaks to the tune's very basic original form, which is why we're talking about it today. So go ahead and download and print out the pdf, and let's begin:

Go ahead and give the recording a few listens-through with the printed pdf:



After the break we'll get into this for real:

VOQOTD: Elvin's advice to young drummers

“PRACTICE, and play. Play any kind of music anywhere, weddings, carnivals, dances, circuses. Play and make sure that you give it your best. Be the best out there. I've played burlesque shows and recently I played a parade, right down Broadway in New York. Get a job, take it, be there on time.”

—Elvin Jones, 1974 clinic Q&A

The Joe Brazil Project blog has shared the entire interview, which is worth reading.

Doubling up a ballad feel with Syncopation

Happy new year, everybody. I'm practicing a lot of slow tempos lately, so here are some Reed interpretations that will be familiar to all jazz students, written out to suggest double time during a ballad. You'll be using sticks to play the exercises, but once you've gotten these together, you should be able to render something similar with brushes. First, without getting too much beyond the scope of a little blog post, we should clarify a few things about this feel. Give a listen to this recording of Dexter Gordon playing Body & Soul:





The tune is in 4/4, with a quarter note pulse of about 57 beats per minute, using what I call a compound subdivision of both triplets and straight 8th notes— any musician may play off of either subdivision at any time. You can also hear that at different moments, they may generate a swing feel based on the even 8ths, as if they were quarter notes at ~114 beats per minute. You can hear that most clearly during the piano solo after about 4:58.

Reading out of Syncopation, then, the slow quarter note pulse of our imaginary original ballad feel will fall on the half notes in Reed. So one measure of ballad 4/4 will equal two measures out of Reed, using this time feel:

To further muddy the waters, if we forget about the ballad thing, and just play Reed at a medium tempo (say, oh, 114 bpm), with the above time feel, we're actually making a half-time feel out of it by putting the hihat on beat 3, and playing half notes (plus the skip note) on the ride cymbal. But that's rarely done in jazz— virtually all of the time you play this feel, it will be because you are doubling up on a slow tempo. So we are learning vocabulary for an implied time feel, and you should not expect to see this exact feel, with the hihat on 3, “in nature.”

Now that we've settled that, on the examples, we'll be using the first four measures of the long exercise on p. 37, which should be very familiar to you. We'll be orchestrating the melody line— the top line— with our time feel, and ignoring the bottom line. You'll be practicing these applications while reading pages 32-44 of Reed.

See how we'll apply this to our ballad feel after the break: